The Emperor’s conception of his relations to the people remains to-day what he was brought up in and what it was when he mounted the throne.  In England, America, and France the people are the real rulers, and their monarch or president is their highest official servant and representative.  The idea is not perhaps constitutionally expressed, but it is universally and deeply felt in the countries named.  In Germany the opposite theory obtains—­for how long it must be left to the future to say.  In Germany the Emperor is the real ruler, the genuine monarch, and the people are his subjects, the country his country.  Hence, while an English king in an official document or public statement would not think of putting himself first and the people or country second, the German Emperor’s official statements and speeches constantly repeat such expressions as “I and my people,” “I and the army,” “my capital,” “me and the Fatherland,” and a score more; so that Anglo-Saxons and other foreigners acquire the impression that the word “my” is no figure of rhetoric or pride, but a simple claim of ownership or possession.  And the official relation between monarch and people is reflected in the people’s ordinary life.  To the foreigner it continually appears that the public are the servants of the official, not the contrary, whether officialism takes the shape of a post-office clerk, a tramcar conductor, a shop salesman, a policeman, or a waiter.  All these functionaries are the possessors of an authority which the citizen is expected to, and usually does, obey.  The explanation of such a state of things is a little abstruse, but an attempt may be made at giving it.

The period immediately preceding the reign of Frederick the Great was a period of absolute monarchy in Germany, a system introduced from France, where Louis XIV had proclaimed the doctrine L’etat, c’est moi, according to which the lives and property of the subject belonged to the Prince, whose will was to be obeyed without question or demur.  There were now four hundred courts in Germany in imitation of the Court of Versailles, and the smaller the principality the greater the absolutism.  Absolutism, however, required an army to support it; hence the establishment of standing and mercenary armies and the disuse of arms by the citizen.  The result, to quote Professor Ernst Richard’s work on “German Civilization,” was that

“the pride of the burgher and the peasant was broken.  A submissive servility hopelessly pervaded the masses, and even the best had lost all social and national feeling, all sense of being part of a greater body....  The luxurious life and the arrogance of the ruling classes were accepted as a matter of course, one might say as a divine institution.  Thus those traits of character, which had come to light under the cruel stress of the Thirty Years War, fostered by the rule of despotism and the worst vices, took deeper root.  To these belong that greed for social position, for titles and