2 Prussia and tfu German System of Education, 



assume a royal dignity. This was the crisis of her history. 

 The sword of Frederic, by incorporating Silesia and 

 Posen, raised her from a fefcdatory of Austria, to a power- 

 ful rival; and while the latter still hugged the rude old 

 feudal system, Prussia, by employing every new, wise 

 principle of national progress, obtained the commercial, 

 and through this, the political control of all Germany. 

 In her enlightened system of public education, her com- 

 mercial codes based on strict reciprocity ; by political 

 representation and the widest religious freedom; she 

 presents, beside the neighboring despotism, all the con- 

 trast of science with ignorance, of integrity with corrup- 

 tion, of light with darkness. 



In her political alliances, Prussia has one principle — 

 that of a selfish expediency. She accepts the hand of 

 either belligerent, like a partner in a dance. She lias 

 kidnapped the states w T hich she could not honorably 

 annex, as Frederic kidnapped recruits for his giant regi- 

 ment. She has trampled on every principle of interna- 

 tional law and perpetrated every crime necessary to her 

 ends. She instigated and mainly procured the dismem- 

 berment of Poland. Her own original fief was torn from 

 the knights whose interests she had sworn, as chief and 

 guardian, to defend. Two of the most important mem- 

 bers of the empire were seized by acts of buccaneering 

 unsurpassed in the history of nations. While accepting 

 British money to despatch troops to Austerlitz, she was 

 negotiating with Napoleon for British Hanover as the 

 price of neutrality. She pledged herself to Napoleon to 



guard the rear of his Russian army and then fulfilled the 

 pledge by turning thirty thousand bayonets against his 

 frozen, perishing fugitives. Treacherous to the last, she 

 made a tool of Austria to subdue Bchleswig-Holstein and 

 then seized the whole prize, kicked Austria out of doors, 

 and ground the whole confederation to dust. 



