Great, and once got a sound beating, there was nothing behind to break its fall: no people; only pipeclay and facings; red tape, long pedigrees, and petty privileges; in a word, nobility without noblemen, and soldiership without citizenship.
So much for the first epoch of the fall.
II.
The rise and regeneration of Prussia took place very soon after its fall, chiefly by the happy occasion of the Russian expedition of Napoleon in 1812, and the terrible precipitation which had followed at last as the necessary consequence of his own portentous pride and unblushiug insolence; but the real cause that enabled Prussia so triumphantly to shake off the hated yoke of Gaul is to be sought for in the great political and military reforms which were introduced mainly by the Baron von Stein. Stein was one of those strong and courageous, direct, decided, and altogether manly characters that cannot be present in any age, when there is a call for noble action, without putting their stamp on it. The great need does not always bring with it the great man; but if the great man is there he can scarcely fail to show himself. The great idea which inspired Stein's statesmanship was to create what had hitherto not existed in Prussia, a free people; and this he did by two bold measures, the one of which gave emancipation to the peasant by turning him into a proprietor, and the other created citizenship by restoring the free municipal constitutions which in the Middle Ages had given wealth and enterprise to the towns.
Along with these two great regenerative measures went the new organization of the army under the masterly direction of Scharnhorst, one of those thorough-trained soldiers whose manly forms in the great public places of Berlin so significantly proclaim to the stranger the history of the country. Under his direction, instead of professional drill and pipeclay dressing for a body of mere technical soldiers, the whole people were taught to wield arms in defence of a country in which they now rejoiced to exercise the rights of full citizenship; and there seems certainly to be no more important truth in political economics than this, that if a nation is to be saved from a weighty yoke of foreign oppression, it can only be as Greece and Rome were saved on the great occasions of their world-renowned heroism, by the effective soldiership of the whole people. This system of national arming, which was the main cause of the grand political regeneration of Prussia in 1813-14, as all the world knows, enabled that power, in the recent Franco-German struggle, to bring into the field an embattled array of patriotic citizens, against which even the soldiers of the early French Revolution, under the guidance of the famous captain of those days, might have contended in vain; and I, for one, am decidedly of opinion that a compulsory military drill of the whole people has not only been the salvation of Prussia on two great occasions during the present century, but is the best guarantee for the independence of all nations at all times and at all places, and not less certainly in commercial Britain than in military Prussia. I can have no doubt that the general adoption of the Prussian system in this country would not only afford a stronger bulwark of national liberty than we at present possess, but would work along with our national schools and our national Churches, — I do not mean the Established Churches alone, but all Christian Churches in the land, — in potentiating the patriotism, in improving the physical fibre, and in giving firmness to the reins of a healthy social discipline. But whatever people may think of the application of the system of compulsory soldiership to this native-seat of rank individualism and inorganic liberty, there can be no doubt that it is owing mainly, if not altogether, to this admirable system of national soldiership that Prussia — not two centuries ago a petty electorate on the extreme march of the least lovely part of Germany — is now that great power to whose decision all other powers naturally look, as controlling with firm hand the fortunes of the present, and shaping by its bold and manly policy the destinies of no distant future.
I now pass to the third epoch, which I have called the period of reaction and red-tape.
III.
The battles of Leipzig and Waterloo, which restored Prussia to her old position as a European power of high consideration, had been gained not only by gunpowder, and an accumulation of material forces, but mainly, as just indicated, by the creation of a popular spirit, and the raising of a national and truly German enthusiasm among the people. After the peace it was natural, and indeed necessary, that the fervid enthusiasm which had overthrown the French despotism should occupy itself further with the reconstruction of popular
