TRANSACTIONS. 



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Art. I. Prussia and tlie German System of Education : 

 prepared and read by Arthur Bott, Esq. 



The power which now speaks to Europe in the name of 

 Germany, and which certainly bids fair to unite all Ger- 

 man states under her sceptre, was unknown at the period 

 of the Reformation. 



The counts of Hohenzollern descend from tributaries of 

 Charlemagne. Their house long maintained a precarious 

 existence as a fief of Poland. From the beginning, it 

 clutched at every territory within its reach, swallowed up 

 the smaller ones wherever found, near or far, and left to 

 time the consolidation of the fragments into one organic 

 body. If proprietors of intervening territory could not be 

 subdued, they were cheated in barter or caught in the 

 meshes of Venus. From the swamps of Brandenburg, 

 hardly larger than an English county, the counts of 

 Hohenzollern dotted western and northern Germany with 

 these demesnes. The Julich and Cleve duchies lay 

 leagues away from Brandenburg, as Brandenburg was far 

 away from Stettin ; and none of them had any topograph- 

 ical connection with eastern Prussia. All these acquisi- 

 tions were rather the outposts of a projected kingdom 

 than vital members of one political body. In every 

 European treaty Prussia secured some new dominion. 

 Early in the eighteenth century Austria permitted her to 



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