No one would call the political history of Germany an interesting history. It is only the history of free nations or the free play of spiritual forces that is of abiding human interest, and the history of Germany is neither the history of a free people nor the conflict of spiritual forces. That history is so intolerably tedious that even the magic of Treitschke’s genius has not been able to relieve its dulness, and that before the war no British or French publisher dared venture on a translation of Treitschke’s masterpiece. But if the political history of Germany has all the tedium and monotony of parochialism, on the contrary, the personal history of the Hohenzollern is intensely instructive. One would hesitate to call it romantic. Yet there is an element of romance, the romance of business, the interest which attaches to the rise of a family from the humble obscurity of a petty princeling to the power and prestige of world rulers, the same kind of interest which belongs to the life-story of Mr. Vanderbilt or Mr. Carnegie. What a progress those Hohenzollerns have made from the distant days when they left their little Swabian southern home of Zollern between the Neckar and the Upper Danube, the cradle of their dynasty! _Nomen, omen!_ Does not the very sound of the word _Hohenzollern_ suggest and inspire high ambitions? And does not the very name of that little village of Zollern, which is apparently derived from _Zoll_, suggest that all the world was henceforth to pay a Zoll, or toll, to the dynasts of Hohenzollern?