ical struggle.

Before giving pictures of the German character during the last two
centuries, we will endeavour to portray the peculiarities which are
developed in the family relations of the different classes of ancient
Germany, both the peasantry, the nobility, and the citizens. But the
aim of the book is to show how, by means of the Hohenzollern State,
Germans changed gradually from private to public men; how dramatic
power and interest entered into lyrical individual life; how the
Burgher class was strengthened by increasing education, and the
nobility and peasantry submitted to its influence; finally, how it cast
aside the specialities of classes, and began to form characters
according to its own needs and points of view.

CHAPTER I.

THE LIFE OF THE GERMAN PEASANT.
(1240-1790.)

In seven hundred years the independent life of the Greeks terminated;
about a thousand embraces the growth, dominion, and decline of the
Roman power; but the German Empire had lasted fifteen hundred years
from the fight in the Teutoburg Forest,[1] before it began to emerge
from its epic time. So entirely different was the duration of the life
of the ancient world to that of the modern; so slow and artificial are
our transformations. How rich were the blossoms which Greek life had
matured in the five centuries from Homer to Aristotle! How powerful
were the changes which the Roman State had undergone, from the rise of
the free peasantry on the hills of the Tiber to the subjection of the
Italian husbandmen under German landlords! But the Germans worked for
fifteen centuries with an intellectual inheritance from the Romans and
the East, and are now only in the beginning of a development which we
consider as peculiar to the German mind, in contradistinction to the
Roman, of the new time, to the ancient. It is indeed no longer an
isolated people which has to emerge from barbarism by its own
creations; it is a family of nations more painstaking and more
enduring, which has risen, at long and laborious intervals, from the
ruins of the Roman Empire, and from the intellectual treasures of
antiquity: one nation reciprocally acting on the other, under the law
of the same faith.

The Romans from free peasants had become farmers, and they were ruined
because they could not overcome the social evil of slavery. The German
warriors also, in the time of Tacitus, t