nd haughty and domineering to those below them.
The tendency is perhaps not confined to Germany, but it seems, to the
inhabitant of countries where bureaucracy is not a powerful caste, to
penetrate German society and ordinary life to a greater degree--yet
not to a great degree--than in more democratic societies.

The Emperor naturally knows nothing of such a thing, for there is no
one superior to him in the Empire in point of rank, and he is much too
modern, too well educated, and of too kindly and liberal a nature to
encourage or permit Byzantinism towards him on the part of others.
Indeed Byzantinism was never a Hohenzollern failing. In his able work
on German civilization Professor Richard tells of some Silesian
peasants who knelt down when presenting a petition to Frederick
William I, and were promptly told to get up, as "such an attitude was
unworthy of a human being." Only on one occasion in the reign has an
action of the Emperor's afforded ground for the suspicion that he was
for a moment filled with the spirit of the Byzantine emperors--namely,
when he demanded the "kotow" from the Chinese Prince Tschun, who led
the "mission of atonement" to Germany. This, however, was not really
the result of a Byzantine character or spirit, but of the excusable
anger of a man whose innocent representative had been treacherously
killed.

Of affinity with the idea of Byzantinism is that as frequently
occurring idea in German court and ordinary life conveyed by the word
"reaction." Here again we have one of those qualities to be found
among mankind everywhere and always: the instinct opposed to change,
even to those changes for the good we call progress, the disposition
that made Horace deride the _laudator temporis acti se puero_ of his
day, the feeling of the man who laments the passing of the "good old
times" and the military veteran who assures us that "the country, sir,
is going to the dogs." In political life such men are usually to be
found professing conservatism, owners of land, dearer to them often
than life itself, which they fear political change will damage or
diminish. In Germany the Conservative forces are the old agrarian
aristocracy, the military nobility, and the official hierarchy, who
make a worship of tradition, hold for the most part the tenets of
orthodox Protestantism, dread the growing influence of industrialism,
and are members of the Landlords' Association: types of a dying
feudalism, disposed to beli