The father of Frederick the Great, the founder of the more modern Hohenzollerns, was mad.  His madness consisted of stealing giants; like an unscrupulous travelling showman.  Any man much over six foot high, whether he were called the Russian Giant or the Irish Giant or the Chinese Giant or the Hottentot Giant, was in danger of being kidnapped and imprisoned in a Prussian uniform.  It is the same mean sort of madness that is working in Prussian professors such as the one I have quoted.  They can get no further than the notion of stealing giants.  I will not bore you now with all the other giants they have tried to steal; it is enough to say that St. Paul, Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare himself are among the monstrosities exhibited at Frederick-William fair—­on grounds as good as those quoted above.  But I have put this particular case before you, as an artist rather than an Italian, to show what I mean when I object to a “German future for Europe.”  I object to something which believes very much in itself, and in which I do not in the least believe.  I object to something which is conceited and small-minded; but which also has that kind of pertinacity which always belongs to lunatics.  It wants to be able to congratulate itself on Michael Angelo; never to congratulate the world.  It is the spirit that can be seen in those who go bald trying to trace a genealogy; or go bankrupt trying to make out a claim to some remote estate.  The Prussian has the inconsistency of the parvenu; he will labour to prove that he is related to some gentleman of the Renaissance, even while he boasts of being able to “buy him up.”  If the Italians were really great, why—­they were really Germans; and if they weren’t really Germans, well then, they weren’t really great.  It is an occupation for an old maid.

Three or four hundred years ago, in the sad silence that had followed the comparative failure of the noble effort of the Middle Ages, there came upon all Europe a storm out of the south.  Its tumult is of many tongues; one can hear in it the laughter of Rabelais, or, for that matter, the lyrics of Shakespeare; but the dark heart of the storm was indeed more austral and volcanic; a noise of thunderous wings and the name of Michael the Archangel.  And when it had shocked and purified the world and passed, a Prussian professor found a feather fallen to earth; and proved (in several volumes) that it could only have come from a Prussian Eagle.  He had seen one—­in a cage.

Yours ------,
G.K.  Chesterton.

* * * * *

My Dear ------

The facts before all Europeans to-day are so fundamental that I still find it easier to talk about them to you as to an old friend, rather than put it in the shape of a pamphlet.  In my last letter I pointed out two facts which are pivots.  The first is that, to any really cultured person, Prussia is second-rate.  The second is that to almost any Prussian, Prussia is really first-rate; and is prepared, quite literally, to police the rest of the world.