Now, while Germany was thus working out the task of her organic
self-development there was within her, or rather by her side, a people
with whom every process tended to take a mechanical form.
Artificiality marked the creation of Prussia; for she was formed by
clumsily sewing together, edge to edge, provinces either acquired or
conquered. Her administration was mechanical; it did its work with the
regularity of a well-appointed machine. Not less mechanical--extreme
both in precision and in power--was the army, on which the attention
of the Hohenzollerns was concentrated. Whether it was that the people
had been drilled for centuries to mechanical obedience; or that an
elemental instinct for conquest and plunder, absorbing to itself the
life of the nation, had simplified its aims and reduced them to
materialism; or that the Prussian character was originally so made--it
is certain that the idea of Prussia always evoked a vision of
rudeness, of rigidity, of automatism, as if everything within her went
by clockwork, from the gesture of her kings to the step of her
soldiers.

A day came when Germany had to choose between a rigid and ready-made
system of unification, mechanically superposed from without, and the
unity which comes from within by a natural effort of life. At the same
time the choice was offered her between an administrative mechanism,
into which she would merely have to fit herself--a complete order,
doubtless, but poverty-stricken, like everything else that is
artificial--and that richer and more flexible order which the wills of
men, when freely associated, evolve of themselves. How would she
choose?

There was a man on the spot in whom the methods of Prussia were
incarnate--a genius, I admit, but an evil genius; for he was devoid of