To treat the whole world as if it were a huge garden, for which one small race of men, who have worked busily in a single corner of it, can aspire to make and carry out an all-comprehending plan, is in reality a proof of littleness and not largeness of mind. Such vaulting ambitions are the symptoms of a dangerous disease, to be noted and distrusted. And none ever noted these tendencies more carefully or distrusted them more heartily than the two greatest statesmen whom Prussia has produced. Frederick the Great rode his own Pegasus-vision on curb and martingale. The Great Bismarck reined back the Pegasus-vision of his fellow-countrymen on to its haunches with an even sterner hand. "One cannot," so he wrote in later years--"one cannot see the cards of Providence so closely as to anticipate historical development according to one's own calculation." [Sidenote: MASTERY OF THE WORLD] Those very qualities of vastness and symmetry which appear to have such fatal attraction for the pedantocracy repel the practical statesman; and woe to the nation which follows after the former class rather than the latter, when the ways of the two part company! To the foreign observer it seems as if Germany, for a good many years past, has been making this mistake. Perhaps it is her destiny so to do. Possibly the reigns of Frederick and Bismarck were only interludes. For Germany followed the pedantocracy during a century or more, {109} while it preached political inaction and contentment with a shorn and parcelled Fatherland. She was following it still, when Bismarck turned constitutionalism out of doors and went his own stern way to union. And now once again she seems to be marching in a fatal procession after the same Pied Pipers, who this time are engaged, with a surpassing eloquence and fervour, in preaching discontent with the narrow limits of a united empire, and in exhorting their fellow-countrymen to proceed to the Mastery of the World. Among an imaginative race like the Germans, those who wield the weapons of rhetoric and fancy are only too likely to get the better of those surer guides, who know from hard experience that the world is a diverse and incalculable place, where no man, and no acre of land, are precisely the same as their next-door neighbours, where history never repeats itself, and refuses always--out of malice or disdain--to travel along the way which ingenious Titans have charted for it. But it is not every generation which succeeds in producing a Frederick the Great or a Bismarck, to tame the dreamers and use them as beasts of draught and burden.