st two centuries, an
aggressive military monarchy. "Prussia attained her greatness," says Prince
Buelow, "as a country of soldiers and officials, and as such she was able
to accomplish the work of German union; to this day she is still, in all
essentials, a State of soldiers and officials." Power rests in the hands
of the monarch and of a bureaucracy of military and civil officials,
responsible to him alone, and traditionally and fanatically loyal to the
monarch who is, before all things, their War Lord.

The Prussian outlook is so foreign to Western habits of thought that it is
well that we should try to understand it at its best. Prussia proper has
not been rich, like the rest of Germany, in poets and imaginative writers;
but she is fortunate to-day in possessing in the greatest living Greek
scholar, Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a man who by birth and
breeding is able to put the highest interpretation upon the aims and spirit
of the Prussian State. To Wilamowitz Prussia is not only nearer and dearer
than Athens. She is better, and more advanced. At the close of a wonderful
address on "the glory of the Athenian Empire," in which he has employed all
the resources of his wide learning to paint a picture of Ancient Greece
at her best, Wilamowitz breaks into this impassioned peroration: "But one
element in life, the best of all, ye lacked, noble burghers of Athens.
Your sages tell us of that highest love which, freed from all bodily
entanglements, spends itself on institutions, on laws, on ideas. We
Prussians, a rough, much-enduring tribe of Northerners, may be compacted
of harder stuff; but we believe that love is on a higher level when the
fullest devotion to an institution and an idea is inseparably linked with
an entirely personal devotion to a human being; and at least we know how
warm such a love can make a loyal heart. When our children have scarce
learned to fold their hands before God, we set a picture before them, we
teach them to recognise the noble features; we tell them, 'This is our good
King.' Our young men, when they are of age to bear arms, look with joy and
pride on the trim garb of war, and say, 'I go in the King's coat.' And when
the nation assembles to a common political celebration, the occasion is no
Feast of the Constitution, no Day of the Bastille, no Panathenaic Festival.
It is then that we bow in reverence and loyalty before him who has allowed
us to see with our own eyes that for which o