have achieved their success by hard fighting. With the exception of
the original marches of Brandenburg there is scarcely a district in
the kingdom of Prussia that has not been wrested from some enemy
and held as the spoils of war. This policy of forcible annexation
or robbery, as the historian may be pleased to call it--while
inconsistent with principles of equity, has had nevertheless its
marked advantages. Perceiving that the sword alone could keep what the
sword had won, the Hohenzollerns have ever striven to identify their
dynastic interests with the well-being of their people, to make their
régime one of order and improvement, to repress the power of the
nobility without crushing its spirit, to adjust a satisfactory
compromise between centralization and local independence, and to stamp
their own uncompromising spirit upon each individual subject. Hence
their success in creating a nation out of provinces. Every Prussian
has always felt that he was a member of one indissoluble commonwealth.
The Habsburgs, on the contrary, have grown great through marriage.
Their policy is aptly expressed in the oft-quoted phrase, _Bella
gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube_. Regarding their sway as a matter
of hereditary succession and divine right, they have been content
to let each province or kingdom remain as it was when acquired,
an isolated Crown dependency. They have not put forth serious and
persistent efforts to weld the Tyrol, the Austrian duchies, Bohemia,
Galicia, much less Hungary, in one compact realm. They have done
even worse. They have committed repeatedly a blunder which the
Hohenzollerns, even in their darkest days, never so much as dreamed
of--namely, the blunder of hounding down one province or race by means
of another. They have used the Germans to crush the Bohemians, the
Poles to thwart the Germans, the Hungarians to check all the others,
and the Croats to defeat the Hungarians. From this has resulted a
deplorable conflict of races. The present emperor, Francis Joseph,