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 of Hardenberg's career, it gives no sufficient account of his legislation of 1810, 1811. The same omission, joined to the slightness of the view given of Stein's legislation, makes it incomplete as a history of the transformation of Prussia.

Nevertheless the appearance of such a book affords a good opportunity of pointing out the vast historical importance of that transformation. We are most of us so ignorant of Prussian history that the very outline of it in our minds wants one of the principal features. Our view of it is such as our view of French history would be if we had never heard of the Revolution of 1789. This may seem a startling statement, but it is possible to imagine that but for one or two very glaring occurrences — such as the execution of the king and queen, and the positive destruction of monarchy and Church — we might have looked at the events that began in 1789 purely from a military and foreign point of view. We might have overlooked all internal changes, and seen nothing but that France at that time undertook a war against Europe, a war in which she was successful for many years, but afterwards lost again all the advantages she had gained. This is something like what we do with the history of Prussia. We see her neutrality between 1795 and 1806, then her ruin at Jena and Tilsit, then her period of humiliation, then her War of Liberation, and so on; but because Frederick William III. remains quietly seated on the throne through the whole period, we remain totally unaware that a Prussian revolution took place then — a revolution so comprehensive that the old reign and glories of Frederick may fairly be said to belong to another world — to an ancien regime that has utterly passed away. It was a revolution which, though it did not touch the actual framework of government in such a way as to substitute one of Aristotle's forms of government for another, yet went so far beyond government, and made such transformation both in industry and culture, that it deserves the name of revolution far more, for instance, than our English Revolution of the seventeenth century.

Thus the first step which our imaginary student of German politics must take, is to move the battle of Jena out of the life of Napoleon into the history of Prussia. Instead of thinking of it as a military feat, he is to think of it as the beginning of a political revolution. And next remembering that in Prussia two movements go on together, viz., the internal development of the state and its movement towards the headship of Germany outside, he must treat the battle of Austerlitz in the same manner and begin to think of that as the beginning of the revolution which brought down the old empire. Thus we get — 1805, fall of old Germany; 1806, fall of old Prussia. And so in Germany as in France we have an ancien régime and a revolution, and, as in the case of France, we ask first, what was the corruption, or weakness of the old régime which caused it to fall? and what was the nature of the new system which took its place?

The downfall of the old system in Prussia was much less appalling and amazing than in France; but, on the other hand, it was much more unforeseen. Many prophets had prophesied of strange things to happen in France, — nos enfants verront un beau tapage — for all the most unmistakable signs of decay met in the Bourbon monarchy. The Hohenzollerns too had been guilty of crimes, but they were the crimes of youthful energy, not of decrepitude; and the ambition of Frederick, if unscrupulous, was patriotic. Considered as an internal administrator, he was a pattern of self-sacrificing industry to all the sovereigns of his time. He and Louis XV. were at the opposite poles of kingship. Was it not strange, then, that a similar catastrophe should await the work of both? that the one system should perish in the rout of Jena, as the other in the Tenth of August? Napoleon is often described as having a sort of indefinite commission to remove out of the world whatever was rotten or decaying. Was it not strange then, that that which went down most instantaneously before his shock should be precisely that system which was youngest, and whose glories were most recent? and that even the old clumsy fabric of the Habsburgs should make a better fight than the new construction of the Hohenzollerns, the pride of the eighteenth century?

The explanation is that the Prussian State was as weak from immaturity as the French from old age; that the gigantic labors of Frederick William I. and Frederick the Great, though they had raised Prussia from insignificance to greatness, had not been sufficient to make her greatness stable and secure. But in this instance the image of a building is more convenient than that of a living body. If a State be regarded as an edifice reared on a foundation, we may say that in France the fault lay in the building itself, while in Prussia the building, the work of 