Badenese, Wuertembergers, Franconians, Hanoverians, the citizens of the former free cities no less than the already absorbed Westphalians, Thuringians, Silesians, Mecklenburgers, were speedily all reduced to being the slaves of the Prussian military system and of the Prussian military caste.

The naive German peoples, as already pointed out, accepted this Prussian domination as the realization of their time-honoured patriotic ideal of German unity.
The fact of their subservience was emphasized in every way.

The law of _lese-majeste_ (_majestaetsbeleidigung_), by which all criticism of the despotic head of the State or his actions is made a heinous criminal offence, to which severe penalties are attached, it is not too much to say is a law which brands the ruler who accepts it as a coward and a cur, and the Legislature which passes it as a house, not of representative citizens, or even subjects for that matter, but of representative _slaves_.

It must not be forgotten that the law in question strikes not only at public expressions of opinion in the press or on the platform, but at the most private criticism made in the presence of a friend in one's own room.

The depths of undignified and craven meanness to which a monarch is reduced by being thus protected from criticism by the police-truncheon and the gaoler struck me especially as illustrated by the following incident which happened some years ago: Shortly after the accession of the present Kaiser, a conjurer was giving his entertainment in a Swiss town.