champions, that German literature came; but from the fables and satires of the people, from Hans Sachs and from the Luther translation of the Bible. This is roughly the setting of civilization, in which the first Hohenzollerns found themselves when they took over the Mark of Brandenburg, in the early years of the fifteenth century.

Here is a list of them, of no great interest in themselves, but showing the direct descent down to the present time; for from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the French Revolution the German states were without either men or measures, except Frederick the Great, that call for other than dreary comment:

These incidents, names, and dates are mere whisps of history. It is only necessary to indicate that to articulate this skeleton of history, clothe it with flesh, and give it its appropriate arms and costumes would entail the putting of all mediaeval European history upon a screen, to deliver oneself without apology from any such task. It may be for this reason that there is no history of Germany in the English tongue, that ranks above the elementary and the mediocre. There is a masterly and scholarly history of the Holy Roman Empire by an Englishman, which no student of Germany may neglect, but he who would trace the beginnings of Germany from 113 B. C. down to the time of the Great Elector, 1640, must be his own guide through the trackless deserts, of the formation into separate nations, of modern Europe. It is even with misgivings that the student picks his way from the time of the Great Elector to Bismarck, and to modern Germany.

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648, marks the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and finds Germany with a population reduced from sixteen millions to four millions. Famine which drove men and women to cannibalism, bands of them being caught cooking human bodies in a caldron for food; slaughter that drove men to make laws authorizing every man to have two wives, and punishing men and women who became monks and nuns; lawlessness that bred roving bands of murderers, who killed, robbed, and even ate their victims, demanded a ruler of no little vigor to lead his people back to civic, moral, and material health. The Great Elector wrested east Prussia from Poland, he defeated and drove off the Swedes, whom Louis XIV had drawn into an alliance against him, he travelled from end to end of his country, seeking out the problems of distress and remedying them by inducing immigration from Holland, Switzerland, and the north, by building roads, bridges, schools, and churches, and by encouraging planting, trade, and commerce. He built the Frederick William Canal connecting the Oder and the Spree, and introduced the potato to his countrymen. Germany now produces in normal years fifteen hundred million bushels of potatoes. The splendid equestrian statue of the Great Elector on the long bridge at Berlin, is a worthy monument to the first great Hohenzollern.

When Charles II of Spain died, Louis XIV, the Emperor Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Elector of Bavaria, all three claimed the right to name his successor. In the war that followed and which lasted a dozen years, the Emperor, Holland, England, Portugal, the Elector of Hanover, and the Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, the son of the Great Elector, were allied against France. Frederick, the Elector of Brandenburg, was permitted by the Emperor, in return for his services at this time, to assume the title of King, and he crowned himself and his wife Sophia Elizabeth, at Königsberg, King and Queen of Prussia, taking the title of Frederick I of Prussia, January 18th, 1701.

This novus homo among sovereigns was now a fellow king with the rulers of England, France, Denmark, and Sweden, and the only crowned head in the empire, except the Emperor himself, and the Elector of Saxony, who had been chosen King of Poland in 1697. By persistent sycophancy he had pushed his way into the inner circle of the crowned. Those who have picked social locks these latter days by similar sycophancies, by losses at bridge in the proper quarter, by suffering sly familiarities to their women folk, and by wearing their personal and family dignity in sole leather, may know something of the humiliating experiences of this new monarch. He was a feeble fellow, but his son and successor, Frederick William I, “a shrewd but brutal boor,” so Lord Rosebery calls him, and there could not be a better judge, amazed Europe by his taste for collecting tall soldiers, by his parsimony, his kennel manners in the treatment of his family and his subjects, and leaves a name in history as the first, greatest, and the unique collector of human beings on a Barnumesque scale. All known collectors of birds, beetles, butterflies, and beasts accord him an easy supremacy, for his aggregation of colossal grenadiers.

It is temptingly easy to be epigrammatic, perhaps witty, at the expense of Frederick William I of Prussia. The man, however, who freed the serfs; who readjusted the taxes; who insisted upon industry and honesty among his officials; who proclaimed liberty of conscience and of thought; who first put on, to wear for the rest of his life, the uniform of his army, and thus made every officer proud to wear the uniform himself; and who left his son an army of eighty thousand men, thoroughly equipped and trained, and an overflowing treasury, may not be dismissed merely with anecdotes of his eccentric brutality.

Only the ignorant and the envious, nibble at the successes of other men, with vermin teeth and venomous tongue. Those people who can never praise anything whole-heartedly come by their cautious censure from an uneasy doubt of their own deserving. The contempt of Frederick William I for learning and learned men, left him leisure for matters of far more importance to his kingdom at the time. His habitual roughness to his son was due, perhaps, to the fact that there was a curious strain of effeminate culture in the man who deified Voltaire. Poor Voltaire, who called Shakespeare “le sauvage ivre,” or to quote him exactly: “On croirait que cet ouvrage (Hamlet) est le fruit de l’imagination d’un sauvage ivre,” who said that Dante would never be read, and that the comedies of Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of