, or a Hessian, rather than as a German, that
he is disposed to give unequivocal proof of patriotism." The present
ambitious German Emperor said, in 1899, at Hamburg: "The sluggishness
shown by the German people in interesting themselves in the great
questions moving the world, and in arriving at a political
understanding of those questions, has caused me deep anxiety." What
kind of material had the nation-makers to work with! What a long,
disappointing task it must have been to light these people into a
blaze of patriotism! In those days America, though the population of
the American colonies was only eleven hundred and sixty thousand in
1750, talked, wrote, and fought politics. The outstanding
personalities of the time were patriots, soldiers, politicians, not a
dreamer among them.

England was so nonchalantly free already, that the betting-book at
White's Club records that, "Lord Glengall bets Lord Yarmouth one
hundred guineas to five that Buonaparte returns to Paris before Beau
Brummel returns to London!" Burke and Pitt, and Fox and North, and
Canning might look after politics; Hargreaves and Crompton would take
care to keep English industries to the fore, and Watt, and the great
canal-builder Brindley, would solve the problem of distributing coal;
their lordships cracked their plovers' eggs, unable to pronounce even
the name of a single German town or philosopher, and showed their
impartial interest, much as now they do, in contemporary history, by
backing their opinions with guineas, with the odds on Caesar against
the "Beau."

Weimar was a sunny little corner where poetry and philosophy and
literature were hatched, well out of reach of the political storms of
the time. The Grand Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach with his tiny
court, his Falstaffian army, his mint and his customs-houses, with his
well-conducted theatre and his suite of litterateurs, was one of three
hundred rulers in the Germany of that time.

The Holy Roman Empire, consisting, in Napoleon's time, of Austria,
Prussia, and a mass of minor states, these last grouped together under
the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, and wholly under French
influence, lasted one thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, or
from Caesar's victory of Pharsalia down to August the 1st, 1806, when
Napoleon announced to the Diet that he no longer recognized it.

This institution had no political power, was merely a theoretical
political ring for the theoretic