y by Napoleon; of the German princes bribed by kingly crowns
from the hands of an ancestorless Corsican; but it all goes to show
how far from any sense of common aims and duties, how far from the
united Vaterland of to-day, was the Germany of a hundred years ago. It
adds, too, immeasurably to the laurels of the man who produced the
present German Empire out of his own pocket, and stood as chief
sponsor at its christening at Versailles in 1871.

This Prussia that sent twenty thousand troops to aid Napoleon against
Russia, and which during the retreat from Moscow went over bodily to
the enemy; this Prussia whose vacillating king simpered with delight
at a kind word from Napoleon, and shivered with dismay at a harsh one;
this army with its officers as haughty as they were incapable, and its
men only prevented from wholesale desertion by severe punishment, an
army rotten at the core, with a coat of varnish over its worm-eaten
fabric; this Prussia humiliated and disgraced after the battle of
Jena, in 1806, in seven years' time came into its own again. Vom
Stein, Scharnhorst, the son of a Hanoverian peasant, and Hardenberg
put new life into the state. At Waterloo the pummelled squares of red-coats
were relieved by these Prussians, and Bluecher, or "Old Marschall
Vorwaerts" as he was called, redeemed his countrymen's years of
effeminate lassitude and vacillation.

"Such was Vorwaerts, such a fighter,
Such a lunging, plunging smiter,
Always stanch and always straight,
Strong as death for love or hate,
Always first in foulest weather,
Neck or nothing, hell for leather,
Through or over, sink or swim,
Such was Vorwaerts--here's to him!"

Napoleon goes to Saint Helena and dies in 1821. What he did for
Germany was to prove to her how impossible was a cluster of jealous,
malicious provincial little state governments in the heart of Europe,
protecting themselves from falling apart by the ancient legislative
scaffolding of the Holy Roman Empire. He squeezed three hundred states
into thirty-eight, and the very year of Waterloo, on April the 1st, a
German Napoleon was born who was to further squeeze these states into
what is known to-day as the German Empire.

The Congress of Vienna was a meeting of the European powers to
redistribute the possessions, that Napoleon had scattered as bribes
and rewards among his friends, relatives, and enemies, so far as
possible, among their rightful owners.

From the island of Elba, off the coas