So little is known of the inner life and ideas
of the German Emperor, that any letters from him are of interest. Two have just been published from him in the " Memoirs of General von Natzmer," addressed to the General, who was his bosom-friend. The first was written in 1821, and the second in 1824; but great as is the time which has elapsed, they probably reveal the mind of the existing man. They both show that the Emperor, as a man of twenty-five and twenty-eighty was penetrated with the idea that Prussia could only exist as an armed nation, full of " intellectual potencies " directed to war, and that "protracted peace was most perilous " for her people. She must always rely on her warlike enthusiasm to compensate for deficiencies of power, and though only eleven millions strong, must play her part among nations of forty millions. Else, "when you no longer wish to be anything, why strive to appear something, and keep up an Army at the price of enormous sacrifices P " The letters show that from the first, Prince Frederick William was a genuine Hohenzollern, that he relied on the Army to raise the nation, and that he had thought out the kind of State that he wished to make of Prussia. He has realised his dream, and the con- tinued danger of Germany probably seems in his eyes a good, as compelling the nation to keep the strained attitude of prepara- tion without which " protracted peace is perilous " for her energies.
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