THE PRUSSIAN CHARACTER

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXII, Issue 4824, 29 November 1902, Page 7 (Supplement)

THE PRUSSIAN CHARACTER

A system lias long been at work in Prussian Poland, whose uixn, openly stated, is either to make Germans of the Poles.-or* to drive them out of the land; each of its acts has added a littlo to the sum of bitterness felt by every Polo throughout the three Empires; and the recent outburst was but tho accumulated resentment of fifteen years. It wore hard to find anything ir. history (says a , writer in “Biacicwootrs Magazine”) that quite resembles this system. There is something like it in the tale of Pharaoh and the and so far as regards tho Egyptian lung's utterance, “Let ns deal wisely with them, lest they multiply,” the attitude taken is similar, and the political motive absolutly tho same. But the parallel fails in this, that the Israelites were in no wise attached to tho 1 land of their sojourn.

. But In tho native soil there is strength to resist as well, and it has come to pass that the system—though hacked by the mighty machinery of perhaps the most perfect administration in tho world; backed, too, by a powerful society which has given to the struggle all the bitterness of civil warfare —has hitherto utterly failed of its purpose, and has but kindled unutterable hatred, endangered the Triple Alliance on tho side of Austria, and brought even Eussia into undisguised sympathy with Poland. In commenting on the Wreschen incidents, the whole Enssian press, one may aay, without exception, has sided with tho Poles: not surely out of friendship, but moved by a simple feeling of hu- • inanity. When Muscovite barbarians rebuke the madness of German philosophers, it must he'-stark and staring indeed. Yet it is but fair to say here that for those deeds Prussia alone, not Germany, is responsible. And Prussia beard in its essence the - stamp of the old Teutonic knights; from them its people have taken their character, if not physically (though in truth those miii- • tant monks cared for no vow but that of obedience), at least spiritually, by the stern discinliue they instilled into tho tho wild Bornssi whom they snbdued, and the colonists from the West whom they planted amongst them. Thence . sprang the Prussians; and. true to their origin, they are even now the worship,pers of rigid order, the fanatical idola- ' tors of law. Their ideal of civilisation is drill: they take yin'll, freedom and constitutional forms as may be granted them, just as a soldier takes his day on leave. Eegulations and penalties which, to the free spirit of other nations, were unendurable, they quietly accept as part of tbo campaign of progress; tbey may fail to sea their’ use. but a Prussian has only to obey orders. A traveller alights at the Berlin terminus, and wants a cab; tho policeman on duty interferes, and the one he has called must bo taken, or none. A man commits some trilling misdemeanour, and rnns away from the policeman who commands Mm to stand in tho King's name: bo is simply shot down for resisting authority. These are facts. And if tie Prussian can bear this, how will he look upon an utterly different race, whom he knows in his heart to be not less intelligent than himself, yet tainted with incomprehensible aspiration:- towards -freedom—a race that feels as a degradation tie very yoke of which ho is so proud—and, above all, a race absolutely in his power and at his mercy? Per tho Teutonic knights, though brave, were bravo professionally: they cared little to fight when the odds were against them; they preyed by preference upon the naked barbarians whom they rodo down, or on the unprotected peasantry of Mazzovia, whose farms they laid waste, until Jagello, King of Poland, mil Lithuania quelled them for many a year in the field of Qrnnwaid. To their betters in arms, as to military superiors, they bowed with respect; more than a century afterwards they offered their unsolicited homage to tho Polish King. To rivals they were insolently fierce; to their slaves mercilessly exacting. And these ancestral features are still reproduced in the Prussian character to-day.