servant of the nation; Prussia was also to cease to be a State by itself, a power on its own account.  She was to create the nation’s ideal—­complete unity—­and then to merge herself in the nation.  But Prussia would not and could not do this.  She was far too great a power herself; she could very well rule Germany, but not serve."[2] Both Germany and Italy at first played with the idea of a Confederation, but each was eventually forced to look to one of its existing States to give it the unity it desired.  There was only one possible choice for each:  for Germany, Prussia; for Italy, Piedmont; but while Piedmont was content to serve, Prussia was too proud to do anything but rule.  The dynastic State frontiers were therefore retained because Prussia refused to sacrifice her own State frontiers.  The “unification of Germany,” in short, was an episode in the gradual expansion of the Prussian dynastic State, which had begun far away back in the thirteenth century.[3] It assumed the air of a national movement, because Prussia cleverly availed herself of the prevailing nationalistic sentiment for her own ends.  The German Empire is therefore something unique in the annals of the world; it is at once a nation-State, like Italy, France, and Great Britain, and also a military Empire, like Rome under Augustus, Europe under Napoleon, Austria under Joseph II., i.e. a State in which the territory that commands the army holds political sway over the rest of the country.  It is not mere accident of geographical proximity, or even the kinship between Austrians and Germans, which has led to the long and unshakable alliance of Germany with the Hapsburg dominions.  They are associated by common political interests and by similarity of political structure.  Each stands for the supremacy of one dynastic State over a number of subordinate States or nationalities.

[Footnote 1:  The chapter entitled “Dynasties and Stocks” in the Reflections should be carefully studied on this point.  Bismarck was obviously uncomfortable about the old frontiers.]

[Footnote 2:  Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century, p. 104.]

[Footnote 3:  See Chap.  III. p. 95.]

Her common nationality leads us to forget that the German Empire should more rightly be called the Prussian Empire.[1] Nor is there any reason at all why the Empire of Prussia should stop its process of expansion at the national boundaries; it has indeed already stepped beyond them, into Poland in the east, into Denmark in the north, into France in the west.  Why should not the process be carried farther still and Germany become in Europe, nay, in the world, what Prussia is in Germany?  By preserving her identity as a State, and by establishing her hegemony, Prussia, in the name of the national idea of Germany, has been able to spread her own ideals throughout the Empire, in other words to undertake that Prussianisation of Germany which is the most striking fact in her history