Tuttle's History of Prussia

IT may safely be assumed that the early history of Prussia is known to the great majority of English readers only from the first four books of Carlyle’s Frederic the Great. So powerful was the impression of that book that it seems to have deterred others from entering on a task which might be understood as an attempt to rival it. In Germany the case has been different. We can hardly imagine a German of to-day reduced to the necessity of consulting a work which offends in so many ways against the chief canons of modern historical science. He would find himself repelled by the very qualities that have made Carlyle’s book famous, and would turn rather to the less strongly individual, but for that very reason less dangerous, pages of Ranke, Stenzel, Droysen, or Pierson.

it is greatly to the credit of American scholarship that the first effort to break the tradition, and give to the English public a History of Prussia based upon the best results of modern science, should have been made on this side the Atlantic. In the volume before us ¹ Professor Tuttle attempts to follow the fortunes of the Prussian state only as far as the beginning of the reign of Frederic the Great; but this earlier period bears so distinctly a character of its own, it is separated from the following time by so sharp a line of demarkation, that it is well adapted for treatment by itself. Certainly, one does not feel that one is dealing here with anything fragmentary or incomplete. From first to last we see clearly that we are studying a development, not a mere succession of events. The author’s method is as different as can well be imagined from that of his great predecessor. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that he has been governed by a definite purpose to resist every temptation to adorn his story with any of those telling points of personal character and dramatic incident upon which Carlyle so greatly depended for his effects.

The reader in search of fine writing will be disappointed. He will find rather a scrupulous avoidance of anything that could be called rhetorical, — a plain, unadorned style, severely simple and direct. It is evident that the guiding thought of the writer was not of the effect he might produce upon the reader, but how best to attach and keep fast hold upon the one single thread, the “ rother faden,” which runs through every page of his narrative. This thread is the growth of the Prussian constitution. Wars, negotiations, alliances, personal character, all are given weight only in so far as they tend to illustrate this one central and dominant fact.

We doubt if the book ever becomes popular, in the vulgar sense of that word. Its virtues commend it to the scholar rather than to the general reader, and to the scholar it must prove of great and permanent value. Its least satisfactory portion is that which treats of Brandenburg before the coming of the Hohenzollerns, — a period of three hundred years, disposed of within the compass of sixty pages ; truly an undertaking which could hardly promise a large measure of success. It appears clear that in these introductory chapters the author has not thought it worth while to make as careful or as extended studies as in the later portions. In the absence of any account of his sources, — an almost unpardonable omission, in these days, — it is difficult to tell how far his researches may have gone. Surely a writer on the feudal system must come down well beyond Montesquieu, Eichhorn, or even Waitz (quoted in the antiquated edition of 1844), if he would convince us that he has got at the best there is on a subject so full of uncertainties as this. Again, in his treatment of the municipal arrangements, one misses the later works of Karl Hegel and Giercke, and finds reference only to that of Wilda (1831). So as to the codifications of German law, but one comparatively unimportant work is referred to, while the extensive literature of the Sachsenspiegel, notably the text and commentary of Homeyer, is, for aught we know, unknown to the author. In all this early work there is hardly a reference to a contemporary authority.

Some slight errors would doubtless disappear on a more careful revision. It may well be doubted, at least, whether the power of the church to check the inroads and to soften the manners of barbarians was as great as is here made to appear. Neither Brandenburg nor any other state was created an electorate by the Golden Bull. The seven (or six) electorates appear in the Sachsenspiegel a century and a quarter before the year 1356, and were never created by any one. In the use of technical terms, it might be wished that a more uniform and reasonable system had been followed. Why, for instance, say “ Margrave” and “ Burggrave,” words which are neither current English nor German, when by simply keeping “ Markgraf ” and “ Burggraf,” just as he has kept “ Vogt,” the author would have given us good German words, well worth remembering ? Is it not a little strong to call the Crusades “ vast popular migrations”? They seem to us rather to have been distinctly military expeditions, designed to drive, out an enemy from the holy places, and were none the less military because they were sometimes undertaken by an unruly mob under a fanatical impulse.

Yet in spite of these blemishes, the thoughtful reader, if not too unfamiliar with the events and incidents here summarized, will get a reasonably clear impression of the gradual emergence of Brandenburg from primitive barbarism to the semi-civilized conditions of the fifteenth century. At all events, he can hardly fail to grasp the one central idea, that here was a complex of classes and ranks of men, each with certain wellunderstood rights.

Basing his narrative now upon the assumptiofjppf these rights, the author enters upon the Hohenzollern period. Here matters begin to improve. The literature to which reference is made becomes more ample, and approaches more nearly the contemporary records. The task, always a difficult one, of showing the bearing of events apparently widely separated upon a single line of development is made somewhat more easy, in the present case, by a remarkable consistency in general purpose and endowment among the rulers of the Hohenzollern line. From the first moment when the Mark Brandenburg falls under the influence of that sturdily practical race, it enters upon a career of progress which it is within bounds to say has hardly been interrupted to the present day. That policy of “ Get all you can and keep all you get,” which observers of Prussian history in late years will recognize as the burden of its story, began squarely with the Hohenzollern, and has never been lost sight of. Not that these princes were alone in the hearty good will to carry out this policy; their neighbors had no higher political principle. But with this ambition for territorial gain there was joined, in most of the Hohenzollern princes, a plain, hard-headed, practical common sense; a power of acting vigorously at the right moment, and of sitting quietly by when action seemed dangerous ; an unscrupulousness in the matter of engagements ; a supreme disregard of all rights that could conflict with their own ; in short, a combination of qualities which in any age must command a certain kind of success.

Let one but think of Bismarck, posing only a few years ago as the champion of the state’s right to control its own affairs free from all influence of the Roman Church, and now coquetting with Rome, lest the rising tide of popular liberty mount too high for him, and one has a perfect picture of the ancient policy of the Brandenburgers. It cost the best of them no scruples to play fast and loose with every principle, so that their one central purpose of strengthening their own sovereignty were not impaired. It was just this dogged, brutal force, triumphing over every obstacle, which filled the hero-worshiping soul of Carlyle with admiration. Let us compare his view of one notable transaction with that of our author.

“ Another gentleman,” says Carlyle, “ a Baron von Kalkstein, of old TeutschRitter kin, of very high ways in the provincial estates and elsewhere, got into lofty, almost solitary opposition, and at length into mutiny proper, against the new ’ non-Polish sovereign,’ and flatly refused to do homage at his accession in that new capacity. Refused, Kalkstein did, for his share, fled to Warsaw, and very fiercely, in a loud manner, carried on his mutinies in the Diets and Court-Conclaves there; his plea being, or plea for the time, ‘ Poland is our liege lord (which it was not always), and we cannot be transferred to you except by our own consent, asked and given,’ which too had been a little neglected on the former occasion of transfer. So that the great elector knew not what to do with Kalkstein, and at length (as the case was pressing) had him kidnapped by his ambassador at Warsaw; had him rolled into a carpet there, and carried swiftly in the ambassador’s coach, in the form of luggage, over the frontier, into his native province, there to be judged, and in the end (since nothing else would serve him) to have the sentence executed and his head cut off. For the case was pressing! ” So that one gets the impression that after all the elector was only acting well within his rights, and punishing a traitor as he deserved. Mr. Tuttle, however, with no more words, but simply by bringing in the Kalkstein episode where it belongs, in the account of the elector’s war upon the estates of Prussia, shows that his action here was simply a gross and brutal violation of international law, of the inherited rights of the Prussian people, of every principle of human justice.

It is in these parts of the narrative that we have found most to praise. Wisely, it seems to us, Mr. Tuttle has chosen to present the constitutional and social development of each period in a chapter by itself, giving also a separate treatment to the progress of territorial acquisition and other more purely outward matters. Particularly interesting to him, and therefore to his readers, is the account of the steps by which the Hohenzollern princes succeeded in annihilating the popular rights in each of the provinces which together formed the Brandenburg state. It has become, especially since 1870, the favorite device of the Prussian apologists to talk about the “ inherited rights of the Prussian monarchy,” the “ historic rights of the kingdom,” and so on. Mr. Tuttle’s point is to show that this talk is mere dust in the eyes of a half-dazzled, half-paralyzed population ; that in reality these alleged historic rights of the crown have been built up on the ruins of far more ancient and well-established popular liberties. In every one of the Brandenburg provinces there was an active political body, representative after a fashion, at all events embodying what there was of popular right. These bodies were remorselessly sacrificed, one after the other, to the supposed interest of the crown. Instead of that balancing of rights and interests which was, with whatever interruptions, steadily maintained in England, we find the estates of Brandenburg, Cleve, and Prussia, after long and occasionally vigorousresistance, reduced to complete nonentity. Of course a ready answer is that a people which could not defend its liberties did not deserve them; but that answer does not cover the fact that the state of Prussia, like every other Germanic state, rested upon some form of checks and balances, and that the Hohenzollern monarchy, instead of being based upon any theory of inherited sovereignty, is based upon a violent usurpation of powers well defined and clearly understood. Furthermore, one cannot avoid the conclusion that all the modern attempts at parliamentary life in Prussia, with their cruel story of tyrannous and barbarous repression, were not rebellion, but only the re-assertion of rights long held in check by the iron hand of a military despotism.

Yet our author is not blind to that aspect of this despotism which has most often furnished its excuse : these tyrants, greedy or luxurious, passionate and violent, or careless and easy-going, felt themselves to be the fathers of their people ; and is not the father in duty bound to assume that he knows better than his children what is good for them ? This theory of the paternal government, false and degrading as it seems to us, has yet had many redeeming features. Good results were produced under it, though, as Mr. Tuttle wisely observes, no argument can be drawn from that, for the excellent reason that the opposite experiment was never tried. That omnipresent watchfulness which caused the apple-women of Berlin to become producers of stockings, while waiting for custom, might perhaps have brought out far greater results if it had only taught its people to watch themselves for opportunities of self-development. A paternal government which beckons skilled laborers into the country with one hand, and crushes the life out of its subjects with the other, to get the means for enlarging its borders, and so adding, it fancies, to the true vigor of the state, may breed generations of grateful and stupidly happy subjects, but it will never breed ideas which will help the world upward and onward.

These extremes meet most clearly in the second king of Prussia, Frederic William I., the father of Frederic the Great, and almost equal to him in the eyes of the great hero-worshiper. A certain glamour is cast over his ugliness by Carlyle’s admiration. Our author tries to show him as he was : an illconditioned, vulgar brute ; insensible to every consideration of justice or mercy ; cautious in expenditure beyond the line of meanness; not self-indulgent where self-indulgence had no attraction for him, but wildly extravagant in following certain freaks and whims, that really suggest the folly of a madman. It is a dreary boast for any people that it needed the lash of such a " Landesvater ” as this to whip it up to the point of honor in the civil and military service. And here again we are forced to admire the impartiality with which attention is called to whatever of explanation or excuse is warranted by the evidence. We are left with the final impression that this careful father honestly believed that a plate or two thrown at the head of a reluctant child was really the most effectual argument, and that to beat his daughter to the point of death for a trifling offense was an altogether kingly and judicious action. Nor can any disgust at his methods conceal the fact that in a time when the fate of nations depended upon material power this royal drill-sergeant did succeed, at whatever cost, in maintaining a military force which in the hands of his son became the terror of Europe.

At the death of Frederic William the forces, military, financial, and territorial, which were to be used in carrying Prussia to the very highest point in European politics were practically at the disposal of its sovereign. It is to be hoped that this volume, containing as it does the story of the gathering of these forces, will be but the introduction to a complete history of their future activity.