It is well to know where we are in the world's culture and striving when we speak of other nations. What were we doing, what was the rest of the world doing, in those days when the Hanoverian peasant's son, Scharnhorst, and Clausewitz were about to lay the foundations of this German army, now the most perfect machine of its kind in the world? These were the days prepared for by Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Rousseau; by Pitt and Louis XV, and George III; the days of near memories of Wolfe, Montcalm, and Clive; days when Hogarth was caricaturing London; days when the petticoats of the Pompadour swept both India and Canada into the possession of England. These names and the atmosphere they produce, show by comparison how rough a fellow was this Prussia of only a hundred years ago. He had not come into the circle of the polite or of the political world. He was tumbling about, un-licked, untaught, inexperienced, already forgetful of the training of the greatest school-master of the previous century, Frederick the Great, who had made a man of him. We were already politicians to a man in those days, and the Englishman Pitt was map-maker, by special warrant, to all Europe. When the Prussians were serfs politically, our House of Representatives, in 1796, debated whether to insert in their reply to the President's speech the remark that "this nation is the freest and most enlightened in the world." It is true that this was at the time when Europe was producing Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Mozart, Haydn, Herschel, and about ready to introduce Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Heine, Balzac, Beethoven, and Cuvier; when Turner was painting, Watt building the steam-engine, Napoleon in command of the French armies, and Nelson of the British fleet; but this bombastic babble of ours harmed nobody then, and only serves to show what a number of intellectual serfs must have been members of that particular House of Representatives.