treasury. The States she has incorporated have always been made to pay for the privilege of being annexed, and for the expense which that operation has entailed. By refusing to anticipate her revenues, and to entangle herself in expensive loans, she has been enabled to keep her metallic far ahead of her paper currency. It is this regard for her financial soundness which has made Prussia the most hopeful country in Europe. For her trifle of twenty millions of debt she has provided a sinking fund, which promises to rid the nation of it in twelve years; while Austria and Italy, staggering under the load of immense debts, have no escape from financial beggary, except by heavy national taxation. The consequence is, that the Prussian people find themselves in possession of empire without the pecuniary exigencies and the burdensome debts which are generally the price at which empire has been purchased. They enjoy all the advantages of a great nation along with the social case and freedom from grinding taxation which have been hitherto the exclusive privilege of a small nation. If, therefore, Prussia has evineed a riotous predilection for absorbing surrounding principalities, it has not been without putting in the most incontestable credentials for governing them to the best advantage. If she has forced her rule upon others it has been more to the advantage of the governed than of the administrators. The latter have had more work without increased pay. The States violently incorporated, like the Sabine women, may have screamed out at first, but their subsequent contentment only shows that they have no other wish than to live upon terms of the closest intimacy with their violators. It is this absorption of the personal interest of the Prussian monarchy in that of the State which gives to that country a peculiar freedom, unrestricted in its social and religious elements, and yet modified by that parental care which the Government, as the father of the State, thinks it ought to exercise over every subject. Italy, with all its freedom, has a state religion which as the guardian of national morality it is pledged to support. Prussia has none. She cares no more about a man's religion than about the color of his coat. Every religious denomination has a clear stage and no favor. Even a Jew may guide her Parliament, and a Roman Catholic may mount her throne. Yet her princes have had no notion of subjecting themselves to inconveniences on account of the welfare of the State, without making their subjects do so likewise. If they have disciplined themselves, they have also insisted upon disciplining their people. The State is, therefore, as a corporate entity, intruded upon every subject's attention at the critical stages of his life, exacting from him certain duties, and compelling his obedience thereto. Prussia claims twelve years of the life of every one of her male subjects, for moulding his mind and drilling his body. As soon as a child of either sex arrives at the age of seven years, to school it must go, and be initiated there for seven years more, not merely in reading and writing, but in the elementary principles of mechanics, in the handling of tools, and in the nature of the relationship which exists between its own body and the surrounding universe. At twenty-one the State interferes again. Every male adult must be initiated for three years into the functions of a common soldier. Even the princes of the blood are not exempt from the general law. To the exigency of this service every domestic tie, private compact, professional engagement, must adapt itself. The State will insist upon three years of every subject's life being sacrificed to itself, on the threshold of manhood. Having then fixed her mark upon him, she retains him in her service for the rest of his life. In two years afterwards he is drafted into the reserve force, which, however, leaves him ample space to follow his occupations as a private citizen. He is then held to the State by looser ties, as a part of the landwehr (militia), though still liable to be called upon for active service in cases of emergency. Having passed through the first ban of the militia at thirty-one, he becomes a member of the second, which though entailing the same duties, has less chance of having its services called into active requisition. He finally passes into the landsturm, as a member of which he always continues liable to be called out for garrison duty whenever the State requires his services. By this connection with her main army and its reserves, the State is enabled at a moment's notice to convert her population into a vast camp, in which every man's strength is utilized to the utmost, and each performs the service most fitted for his season of life. Her military force has the flexibility of a lady's fan combined with the properties of the King of Lydia's ring. Fold it up and the army is lost in the population, extend it and the population disappears behind the army. Perhaps in no country in the world has the blending of the military with the commercial element, of the paternal form of government with the largest amount of social freedom been so felicitously realized. This arises from the fact that the paternal government does not take care of the individual for himself, but for the State. His liberty is interfered with only so far as may be necessary to enable him to perform the duties which he owes to society. The soldier is never allowed for a moment to forget that he is a citizen or the citizen that he is a soldier. Even in time of peace the army is employed upon public works. It may seem a great hardship for a man to be torn from the bosom of his family and made to shoulder a musket, but the training thus received is only a further extension of schooling. He learns sword exercise, and acquires methodized habits. He accustoms his body to hardships. He goes through all sorts of gymnastics. We are not, therefore, quite sure that, apart from its military purposes, it may not be the very best preparation which a nation can receive for the duties of manhood. At all events the Prussian drill system, combined with the Prussian school system, is the readiest means of approach yet devised to the realization of the sound heathen maxim, "Mens sana in corpore sano." What is best for the individual is undoubtedly best for the community. People who have this discipline hanging over them are not disposed to indulge in premature marriages. The sexes do not join in Prussia until they are able to procreate a robust offspring. If the Prussian soldiery handle their gun better, and are readier at their lance than any other, it is the natural consequence of their military training, acting upon the strongest constitutions in Europe. But It is singular that this flexible system. of military organization should have been the result, not of reason selecting the best of many elaborately devised theories, but of iron necessity. The armies which the great Frederic led to battle were composed mostly of foreigners officered by the native nobility. Instead of the soldier and the citizen being combined in the same person, there was a wall of separation between them. The army was a separate caste from the population, and consumed four fifths of the revenues of the State. A master mind like Frederic's, who could infuse life into anything, got what he wanted out of so cumbrous an instrument, but the whole thing fell to pieces when brought into collision with a nation of soldiers. The battle of Jena showed Prussia that she was lavishing her resources upon a delusion, and depending for her military strength upon a broken reed. At the treaty of Tilsit she was stripped of one half of her dominions and obliged to submit to the condition of not keeping a numerical force on foot greater than seventy thousand men. that which Napoleon thought would deprive the Prussian Eagle of its talons, in reality proved to be the multiplying of those talons a hundredfold, and the endowing of each with renovated strength. Steinborst, the war minister, while keeping down the standing army to the prescribed amount, by enlisting recruits for a short term of service, and afterwards drafting them into the militia, soon passed three fourths of the adult population of. Prussia through its ranks. Martial exercises, systematically repeated, made the citizen an adept in the functions of a soldier long after his discharge from the exclusive duties of the profession. The Prussian army resembled a little lake, constantly receiving and disemboguing its waters, yet liable at any moment to have its limits swelled out into an immense sea, by its discharged currents being flung back into its basin. The first mighty gathering took place in the campaign which ended in the field of Leipsic. The little force of forty thousand men, in the course of a single night extended itself into one of two hundred and twenty thousand men. Napoleon was not more surprised at the suddenness of this apparition than Fitz James, when She the warriors of Rhoderic Dhu, emerging in the world. Still further to protect the at his shrill whistle from the ferns of interests of the weaker States, Austria Benledi, converted a slope of mountain interlaced them in one confederation, in heather into a camp of bristling steel. which she assigned Russia a place infeThe army at Quatre Bras and Waterloo rior only to herself. Prussia, therefore, proved itself quite equal to the results ex- was bound by double trammels. pected from it. In those bloody conflicts, could not gain a single inch of territory Prussia was, after Great Britain, the without arraying against herself not only principal agent in releasing Europe from the forces of Austria, but those of the enthe thraldom of France. tire Bund. But expansion was a necessity of her existence. The parts of which the Prussian monarchy was composed were continally gravitating towards each other. The gigantic obstacles which opposed their union, when the time came were as suddenly pushed aside as a mass of rock upheaved by a piece of water seeking to find its own level. When Prussia took her seat at the Councils of Vienna, her territories were in the condition of a man whose right arm is separated from his body, and whose legs appear to belong to other bodies wedged between them. Hanover still erected a barrier between the Westphalian Duchies and the main body on the north. On the south, a knot of minor Prussia, in her time, had experienced principalities intercepted all communica- enough of confederations. She could tion between the eastern and western not form any for herself, and was perprovinces of the kingdom. Prussia now re-petually excluded from others, or admitquired not only that her former territories should be restored to her, but that some of these minor principalities should cease to exist. True to the grasping instinct of her dynasty, she demanded not only the incorporation of the whole of Saxony and the entire country between the Weser and the Elbe, but that the electorates of Nassau and Mayence should be annexed to her dominions. Hanover, doubtless, would have been in the coveted list, had not Hanover at that time been an appanage of his British Majesty. These demands Austria resisted. Her chief had already parted at Presburg with the imperial mantle, as Emperor of Germany, by right of which she claimed the fealty of the Prussian princes as possessors of the fief of Brandenburg, and no superiority now was left to her, except such as accrued from the dislocated state of her rivals and the compact strength of her own possessions. If Prussia, therefore, was to be aggrandized, it must not be in the way of consolidation. She got a piece of Franconia here, and a bit of Saxony there, and from France the left bank of the Rhine, in return for giving up a slice of Poland to the new province of Warsaw-ample indemnities for disgorging a part of what she had acquired by robbery and spoliation, but still leaving her territories a more curious assortment of odd and dislocated parts than the most broken piece of tesselated pavement ted only on condition of playing a very inferior part. In the old Bund of the Empire she was almost lost, as a unit among some two hundred and fifty principalities, bound by ties of homage and military wardenship to the imperial house she has now laid prostrate at her feet. When Napoleon broke up the old Bund and constructed the Rhenish Confederation out of its fragments, Prussia found herself rigorously excluded from the alliance. The territories of which she had been stripped had gone to swell the estates of petty principalities which yesterday had been content to lick her feet, but which now, through the indulgence of their conqueror, affected airs of magniloquence and grandeur even superior to herself. She had previously struck the patriotic note, seeking to patch up another confederation upon the basis of the exclusion of the foreigner, of which she was to be the head: but none could be found to commit themselves with an erratic but aspiring State, which left them no option but being swallowed up by their protector, or crushed to the dust by the overwhelming weight of Napoleon. The substitution of the Germanic Confederation for that of the Rhine did not much improve her prospects in this direction, as she found herself shackled with treaties and conventions which left her no possible outlet for the accomplishment of her destinies, except by revolution. It, however, kept alive the feeling of "Germany for tional resources of the vast territory the Germans," which she so vainly at- which extends between the Baltic and tempted to arouse for her own purposes the Alps. She dictated the law in all in 1806, and which, as the State contain- essential points, and moulded the coming most German souls, invested her pre-mercial institutions of four kingdoms, tensions with an air of reasonableness one electorate, three grand dukedoms, before the world. Besides, the confedera- and more than twenty smaller principalition which Metternich constructed was ties. This was not merely a shadow of a military confederation, based upon rear- the political supremacy to which she was ing an insurmountable barrier against aspiring, but a very large instalment of the inroad of the Frank, rather than a it. It was a gigantic stride in the path confederation determining the external which the Princes of Hohenzollern had relationship between the States them- early struck out for themselves, of makselves. Such an omission could not es- ing the increase of their own power procape the notice of so astute a power as portionate with the advantages conferred Prussia. She determined to supplement upon those whom they had induced or the confederation of Metternich with a compelled to submit to it. Formerly, a confederation of her own. If Austria bale of goods could hardly traverse two was at the head of the military, she re- hundred miles of German territory withsolved to place herself at the head of the out being stopped at some half dozen social and commercial organization of different custom-houses by legalized banGermany. dits, who came forth to rifle its contents, and mulct the owner in harassing imposts. But now, goods could be sent from Lake Constance to the banks of the Niemen without stopping once in their route, or being subject to any but one uniform toll for the entire transit. Although the greatest necessity for a commercial league existed between the different States of the Confederation, the task was one by no means easy of accomplishment. The jealousy with which the minor States regarded Prussia induced them to repudiate her supremacy in everything. But by patience and stratagem Prussia overcame all obstacles. It was not until 1825 that she could prevail on Hesse Darmstadt to adopt her scheme. It took seven years more to induce Bavaria and Wurtemberg to follow in the wake of Darmstadt, and then, not until she had removed from the cabinet of Munich her keen -sighted opponent Count Armansperg; Saxony, after some hesitation, and then Baden, joined the league. Frankfort was compelled to accede by the superior strength of her antagonist. But Hanover, Brunswick, Hesse Cassel, and Oldenburg stood out to the last. They got up a league of their own, evidently suspecting, with Count Armansperg, that Prussia had some political motive in imposing her tariff upon the whole of Germany. But Prussia could wait. As Hanover was connected with England, she first endeavored to detach that kingdom from its allies; but only succeeded with Hesse Cassel, which violated the pact it had formed, and joined the Prussian union. By these isolated efforts, pertinaciously pursued, Prussia, in 1839, became the arbiter of the na The consequence was as rapid an increase of the industrial wealth of the members of the union as took place in this country when steam engines supplied the place of hand labor or mail coaches. But we do not believe that Prussia would have cared a straw about one bale the more or one freight the less of cotton or isinglass, or drysaltery, poured into the German States, had it not been for the political power masked behind it. She had no inducement to swell the coffers of her neighbors, except to captivate their people. By stimulating the productive energies of eight thousand six hundred and fifty-four German square miles of territory, she taught the twentyseven millions and a quarter of their inhabitants to regard her as the creator of their material prosperity, and to look to the reservoirs from which their wealth flowed as situate at Berlin. Nor were their princes unfettered by the union. Prussia, by making them feel that their continuance in the Zollverein depended on her option, could command their votes in the Diet, under the thumbscrew of diminishing their material wealth. There was, however, one little differ ence between the great confederation or- | hilation of a common enemy. But the ganized at Vienna, and its supplement movement was associated with a wild organized at Berlin. While Prussia was spirit of democracy, which struck at the included in the one, Austria was shut out conservative basis of her institutions, and from the other. Indeed, the feeling of Prussia did not care about being carried Germany for the Germans, which the to the summit of her wishes by an agitaestablishment of the Zollverein had in- tion which threatened to undermine the tensified so much, was hardly one in foundations of her monarchy. The fact which her great southern rival could par- is, Prussia found that in the phantom of ticipate; keeping Italy dismembered in national unity, she had raised another order to add a limb of the Peninsula to Frankenstein which threatened to make the motley group of Czechs, Hungarians, short work of the author of its own exIstrians, Dalmatians, Illyrians and Styr- istence. Had her councils been guided ians, over whom she ruled, and linking by a bold minister, Prussia might have the destinies of some eight millions of reaped the advantages which she has Germans to this piebald assemblage of at present obtained, and helped to comnations, Austria could hardly throw in plete the edifice of Italian liberty withher lot with any national party without out French interference. But, scared by spreading disaffection to her rule. In the bold attitude of German democracy, fact, it was putting a light to the very she contented herself with petting the explosive materials on which that rule unitarian movement by invading the was erected. By this engine Prussia Elbe Duchies, thinking her great rival held Austria at an immense disadvan- sufficiently damaged by having to call in tage, and she never failed to use it when Russia for the suppression of the popular she meant her rival any mischief. For, party both in Hungary and Italy. The if Prussia raised the national cry, Aus- odium Austria thus acquired made her tria could not stand aloof, nor pretend to anxious to regain lost ground by flinging be indifferent to its meaning. She was herself unreservedly into the agitation obliged to bid against Prussia for the for German unity, and which the failures leadership of Germany, and play and co- of 1848 rather smothered than subdued. quet with an instrument which threaten- By prolonging the Schleswig-Holstein ed her with death. When Prussia raised dispute, to which Prussia had given such the cry, at the commencement of the prominence, with that view, Austria was century, the feeling was too weak, and in the condition of the bird who hugs to the Gallic power in Germany too strong its own destruction the shaft which the for it to be turned to account by either artful fowler has winged with a feather party. When she raised the cry in 1813, from its own breast. Austria, in consequence of the sacrifices she had made, was allowed to embody the feeling in a permanent organization and place herself at the head of it. When the cry was next raised in 1848, Prussia had taken steps that no one should reap the fruits of her own shouting but herself. For it fell upon the ears of a population, whom, for the last quarter of a century, she had taught, not only to collect the material fruits of union without the assistance of Austria, but to look upon her as the great obstacle which impeded their full realization. The sound also came thundering across the Alps of "Italy for the Italians," with which the existence of Austria was regarded as equally incompatible. Here were two countries in fear of each other, whose establishment was based upon the anni There cannot be a doubt that about the Elbe Duchies, Prussia, from the time the quarrel broke out, had clearly made up her mind. The end was, in accordance with the ancestral rapacity of her power, to pocket these duchies for herself, and to stimulate the old cry of Germany for the Germans for that purpose. The troops she had marched into Schleswig on the first opportunity in 1848, were withdrawn only in obedience to Russia. Nor did she retire without leaving behind her in the heart of the territory secret committees of insurrection, and all the organized machinery of revolt which she afterwards fed with men and ammunition from Berlin. When the Great Powers in London thought they had settled the dispute, and decreed the terms which should pin the duchies to Den |