British readers who do not know Germany may think the foregoing indictment of German political incapacity severe. It is not so severe as Prince Büllow's. The portion of the late Imperial Chancellor's book which deals with domestic policy opens with these crushing sentences: "The history of our home policy, with the exception of a few bright spots, is a history of political mistakes. Despite the abundance of merits and great qualities with which the German nation is endowed, political talent has been denied it.... We are not a political people." A page or two later he goes even further and quotes with approval a dictum that the Germans are "political donkeys." That a modern statesman should think this of his fellow-countrymen is remarkable enough; that he should say it outright is a still more remarkable proof of his unshakeable belief in their submissiveness. Therein lies the whole tragedy of the present situation. The German people, so kindly and, alas! so docile, is suffering, not for its sins, but for its deficiencies; not for its own characteristic acts or natural ambitions, but for what it has too tamely allowed others, Prussian statesmen and soldiers, with alien ideals and an alien temper, to foist upon it, until it has become an integral part of its natural life and consciousness. Germany has been indoctrinated and Prussianised not only into acquiescence, but into sympathy with the policy of its rulers. §3. _Prussia_.--This brings us to the consideration of the second and more powerful of the two Germanies--namely, Prussia. In order to understand Prussia and the Prussian spirit we must plunge ourselves into an atmosphere wholly different from that of the Germany that has just been described. The very names of the two countries mark the measure of the difference. Germany means the country of the Germans, as England means the country of the English. But the name Prussia commemorates the subjugation and extinction by German conquerors and crusaders from the west of the Prussians or Bo-Russians, a tribe akin to the Letts and Lithuanians. The old Duchy of Prussia, which now forms the provinces of East and West Prussia at the extreme North-East of the present German Empire, consisted of heathen lands colonised or conquered, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, by a great religious and military organisation known as the "Knights of the Teutonic Order." While Southern and Western Germany was passing, with the rest of Western Europe, through the transition between mediaeval and modern Europe, what is now North-Eastern Germany was still in a wholly primitive stage of development, and the Knights of the Teutonic Order, with crusading fervour, were spreading Christianity and German "culture" by force of arms, converting or repelling the Slavonic population and settling German colonists in the territory thus reclaimed for civilisation. The great British admirer of Prussia, Thomas Carlyle, in the first volume of his