recounting Prussia's regeneration he does not overlook, as so many historians of Prussia do, the continuance for years after 1815 of the transforming impulses which Stein set in motion, though few will agree with the assertion that after this date "the view that the state was an end in itself … lost all but a few hidebound supporters" (p. 92). The thesis that the authoritative and collective tendencies in Prussia are an organic development dominates the discussion and in his eagerness to develop this through the nineteenth century Schevill occasionally overlooks important points, such as the unifying effects of the enthusiasms of the Frankfort Parliament and the constitutional results of Bismarck's victory over the Prussian Liberals in 1863, so crucial for the development of the Bismarckian state.
The book was planned before the war, nevertheless the conflict determines the tone and content of the discussion of Bismarck and after. Schevill defends vigorously and ably the German constitution as a "healthy interaction" of authority and democracy, and finds that the authoritative principle has taken a more genuinely democratic course than English and American liberalism. A statement of Lord Northcliffe's that the Germans are "second-rate imitators" introduces eight pages on German contributions to science, municipal government, etc. The author's arguments, like Delbrück's, in defense of the German dualistic system give the impression of one tilting against windmills. The British middle-class Liberalism, which Schevill attacks (p. 166 ff.), has long since ceased to exist in theory or practice save as a sort of bogey-man for critics. Is the British social legislation, from the factory laws of the 'forties down to Lloyd George's sick-insurance bill, not evidence of a growing fusion of liberalism with democracy, that freedom with equality, which Schevill finds so antipodal?
Appendixes on the Polish question and Alsace-Lorraine give a fair and sympathetic statement of the German position on these matters. Still another appendix (there are eight in all) absolves Bismarck from the charge of falsifying the Ems Despatch. Over against the fine-spun arguments of Schevill and others on this point one would like to set the classic remark of the hard-headed Moltke, when Bismarck read him the "concentrated" form of Abeken's message: "So hat das einen anderen Klang. Vorher klang es wie eine Chamade [signal for negotiations], jetzt wie eine Fanfare [flourish in answer to a challenge]." (Gedanken und Erinnerungen, II. 91.)
After Frederick the Great had separated from Voltaire through incompatibility of temper, and after he had thrown De Prades into a
