the Hohenzollerns, was good, but the foundation insufficient. The building is the visible part of a State — its government, administration, revenue, army. All this was rotten in France under Louis XV. and sound in Prussia under Frederick the Great. But the foundation on which all such buildings must stand is, as foundations are generally, out of sight, and may easily be left out of consideration. It is the unity of the country and of the nation; and this is marked in various ways — by continuity of territory and strength of frontier, by homogeneousness of the population and separateness of it from neighboring populations, and this again is marked by the distinctness of language, form of civilization and literature. In France this foundation was immensely strong, — no nation had so intense a self-consciousness — and therefore, when the structure of the State crumbled, the nation, after a very short interval of embarrassment, showed itself stronger than ever. But in Prussia this foundation was exceptionally weak. It could scarcely be said that either a Prussian nation or even a Prussian country existed. No one spoke of a Prussian language, or of a Prussian literature; no one supposed that Kant and Herder, because they were Prussians, belonged to a different literature from Goethe and Schiller. The ministers who conducted the government of Prussia were not necessarily Prussians either by birth or education. Who ever hears in England of a statesman being borrowed for a high official post from the French or Austrian service? Or when a public man among us is driven from office, or loses his seat in Parliament, who expects to hear that he has applied for employment to the czar? But in Prussia few of the most distinguished statesmen, few even of those who took the lead in her liberation from Napoleon, were Prussians. Blücher himself began life in the service of Sweden, Scharnhorst was a Hanoverian, so was Hardenberg, and Stein came from Nassau. Niebuhr was enticed to Berlin from the Bank of Copenhagen. Hardenberg served George III. and afterwards the duke of Brunswick before he entered the service of Frederick William II.; and when Stein was dismissed by Frederick William III. in the midst of the war of 1806, though he was a man of property and rank, he took measures to ascertain whether they were in want of a finance minister at St. Petersburg. And how weak was the frontier — how discontinuous the territory! How much of it too had in 1806 been quite recently acquired, and was inhabited by a discontented population which did not even profess to be Prussian! The partitions of Poland were quite recent; Warsaw was then a Prussian town; other large acquisitions had been made within Germany itself in 1803; and Hanover had just been taken from George III. In these circumstances, from the very nature of the case, and not from any exceptional coldness of disposition, there could not be in Prussia any of that burning spirit of nationality which showed itself in France in 1792, or in Spain in 1808; and where such a spirit is wanting the best-disciplined army and the most diligent administration and the best-intentioned government have no firm foundation under them.
Next to the baselessness of the whole fabric we are to consider the essential precariousness of an absolute form of government, and then some special abuses in government which had sprung up at that particular time. But in estimating all these influences, we are to bear in mind the immensity of the power which assailed Prussia in 1806. If the system of Frederick succumbed, it succumbed not like the French, to the sheer weight of its own corruption, but to an external force to which other systems thought good, our own for instance, might have yielded had they been equally exposed to its attack. It was this evident superiority of force which gave Napoleon himself an absolute confidence of success. On October 12th, 1806, he wrote to the king of Prussia, "Your Majesty will be defeated. Europe knows that France has thrice the population of your Majesty's states, and is not less developed than they are in a military point of view." It was in itself no great disgrace to be worsted by Napoleon at the head of such a force; the condemnation of the system lies in the fact that it did not offer a stout resistance, but collapsed at once. It was the curious fate of Prussia twice in little more than half a century to be attacked by a greatly superior force, and to wage on the first occasion the most glorious and on the second the most inglorious defensive war known to modern history. To explain this we are certainly obliged to point out the personal insufficiency of the king for the ponderous task which had devolved on him.
An administration both civil and military, if it cannot draw inspiration both from above and from below, must at least do so from one quarter or the other. If
