ur Fathers dreamed and
yearned, before him who ever extends the bounds of the Kingdom in Freedom,
Prosperity, and Righteousness, before his Majesty the Emperor and King."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Speeches and Lectures_, 3rd edition, Berlin, 1913, p. 65. The
"good King" referred to is the old Emperor William, as the address dates
from 1877.]

Here, far better expressed than in the Kaiser's speeches, we see the spirit
of the Prussian Junker at its best. It is narrow, old-fashioned, and, to
democratic ears, almost grotesque. Yet, if it survives uncorrupted by the
dangers to which progress always exposes a military caste, it will not be
easy either to crush by defeat or to transform by humiliation.

It is among the old Prussian nobility and the large landed proprietors
in the original Prussian provinces, who have come to be known as the
"Junkers," that this spirit prevails. They stand for the old stern
repressive military discipline and unchanging Conservatism in its extremest
form, regarding with well-founded suspicion and misgiving symptoms of
development in any direction whatsoever. No party in Germany acquiesced
more unwillingly in the changes necessitated by her commercial and
industrial development. Even their militarism stopped short at the
Army, and it required a substantial increase in the protective tariff
safeguarding their agricultural interests to purchase their reluctant
adhesion to the Kaiser's policy of naval expansion. Even now the German
Navy, the pride of the commercial and industrial classes throughout the
German Empire, is regarded by them with uneasy suspicion as a parvenu
service, in which the old Prussian influences count for less in promotion
than technical skill and practical efficiency.

The institutions of the Prussian State represent the spirit of its ruling
caste. If the German Empire is not democratic, Prussia lags far behind it.
The electoral system in use for the Prussian Lower House is too complicated
to explain here. Its injustice may be gauged from the fact that in 1900
the Social Democrats, who actually polled a majority of the votes, secured
seven seats out of nearly 400. The whole spirit and practice of the
Government is inimical to inborn British conceptions of civil liberty and
personal rights. There is one law and code of conduct for officers and
another for civilians, and woe betide the civilian who resists the military
pretensions. The incidents at Zabern in Alsace in 1913 are still fr