when a population which had been for centuries restrained from free
domestic movement, burst its bonds and insisted on levelling the barriers
which had immobilized it.

The story of the French Revolution is too familiar to need recapitulation
here: indeed, I have already dealt with it in my _Social Revolutions_; but
the effects of that convulsion are only now beginning to appear, and these
effects, without the shadow of a doubt, have been in their ultimate
development the occasion of that great war whose conclusion we still
await.

France, in 1792, having passed into a revolution which threatened the
vested interests of Prussia, was attacked by Prussia, who was defeated at
Valmy. Presently, France retaliated, under Napoleon, invaded Prussia,
crushed her army at Jena, in 1807, dismembered the kingdom and imposed on
her many hardships. To obtain their freedom the Prussians found it needful
to reorganize their social system from top to bottom, for this social
system had descended from Frederic William, the Great Elector of
Brandenburg (1640-1688), and from Frederic the Great (1740-1786), and was
effete and incapable of meeting the French onset, which amounted, in
substance, to a quickened competition. Accordingly, the new Prussian
constitution, conceived by Stein, put the community upon a relatively
democratic and highly developed educational basis. By the Emancipating
Edict of 1807, the peasantry came into possession of their land, while,
chiefly through the impulsion of Scharnhorst, who was the first chief of
staff of the modern army, the country adopted universal military service,
which proved to be popular throughout all ranks. Previous to Scharnhorst,
under Frederic the Great, the qualification of an officer had been birth.
Scharnhorst defined it as education, gallantry, and intelligence.
Similarly, Gneisenau's conception of a possible Prussian supremacy lay in