The tourist who takes the express train between Berlin and Copenhagen, one hour after he has left the Prussian capital reaches a vast plain more than half the size of Belgium, where barren moorlands alternate with smiling fields, where dormant lakes are succeeded by dark pine-forests. Few travellers ever think of breaking their journey on this melancholy plain, the territory of the Grand Dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. They have not the remotest suspicion that these Grand Duchies of Mecklenburg, which they cross in such listless haste, are, from a political point of view, one of the most fascinating countries of Europe. Mecklenburg has for the students of comparative politics the same sort of interest which an Indian reserve territory, or the Mormon State of Utah, has for the traveller in the United States, or which a cannibal tract in the equatorial Congo forest has for the explorer of Central Africa. For this pleasant land of Mecklenburg-Schwerin is the last survival of a patriarchal and feudal civilization. It is the most perfect type of the paternal Prussian type of government, entirely unspoiled by the Parliamentary institutions of a feeble democratic age.

II.

Here alone of all the North German States the conditions of a past generation continue in their pristine vigour. Although the Grand Duke is the only descendant of Slavonic Princes in the German Empire, and still calls himself “Prince of the Wendes,” he is the most Teutonic of dynasts. Although Mecklenburg-Schwerin is independent of Prussia, it is the most Prussian and the most Junkerized of all Federal States.

In degenerate Prussia the Kaiser has actually to submit to the financial control of an unruly Reichstag, and is not even allowed to spend the Imperial revenues as any Emperor by right Divine ought to be logically allowed to do. The Duke of Mecklenburg is far more fortunate than William II. He has no accounts to settle, he has not even a budget to publish. He collects in paternal fashion the revenues of his Grand Ducal demesnes, and no power has any right to ask any questions. Even the “Almanack of Gotha,” which is generally omniscient in these matters, is silent on the revenues of His Highness. There is a public debt of about one hundred and fifty million marks! The public revenues are the private income of the Grand Duke. The public debt is a private charge on the people.

In degenerate Prussia even the Imperator-Rex has to divide some of his authority with a meddlesome assembly, and has to delegate it to an obedient but ridiculous bureaucracy. In the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg the ruler governs his subjects in the good old patriarchal way. It is true, in the troubled days of 1848 an unwise predecessor granted something like a paper constitution, but that scrap of parchment happily became a dead-letter twelve months after it had been granted. It is also true that there still subsists some faint image of representative government in the two estates of the Grand Duchy, dating as far back as 1755, but those venerable estates of the Grand Duchy are only composed of and only represent the Ritterschaft—i.e., six hundred and ninety noblemen; and the Landschaft—i.e., fifty municipalities. Neither the peasants in the country nor the artisans in the towns are ever troubled to give their advice on matters concerning the common weal. And as, in order that a Bill may become the law of the Grand Duchy, the consent of the two estates is required, nothing unpleasant is ever likely to happen, and the old order, represented by the six hundred and ninety overlords, continues undisturbed.

In degenerate Prussia even the Junkers have to submit to the presence of petty landowners of lowly birth, or even to peasants of servile origin. Do not historians remind us that even Frederick the Great had to surrender to the claims of the Miller of Sans Souci. In Mecklenburg-Schwerin there is no Miller of Sans Souci to worry the Grand Duke. For no peasant owns one single acre of land. One-half of the territory of the Grand Duchy is owned by a few hundred lords of the manor, and the other half realizes the Socialist ideal of the suppression of private property and of the transfer of all private ownership to the State. Six thousand square miles are the absolute property of the State—that is to say, of the Grand Duke. For never was absolute ruler more truly entitled than the Grand Duke to appropriate the words of Louis XIV.: “L’État c’est moi.”

In this paradise of Prussian Junkerthum one might reasonably have expected the monarch and the lords of the manor to enjoy as complete happiness as is ever allotted to mortal man. And the peasants and artisans could equally be expected to share in the universal contentment. Are not the Grand Duke and his knights as closely interested in the welfare of their tenants as a shepherd in the welfare of his flock? But even in a patriarchal Grand Dukedom the spirit of modern unrest seems to have penetrated. If German statisticians may be trusted, the inhabitants of the Grand Duchy do even seem to have preferred the risks and uncertainties of living in a distant and unpaternal American Government to the peace and quiet and security of the Mecklenburg plains. The ungrateful subjects of the Grand Duke have done what the Kaiser once advised his own disloyal subjects to do; they have shaken the dust of the Fatherland off their feet; they have emigrated in such large numbers to the United States of America that this paradise of Prussian Junkerthum, with its 700,000 inhabitants, is to-day the most thinly populated part of the German Empire, and contains fewer industries than any other part.

After all, to a military empire soldiers are more necessary than peasants and artisans. Already in 1815 Mecklenburg could claim the glory of having produced the greatest Junker soldier of the age, bluff and rough Prince BlÜcher, the victor of Waterloo. The achievements of the Grand Ducal regiments have fully proved that Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz have in the present war remained true to the glories of their military past and have remained worthy of their feudal present, and the august head of the Grand Ducal dynasty is just now doing most efficient work in the Balkan States as the super-Ambassador of his Imperial cousin.

CHAPTER X