Of the States that throve among the crumbling masses of the old Empire the chief was Brandenburg-Prussia.  She had a twofold energy which the older organism lacked:  she was Protestant and she was national; she championed the new creed cherished by the North Germans, and she felt, though dimly as yet, the strength that came from an almost single kin.  Until she seized on part of the spoils of Poland, her Slavonic subjects were for the most part germanized Slavs; and even after acquiring Posen and Warsaw at the close of the eighteenth century, she could still claim to be the chief Germanic State.  A generation earlier, Frederick the Great had seen this to be the source of her strength.  His policy was not merely Prussian:  in effect, if not in aim, it was German.  His victory at Rossbach over a great polyglot force of French and Imperialists first awakened German nationality to a thrill of conscious life; and the last success of his career was the championship of the lesser German princes against the encroachments of the Hapsburgs.  In fact, it seems now a mere commonplace to assert that Prussia has prospered most when, as under Frederick the Great and William the Great, her policy has been truly German, and that she has fallen back most in the years 1795-1806 and 1848-1852, when the subservience of her Frederick Williams to France and Austria has lost them the respect and support of the rest of the Fatherland.  A State that would attract other fragments of the same nation must be attractive, and it must be broadly national if it is to attract.  If Stein and Bismarck had been merely Prussians, if Cavour’s policy had been narrowly Sardinian, would their States ever have served as the rallying centres for the Germany and Italy of to-day?

The difficulties which beset Frederick William III. in 1805 were not entirely of his own making.  His predecessor of the same ill-omened name, when nearing the close of his inglorious reign, made the Peace of Basel (1795), which began to place the policy of Berlin at the beck and call of the French revolutionists.  But the present ruler had assured Prussia’s subservience to France at the time of the Secularizations, when he gained Erfurt, Eichsfeld, Hildesheim, Paderborn, and a great part of the straggling bishopric of Muenster.  Even at that time of shameless rapacity, there were those who saw that the gain of half a million of subjects to Prussia was a poor return for the loss of self-respect that befell all who shared in the sacrilegious plunder bartered away by Bonaparte and Talleyrand.  Frederick William III. was even suspected of a leaning towards French methods of Government; and a Prussian statesman said to the French ambassador: