believe it is the oldest princely line in Europe. There is certainly
none whose history on the whole is better. Margraf George of
Anspach-Baireuth was perhaps the finest character among the Protestant
princes of the Reformation, without whom the good fight could not have
been fought. When Charles V. besieged Metz in the winter (which, with
Lorraine, had just been torn from Germany by the French), and was
compelled by the cold to withdraw, it was a Hohenzollern prince, one
of the first soldiers of the time, who led the rear-guard over ground
which another Hohenzollern, Prince Frederick Charles, has again made
famous. Later, in Frederick the Great, the house furnished one of the
firmest hands that ever held a royal sceptre. His successors have been
men of power.

They are good types of their stock, and Prussia is worthy of the
leadership to which she is advancing. In the cathedral of Speyer stand
the statues of the mighty German Kaisers, who six hundred years ago
wore the purple, and, after their wild battle with the elements of
disorder about them, were buried at last in its crypts. They are
majestic figures for the most part, idealised by the sculptor, and
yet probably not far beyond nature; for the imperial dignity was not
hereditary, but given to the man chosen for it, and the choice was
often a worthy one. They were leaders in character as well as station,
and it is right to give their images the bearing of men strong in war
and council. I felt that if the ancient dignity was to be revived in
our own day, and the sceptre of Barbarossa and Rudolph of Hapsburg to
be extended again over a united Germany, there had been few princes
more worthy to hold it than the modern Hohenzollern.

In speaking of this great people so as to give the best idea of them
in a short space, I have seized on what seemed to me in those days