ed years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success;
elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then
came Napoleon.

He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man
had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same
time he was something mightier than that: he was the heir of the
French idea of spiritual and popular liberty.

Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not
grown rusty. Its leaders learnt their lessons from France and England,
they set on foot a liberation of the people by departmental authority
and a liberation of the spirit by the people; they put new life into
the mechanism, and they conquered with the help of England as we have
lately seen France conquer with the help of America.

But here came a parting of the ways. It was possible to pursue either
the way of mechanization or that of the liberation of the spirit.
Prussia did neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation of
the spirit came the reaction; in the place of mechanization came the
bureaucracy. On the rest of the Continent, too, the movement for
political mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it being
the uprising economic movement.

Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay in the system of
political mechanization. The world, as we looked at it from our
Prussian window, seemed as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so.
Once again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism was revived
and the movement of the bourgeoisie towards liberty and the life of
the spirit was repressed. This was called "realism" in politics, and
the estimate was a just one. There was no progress to be made with
professional Liberalism; but with Krupp and Roon one organized
victories. As in Frederick's time the slovenly Continent had to give
way, Prussia mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won Germany.

And again there was a parting of the ways; but this time there was no
one to stand for civic and spiritual freedom. People believed they had
all they wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken, the
professors were political realists, success followed the side of
mechanization, which was rightly supposed to be linked with the
dynasty, and mechanization in the economic sphere drew to its side the
hope of gain.

Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the end he had no
scruples. The two systems of mechanization were at thei