They represent some principle of life or energy, in the midst of mere political wreckage.

If the binding power, which built up an older organism, should decline, as happened to the Holy Roman Empire after the religious wars, fragments will fall away and join bodies to which they are now more akin.
Of the States that throve among the crumbling masses of the old Empire the chief was Brandenburg-Prussia.

She had a twofold energy which the older organism lacked: she was Protestant and she was national; she championed the new creed cherished by the North Germans, and she felt, though dimly as yet, the strength that came from an almost single kin.
Until she seized on part of the spoils of Poland, her Slavonic subjects were for the most part germanized Slavs; and even after acquiring Posen and Warsaw at the close of the eighteenth century, she could still claim to be the chief Germanic State.

A generation earlier, Frederick the Great had seen this to be the source of her strength.

His policy was not merely Prussian: in effect, if not in aim, it was German.