HOHENZOLLERN DYNASTY. The Hohenzollerns were a German family of counts, who in the nth century were living in comparative obscurity in the south-eastern corner of the empire, in the 12th received a Burgrafdom in Franconia, thanks to the friendship of one emperor, in the 15th were invested by another emperor with the electorate of Brandenburg, in the 17th acquired by marriage Prussia in the north-eastern corner of Ger many, and at the same time fragments on the Rhine and the Ruhr, on its western frontier, in the r8th rounded off and enlarged their centrifugal possessions by conquest and also assumed the title of king, in the 19th outstripped the other German states by means of victorious wars, united them and thereby won the title of Ger man emperors, and in the 2oth, after an unsuccessful war, lost empire, kingdom, and markgravate at a blow and abandoned their defeated country to its fate.
When they entered the German empire, it was a very shadowy entity. Up to the 19th century they were never interested in the empire, much less in a position to consolidate it. They remained immersed in the factions of rival German dynasties, until at last they achieved the hegemony in a whole so solid that their disappearance left it unshaken. For exactly five centuries they extended and increased their rule over northern Germany, seldom lost territory, and then only for short times, and gradually con solidated a State that was only a patchwork of scattered frag ments, with no organic connection.
Thus their State could only be held together from above, by an army of soldiers and an army of officials, by severity, police and punctuality; it was often found necessary to suppress by force the centrifugal forces of certain parts which had been accus tomed to other dynasties or other forms of State, and always felt themselves rather German than Prussian. The basic prin ciple of this dynasty thus came to be absolutism, which survived here longer and more vigorously than in most parts of Europe, looked on its citizens to the last as subjects, was opposed to any democratic movement, and sought to impress obedience as the chief virtue. In the place of national sentiment there arose a spirit of caste, and interest in the State went no further than the wish to belong to the upper caste. On top of this came a militaris tic system, more prominent in domestic than in foreign affairs; for the Hohenzollerns were by no means more warlike than the majority of ruling houses, and their subjects cared less for the pursuit of the laurel than many another nation. It was the neces sity of unifying their scattered subject peoples that gained the Hohenzollerns their bellicose reputation; and this is how the sober and peaceable Prussian nation has acquired a name for brawling.
The fortuitous character of the origin of this State, the lack of a great guiding line of development, is reflected and in part in fluenced by the personal characters of the dynasty. Of the 20 rulers who reigned in Brandenburg and Prussia for five centuries, from the first elector to the last emperor-king, there were not more than eight who ruled with efficiency, industry and talent, while the rest were weak and vain, and squandered the money and success accumulated by their fathers ; and these two types followed one another in almost regular alternation, grandfather often resembling grandson, while their country flourished or de cayed alternately, according to the personal characters of these almost unrestricted autocrats.
As these princes were generally long-lived (their reigns averaged 25 years each) the shocks of abrupt changes of character were mitigated. Moreover, the two greatest rulers had each nearly half a century to impress his nature on the people. These two rulers, the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, were able, thanks only to their very long reigns, to draw the tatters of the land together into a real State. These two, with Frederick William I. and William I., incorporated the best characteristics of the family : Great alone showed any traces of genius.
The Margraf Frederick, who became hereditary elector of Bran denburg in 1415, a brave and able man, was despised and opposed by the native, half-Slav nobles as a petty foreign prince, and felt so out of place that after ten years he returned home, leaving his son to rule in the desolate North. His successor, Frederick II. (1440-7o) met with equally violent resistance from the nobles, and also from the towns, until, disregarding their ancient rights, he appeared with 600 horsemen before the gates of the young city of Berlin, took the city, built a castle on the Spree to over awe it, and made this new place in the middle of the sandy waste into his capital. He destroyed all old privileges, turned the citizens into subjects, deprived them of their courts, and in 1448, forced them to swear fealty to him, an oath which the people of Berlin kept until their first rebellion, 400 years later. This iron right hand of his knew not what his pious left hand was doing, for at the same time he founded an Order of holy living for noblemen ; but at last, like his father, he abdicated in disgust—not before his reason had half given way.
Albert Achilles (147o-86), called by his contemporaries the "German Fox," and twice excommunicated by the pope, estab lished a brilliant court, enslaved burgess and peasant (whose part consisted only of paying and serving), involved the country in unprofitable disputes—only to desert it in the end, like his two predecessors. All three, and their successors, the weak John (1486-99), who died young, and the brilliant, crafty Joachim I. were hated in the land, which was still strange to them, although the family had now been ruling there for r oo years. Joachim, a strong opponent of Luther, was also the first to show a mystic side. He dabbled in astrology, pursued and en couraged education, founded the first university, in Frankfurt on the Oder, but also passed many cruel sentences and once had 38 innocent Jews burned in the centre of Berlin.
More unbridled still was the life of Joachim II. who during his long reign built churches and castles with a lavish ness that verged on madness, sought to outshine all other princes, squandered the burgesses' gold on favourites, mistresses and the chase, forbidding them the while to wear trunk-hose or to hold rich wedding feasts, but forcing them five times to pay his debts, which ran into millions.
His son and opposite, John George (1571-98), an Evangelical Protestant, as his father had been before him, economical, pious, father of more than 20 children, tried to make up the 2,500,00o thalers of debts with which his predecessors had saddled the country, lived quietly and respectably, and managed, by clever marriages for his relatives, to secure important heritages. His successor, Joachim Frederick (1598-1608) lived staidly also, and was wise enough to fashion himself a staff for all questions of government by empanelling nine learned men on his privy council—the actual beginning of the Prussian bureaucratic State.
After him, John Sigismund (1608-19) reaped the fruits of the marriage arranged by his grandfather, and for the first time enlarged the land very considerably through his wife's heritage; he became duke in Prussia, and at the same time lord of rich and storied lands on the Ruhr, the Maas and the right bank of the Rhine, for the sake of which he turned Calvinist. Thus, without merit of his own, but also without war, he extended the land "from the Maas to the Memel," as the song said; yet had no pleasure of these strange lands, but sat disgruntled in the middle of a long chain of provinces, linked together by nothing but a dynasty that was still feeble. Under his successor it all went to pieces; this George William (1619-4o), another of the frivolous, showy sort, the hunters and carousers, had none of the qualities needed to weather the storms of the Thirty Years' War, for, as Gustavus Adolphus said, "a new livery, a handsome horse or a pair of grey hounds drove everything else out of his mind." He remained neutral in the war, which nevertheless brought famine and misery into his lands. Thereupon he left Berlin, and went to Prussia, the duchy in the far north-east, where there was better fare and sport, leaving everything in ruin behind him, and bequeathing to his son a hopelessly disorganized country.
An excellent general, he never spared himself in the fight, fought in person among his men at the great victory over the Swedes at Fehrbellin in 1675, and generally developed gifts and quali ties possessed by none of his forefathers, and not more than one of his successors. It was only blended slyness and courage that enabled him to assert his authority in Prussia, after an involved struggle to rid himself of Poland's suzerainty, and thus become master in his own house. But scarcely had he overcome the enemy abroad, when he turned in the same absolutist spirit against the enemy within, and as his ancestor had subdued Berlin, two centuries before, so he forced Konigsberg to submit to him, in the teeth of the constitution, compelled the recalcitrant towns and nobles to do him homage, cancelled the privileges of the Estates where they inconvenienced him, and threw into prison the leader of the burgesses, against his pledged knightly word.
On the other hand, after a reign of nearly 5o years, he left behind him a unity, created by violence, but surpassed in Germany only by the house of Habsburg, hundreds of villages new-built, new canals, dykes and roads, the State revenue in creased five-fold, a first-class army 30,00o strong, and the general awe of his neighbours. Shortly before his death, by one of his cleverest inspirations, he had invited into his country the Protes tants expelled from France. Only now and then, and of special purpose, did he make a brave outer show ; his nature was simple; he loved to water the flowers himself in his palace garden, in which, and afterwards in the country, he planted the pioneer po tatoes, went himself to the market and bought singing birds, en joyed unsophisticated pleasures, and in an age which despised burgess and peasant, was yet a fairly just ruler.
His son and successor was his opposite : a weak, vain and silly man, who tried to hide his hump back under a huge wig; affected, greedy and ungrateful. Frederick III. (1688-1713) had only one passion : he wanted to be king. At the age of ten he founded his first Order, and went on playing to the day of his death with feasts, processions and problems of etiquette. Seeking to em bellish the ever-growing castle on the Spree, he discovered a great artist, Andreas Schluter. When he founded the Academy of Arts, its first and also its second task was : the coronation of the king.
His wife, Sophie Charlotte, an enlightened princess from Han over, who laid out the castle and town of Charlottenburg outside the gates of Berlin, unluckily meddled in politics, which were in the excellent keeping, not of the king, but of his tutor and adviser, the grave and indefatigable Danckelman. She hated this man's honesty and not only hunted him out of his offices, after he had ruled the land with success for a decade, but set the law against him, threw him into prison, and only released him ten years later. His place was taken by thieving adventurers. The work of the Great Elector was ruined.
Meanwhile Frederick took umbrage at the glory in which his cousins of Orange and Saxony were sunning themselves as kings of England and Poland, negotiated for several years with the emperor, and at last, by great promise of military help for Spain, extorted from him the concession that he would raise no objection to his coronation as king. This took place on Jan. 18, 1701 in Konigsberg, with unexampled pomp, and cost 4,000,000 thaler, or two years revenue. The elector, who placed the crown on his own head, called himself henceforward Frederick I., king in Prussia.
Now he began to play at Versailles, founded dozens of grades among the courtiers, and kept a mistress, although he neither needed her nor liked her, for the sole purpose of taking her out publicly, at regular hours, like the king of France. At the same time, as price for kingly rank, he sent a part of his subjects to the emperor, and the emperor sent them to Spain, to death. The rest groaned under the most fantastic taxes, including a tax on wigs, or had to hand in the bristles of the swine they slaughtered, the king proposing to start a trade in bristles. The peasant had to spare the wild swine which trod down his field for the new king to shoot, and antelopes and aurochs were imported into Prussia.
It was fortunate that the son was once more of the economic, efficient type. Frederick William I. (1713-4o), unfairly over shadowed by the figure of his son, was one of the best rulers in Prussia. Short, fat, sound and active, pious, moral and thick skulled, looking like a peasant whenever he laid uniform and pig tail aside, he stood four-square in life and in the State, asking no.ie, always commanding, but usually commanding the right thing. His first act was to clear away all the paternal luxury, to send the favourites packing, to order simplicity in all things; for he had only one idea—economy. Simple in manner, more of a burgess than a king, he liked thick soups, drank thin beer, smoked moderate shag in his pipe, and only now and then let his ministers invite him to delicacies on which he would fall half in mockery, half in enjoyment. His idea of his post was that of a father of a family—a despotic one, of course. He interfered in everything, took account of no laws, clapped his bad ministers of State into jail, woke up the porters who kept people waiting, forced the rich burgesses of Berlin to build houses, forced his generals to buy the bad portraits of them that he insisted on painting in the evenings ; ran, rode and drove about from five in the morning to six in the evening, inspecting, giving orders, and always find ing fault.
All the same, he was usually just, and was popular, did every thing for the country, nothing for himself and little for the upper classes. Out of the nobles, in particular, he squeezed so many taxes that they complained to the imperial council in Vienna, and won their appeal. Yet the king went on threatening them : "I will stabilize the sovereignty and set the crown as fast as a rock of bronze ! I am king and lord, and will do what I wish ! Holiness is God's, but all else must be mine !" But his severity grew milder as it reached the lower classes, worthy burgesses might rise to high posts, bad counts were thrown out, the peasant prospered again throughout the land. Tax-farmers and officials were pun ished for abuses, sometimes even hanged for them. When rav aged districts were to be restored, the king gave the money him self, rewarded every man who built a new house there with a post, enlarged Berlin, made his residence in Potsdam, cut out all the sinecures at court, founded the Kammergericht, a treasury de partment to check expenditure and most important of all, the State Exchequer.
It was iron discipline ; but the land prospered and got back much of the power and solidity which the Great Elector had given it. Compulsory military service was introduced in 1726— although only for burgesses and peasants. This compulsion was hated most by the educated classes in the towns, especially as the rules of the service were pedantic. The Great Elector created the Prussian military, but his grandson must answer for the mili tarism, for then it was that the barrack-yard tone spread like a pestilence through the people, whom the endless years of service spoiled for any more genial regime, so that they tortured them selves and the rest with rudeness and exactitude.
The king had a weakness for "tall fellows," whom he mis takenly held to be the best soldiers. He had the tallest men pressed in all Europe, paid fantastic prices, up to £3,700 a man, for them, spent 12,000,000 thaler on this toy, sold offices for it, broke the law, had giants stolen and carried away from abroad, started a sort of slave traffic, came to the edge of wars—all over the passion which this short, fat man entertained for the tall and slender. Here his piety and his economy broke down.
As he looked after the state like a pater- f amilias, so in his house he played the king, and with the best will in the world, he would have broken up any family life. Aghast, he saw his children go over into inevitable opposition, the daughters reading French books, the son playing the flute in a silk dressing-gown, instead of practising musket-drill as he should have done, having been born, as it were, in uniform. Finding in the crown prince the weaknesses and vanities of his own father renewed, he saw that they must be destroyed, and thrusting a cruel hand into the tangled woof of a complex young soul, driving a young man to desperation, by that very act he saved just what his nature held of genius. But for the horrors endured in his youth, Frederick II. would never have become "the Great." His father served Prussia well in many respects, and not least in saving his son for the State and for history.
At first he began to study the country only to please his father, but he learned to value a fruitful activity and when the king, in his last years, saw the prince busy about his future task, he relaxed the military fetters, allowed him, when his work was done, to occupy himself, generally far from his unloved wife, with the teachings of Voltaire, with giving concerts in his country palace ; for the king looked on all this only as a sort of recreation, like his own, which he mostly took in a room full of tobacco smoke, among doxies and bawdy stories. So it came that when he died, he called himself fortunate to have left such a son behind.
The young king had no love for the people, whom he called the canaille, but still less for the nobles. He loved nothing at all, in fact, except wit and his dogs, and perhaps his sister and a few old soldiers. But he applied that great tolerance which he had learned from Voltaire and from the ideas of Locke, called himself and felt himself the first servant of the State, allowed complete freedom of the press, had a caricature of himself hung lower down in the window, so that the people might see it better, and proclaimed at once that his people were free to be happy in their own fashion.
He abolished the tall fellows at once, but strengthened and enlarged the army, and put a stop to pedantry and brutality. He saved up, and spent little when he built himself a solitary, one storied country house, the Sanssouci, where the best wits, not, indeed, out of Prussia, but mostly out of France, foregathered at his table ; for the king was fond of speaking French, which he did as badly as he did German.
As crown prince, mostly out of boredom, he had written a thesis against Macchiavelli's "Prince," based on misunderstandings, but containing some principles which he afterwards followed : "The Prince is not lord, but servant of the people, his power rests in the last end only on the people's choice. No man has the right to allow himself unlimited sway over his fellow-men. Only the tyranny of government brings the peoples to rebellion." These principles of domestic policy accorded with the age and his own ideas ; in foreign policy Frederick behaved exactly like Macchiavelli, deny ing any morality in affairs of State, or any valid consideration except personal interest. Thus, scarcely had he begun to reign, when he provoked a war to conquer Silesia, on which he had no claim. "My age, the fire of my passion" he wrote to a friend, "the thirst for glory, even curiosity, to tell you the whole truth, in short, a secret instinct has torn me out of pleasant ease and the satisfaction of reading my name in the gazettes and the history books has seduced me." In the first and second Silesian Wars he was able, with the help of his father's army, to conquer this land from Maria Theresa and retain it.
In the decade of peace that followed he lived as a man of the world, not a philosophical one by any means, adorned himself with Voltaire's presence, dabbled in the arts and sciences, kept up the best opera in Europe, was generous towards artists, and wrote his own history so quickly that in 1746 he was already dictating the events of 1745. But when he was half-way through the forties, the consequences of his youthful ambitions rose up before him like black shadows. He saw the revenge of the empress of Austria join hands with the disfavour of the tsarina, the hate of the king of Saxony and the pride of the king of France allied with them, and all at once half Europe stood united against him, to destroy this young kingdom, become too strong.
Frederick went into the Seven Years' War (1756-63) with about 200,000 men against twice the number. This third war, which he had provoked through the conquest of Silesia, brought the enemy as far as Berlin and Sanssouci, and Frederick himself to the verge of despair. In this war a million men fell to no purpose, for it ended on approximately the status quo ante. Half of this million were Prussians. Some 3o years after those candid words on thirst of glory and curiosity, Frederick wrote : "Glory is vain. Have men ever deserved praise? They have only been praised because they made a stir." At the Peace of Hubertusburg, Frederick gained nothing, but also lost not so much as a village, although his enemies had meant to break the new great Power into pieces. This result, shattering in both ways, must have shattered the king as well, like the conflict with his father when he was crown prince. For the second time he returned home a changed man.
Although only 52 years of age, he looked an old man ; although an old man, he had 23 years before him still. Now he became great. The work of reconstruction to which his conscience, his experience, his age, his loneliness alike urged him, showed him the father of his fatherland; all for the peasant and the poor, all, where possible, against the noble, all always against the idle. He quarrelled with Voltaire and most of the other Frenchmen ; his sister was dead, his oldest friends were ageing around him, the circle fell silent, dust lay on the flute ; only the greyhounds loved him, lay in his chairs, in his bed, and when they died, he set up marble memorials to them. In his will he wrote that he wanted to be buried beside them. He could still be interested in the French spirit, but the German was foreign and unsympathetic to him. That Kant, a Prussian professor, was building up a new world, that Herder and Klopstock, Lessing and Wieland were writing quite near him, he was unaware, or else disliked it ; he wrote a sneering pamphlet against Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen; the fact was, he was neither philosopher nor poet, only a dilettante, and not even a good one.
On the other hand, he worked harder than any man in his State, harder, too, than any Hohenzollern before or after him. He drained morasses, planted woods, made roads, built countless houses, went on tours of inspection among his people, distrusted his officers, backed up the peasant against the count, even when he was in the wrong, and now lived truly in the heart of his people. At 7o he wrote, in the true spirit of Voltaire and the old Faust : "He who improves his land, makes waste land fruitful, and who drains swamps, he wins victories over barbarism." Weak Monarchs.—His successor was one more of the bad sort. Frederick's nephew, Frederick William II. (1786-97), lazy and sensual, vacillating and romantic, managed in the single decade of his reign to squander on favourites, male and female, half of what his predecessors had spent seven decades in accumulating, and what chance brought him through a partition of Poland and a heritage in his own family was never assimilated and soon lost. The army soon became undisciplined, and when it was sent to fight the French revolution, it dared not even attack it. The day of Valmy, no victory for the French, yet made the deepest impres sion, for all Europe said that the army of Frederick the Great had ceased to fight.
The next one, too, was weak and without talent, although his life was simple, sober and respectable. Frederick William III. (1797-184o) imitated his ancestors' policy in the Thirty Years' War, and tried to preserve neutrality through the tempests of the Napoleonic Wars. He watched his neighbours' lands occupied, unperturbed, always spoke of "soothing" (which was not very appropriate) Napoleon, refused to listen to his wife, the talented and ambitious Queen Luise, and then suddenly found himself forced into war, after all, and at the Battle of Jena (18o6) lost the fame of Frederick's army, and in the Peace of Tilsit lost more than half of his possessions—everything, in fact, west of the Elbe. He failed to recognize the natural saviour who offered him self to him, the Freiherr vom Stein, one of Prussia's two great statesmen, and when Stein made his entry into the Govern ment conditional on the dismissal of the intriguing privy council, the king wrote to him : "You are a recalcitrant, stubborn, obstinate and disobedient servant of the State, full of your own genius and talents, and instead of looking to the good of the State, led only by caprices, swayed by passions and personal animosity." All the administrative reforms which Stein and Hardenberg effected, were done in the king's despite ; he was drawn into the Wars of Liberation and the alliance with Russia in 1813 against his will, he took no personal part in any battle, but entered con quered Paris in state. For all that, the popular struggle against France evoked the first democratic movement in Prussia. The towns got back the self-government filched from them 30o years before, in another form, the term of general military service was fixed at three years, the conduct of the State was concentrated in the hands of a ministry, which, however, was only empowered to debate, and not to decide. The grant of a constitution now could have bound together the disunited nations of the State, one third of which, into the bargain, were Catholics—a further point of difference. The king promised, indeed, in 1815, just before the last war against Napoleon, the rudiments of a constitution, which involved no losses for him, as the Estates envisaged were also only to have an advisory voice.
When the people had driven out the conquerors, it was quickly forgotten. The reaction, led by part of the Prussian nobility, fed by Metternich in Vienna, conquered in Prussia also ; the Holy Alliance testified that kings were appointed by God, the fall of the Corsican willed by God, and the princes, therefore, infallible in their way. The king threw himself against the popular movement, dissolved athletic and students' associations, suppressed dangerous books and papers, dismissed professors, threw the most popular leaders into prison, punished every request for fulfilment of his . promise as treasonable, filled the country with police and spies, or at least, was glad to let his servants do so.
The son was exactly such a failure as his father : Frederick William IV. (184o-61), a man of decided talent, but weak, con fused, romantic ; in person short-sighted, slovenly, thin-haired, he never dared do what he would, and only took a definite decision to abandon it as soon as taken. Liberal, like all crown princes, before his accession, he soon disappointed the people. The guiding idea of the day, citizenship, the contract between prince and people, he dismissed as nonsense, the sovereignty of the people he described as the principle of evil in the world, and tried vainly to gloss over his hostility to the people by smooth phrases.
It was only seven years later that he began to notice the gather ing storms, and under the pressure of public opinion, convoked, in the shape of the "united diet" (184 7) the first parliament that Prussia had seen, graded on the caste system, but yet empowered to reject State loans or taxes. In his very first speech, however, the king took everything back, declaring it to be God's will that he should reign—he was always adept at hiding his own fear of the people under a mystic light. The diet was closed again immedi ately, with nothing accomplished; but the February revolution in Paris soon after strengthened the people's forces in Berlin. When revolution broke out there in March 1848, when the people of Berlin broke their oath of loyalty exactly 40o years after they had sworn it, the king hesitated, characteristically, assembled troops, but immediately afterwards, in his mortal fear, issued a Patent promising a Liberal Constitution, which he proclaimed in person from the balcony of his palace.
Those first shots which can never be prevented in any riot, were fired by the military. Two hours later, 200 barricades had been erected in Berlin. The troops had the upper hand in the fighting, but the next day the king issued a proclamation "to my dear Berlin," begging the people to disperse quietly, and withdrew his own troops. He sat in his palace, irresolute, listened to all councils, approved a citizens' defence corps, proclaimed an am nesty, ordered a new ministry, till the beaten bourgeoisie were turned into victors by the Crown's timidity. Three days later there appeared an unintelligible proclamation, saying "Prussia was to be absorbed in Germany" and the king would take his place at the head of Germany. Elections were held for a parliament for Prussia and one for Germany. When the latter, sitting in Frank furt, elected the king German emperor, on April 3, 1849, those who were nearest to him did not know whether he would accept or refuse the crown. Up to the last moment his chief intimates believed that he would accept. Suddenly he refused.
Out of fear of a coalition which threatened to form against him under Austria's leadership, he dropped all plans for uniting Ger many, but took the oath to the new Prussian Constitution before the two Chambers. This reproduced the principles of the modern coastitutions of other countries; but the ministers were still re sponsible to the king alone, who enjoyed the sole right of appoint ing then, and also the sole right of concluding treaties with foreign powers, and declaring war or concluding peace at discretion. Only the spirit of an absolutism 400 years old was capable of burdening itself with this two-fold responsibility which the king of Prussia received, and indeed, really assumed for the first time before the whole people, without himself being responsible to anyone but God. At the same time, these two most dangerous clauses cut the people off from any attempt to educate themselves politically, and gave the citizens an excuse for living on as sub jects. Only so can it be explained how these provisions lived on into the loth century. The next decade passed in Prussia amid the growing discontent of the Liberals, and the growing irritability of the sick king, till the king, too late, was declared of unsound mind and his brother became regent, and afterwards successor to the throne.
For the King began by objecting to all the three wars which Bismarck had decided to wage, to put Prussia at the head of Germany, and thus to solve the German question without and against Austria. In 1864, i866 and 187o he swore not to draw the sword, yet in the end his adviser wrung his consent from him. Before the Schleswig-Holstein war he said that he really had no rights at all to these two duchies ; before the war against Austria, that he would never shed German blood ; before the war against France he gave way to Napoleon's and Grammont's arrogant demands to the limit of what was possible. But when he was swim ming on the full tide of victory, it was only with great difficulty that he could be restrained by Bismarck's foresight from impolitic immoderation. He neither understood nor liked Bismarck's con sistent purpose, for if Bismarck cared more for Prussia's greatness than for Germany's unity, the king cared even less for Germany, and he refused for weeks to assume the imperial title, which he thought looked "like a major's title," while clinging to the insignia of Prussia, like his brother before him, who had also refused to become emperor.
None of the important steps in the king's career were due to his own initiative ; in fact, at the decisive moments at Nikolsburg, Gastein and Versailles, Bismarck had always had to employ threats of resignation, nervous breakdowns and outbursts of tears, before he got his way. "I carried him on my shoulders on to the imperial throne," he said afterwards, and it was true. In the end the king was so angry with him over the whole emperor business, that when he descended from his throne in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, on Jan. 18, 1871, he walked past Bismarck without a word, when he went to thank his generals.
The old monarch long remained strange to his people, and it was only through the surprising elevation of his position, and especially through his more than patriarchal age, that he achieved a gradual and tardy popularity. He always remained simple and very economical, as he had been brought up to be in Prussia's lean years; slept and died in his iron camp bed, but left over 20,000,000 marks. But he had a really warm and tactful heart, and like a true king, always managed to leave his chancellor a free hand and all possible glory, without losing any of his own natural dignity. This, and the loyalty with which he stood by his chief minister, although the great nobles tried very hard for years, and his wife for decades, to separate them, the gratitude with which he heaped honours and riches on the founder of his empire—this combination of qualities was not to be found in any of his an cestors. For all his unsophisticated mind, for all his narrow up bringing, William I., with his courage, his piety and his kingly nature was always a true nobleman.
His son, who mounted the throne a dying man, and ruled only Too days, as Frederick III., had won by his share in famous battles, his good looks, and above all, his sorrows, a popularity which he bore with exemplary patience. In character he belonged rather to the romantic type of the family; when the empire was being founded, he proposed that the other princes should be com pelled to do homage ; he adored old thrones and brilliant pageants, and only betrayed his domineering instincts so seldom as he did because the superior intelligence of his wife, Victoria of England, primed him with democratic demands or catch-words.
From now onward, the encirclement of Germany proceeded the more inevitably, as William, out of personal hatred of his uncle, Edward VII. of England, rejected every advance from England, even the offer of an alliance from Chamberlain, and instead of this aspired to colonies and began to build a great fleet—two things that Bismarck had avoided on the principle that Germany's dan gerous situation forbade her from engaging in any adventures abroad. All these enterprises were accompanied by a flood of high-flown and even provocative speeches, the echoes of which made the cabinets of Europe, and the peoples too, uneasy for 25 years. To shout down his weakness, the emperor in these hundreds of public speeches proclaimed again and again his phrases of the shining armour, of the victorious German sword, of the mailed fist, Nibelungen loyalty and Neptune's trident, until the world he addressed held him for a warlike conqueror, only waiting for the moment to fall upon his neighbours.
In reality he was pushed on by the little military circle, that, in Prussia as everywhere else, was urging new wars after a genera tion of peace, called him a coward in secret, and thought out machinations how to bring him from words to deeds, from threats to mobilization. The middle classes listened with ironic smiles, paid less and less attention to these speeches every year, and buried themselves in business, which was flourishing everywhere. Only the workmen and Socialists, in their press, brochures and speeches uttered warnings, year after year, against the dangers of the ever-increasing boasting and court display. When the conse quences of the imperial speeches became a national danger, in Nov. 1908, over an incautious interview in the Daily Telegraph, and all Germany arose and demanded a remedy, it was not the Socialists, but members of the highest nobility who debated whether the emperor should not be put under control, as of unsound mind.
The murder of the Austrian heir to the throne in July 1914 was a personal blow to William, because the victim was his friend, and a prince by God's grace as well ; his mind, too, appears at the time to have been in a state of maniac excitement, so that he encour aged the bellicose cabinet of Vienna with violent words, letters and marginal notes, and promised them help. Three weeks later, when all was lost, and his mind was passing through a state of less exaltation, his anger burned out, he shrank away from the threat ening spectre of war, which he, of tenest of all men, had evoked, and sought at the last moment to avoid it. When the first signs of unrest began among a starving, bleeding people, he thought it could be crushed by force, as in peace. It was only when the general collapse began, in Oct. 1918, that in a memorable scene he sanctioned the new constitution, even as Frederick William IV. had not promised his till the first shots were heard in Berlin; and thus in the last weeks of his reign, against his declared will, yet founded that new democratic Germany in which ministers rule instead of kings, and are nominated by a people's parliament.
In vain first Wilson in America, then a section of public opinion in Germany, appealed to him to abdicate, to ease the situation of his country. He remained, until in the first days of November, the people rose in different cities and ports, and demanded his abdi cation. Even on Nov. 8, when his cousin and chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, himself proposed his abdication as a means of saving the monarchy, which could easily have been carried on by his grandson, a minor, the emperor refused, and in the end, when at last the capital itself rose, declared that he would abdicate as emperor, that is, from the empty title, but not from his place of real power as king of Prussia. But on the morning of the loth, fear of sharing the fate of the tsar, and the advice of his Field marshal Hindenburg sent him fleeing out of his country over the frontier into Holland.
Two hundred years earlier his forebear, the young Frederick the Great had planned to escape over the frontier, and had only been detained by a chance. Then his father's will had been that that prince should be shot for a deserter. Now the news that the Su preme War Lord had forsaken his country, in uniform, at the moment of her greatest need, evoked in the people neither hate nor rage, only an immense disappointment ; for except the higher no bility, who knew the emperor's character, none of his enemies would have believed a Prussian king capable of such conduct. It destroyed the belief of the Prussians in the military basis of their State, which had been instilled into them for centuries as a maxim of morals and honour, and a great illusion fell shattered round the heads of loyal and faithful millions. Prussia and Germany became republics, not because the time was ripe, but because all their princes had become degenerate and defenceless, and vacated their 20 thrones without a blow.
Thus ended the dynasty of the Hohenzollerns, at the height of their power, after rising from burggrafs to emperors, from rulers of one million to 66,000,000, from a vassal state to the heads of Germany. Yet the deeds of the best Hohenzollerns were not in vain. It was only through their work and energy in welding the land together out of so many different parts that it was able to survive the fall of the dynasty without dissolving into its corn ponent parts; and only because Bismarck had united the many German states into one State could that Reich still survive, after the fall of so many dynasties, beaten in the field, compassed about by victorious enemies and temptations to secede. The best of the Hohenzollerns have their reward in history in the solidity of the German Republic as a national and linguistic unit. (E. Lyn.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-See Monumenta Zollerana, edited by R. von StillBibliography.-See Monumenta Zollerana, edited by R. von Still- fried and T. Marker (1852-9o) ; Quellen and Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hauses Hohenzollern, edited by E. Berner (19o1 fol.) ; Hohenzollern Jahrbuch, Forschungen and Abbildungen zur Geschichte der Hohenzollern in Brandenburg-Preussen, ed. Seidel (Leipzig, 1897 1903) ; Forschungen zur brandenburgischen and preussischen Ge schichte, ed. by R. Koser, A. Naude and 0. Hintze (1888, fol.) ; W. Pierson, Preussiche Geschichte (loth ed., 1911) ; R. Koscr, Geschichtc der brandenburgischen Politik bis zum westfdlischen Frieden (1913); U. Hintze, Die Hohenzollern and ihr Werk (1915) ; B. Rogge, Fiinf Jahrhundert Hohenzollernherrschaft (1915) ; G. Schuster, Aus der Geschichte des Hauses Hohenzollern 0915) ; P. Schwartz, 1415-1915 Brandenburg-Preussen and das deutsche Reich unter den Hohenzollern (1915) ; J. Hofner, Die Hohenzollern and das Reich ; E. Ludwig, Wilhelm der Zweite (1925 ; Eng. trans. E. C. Mayne, 1926) . See also PRUSSIA ; BRANDENBURG ; GERMANY, and separate articles on the kings of Prussia and the German emperors.