since 1870.  Piedmont was swallowed up in Italy, Germany has been swallowed up in Prussia; she has become the sharer of her victories and the accomplice of her crimes.  And so under the tutelage of the spirit of Bismarck the docile German people have adopted the Prussian faith; and the policy of aggression and conquest once entered upon, there was no drawing back.  Bismarck fed the youthful nation upon a diet of blood and iron, and its appetite has grown by what it fed on.  The success of 1870 turned the nation’s head; the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine gave it the first taste of conquest.  Germany began to imagine that German character and German culture possessed some magical and unique quality which would alone account for this success.  Dreams of a European Empire, of infinite expansion, of world-power, floated before the national consciousness.  The German people were no longer content, to use Mazzini’s words, “to elaborate and express their idea, to contribute their stone also to the pyramid of history”; they now craved to impose their idea upon the world at large, and to place their stone on the top of the pyramid.  Modern Germany is an example of nationalism “gone wrong,” just as Napoleon was an example of democratic individualism “gone wrong.”  The Man of Destiny has been followed by the Nation of Destiny, the “super-man” by the “super-nation.”  Both have had to face a world in arms arrayed against them.

[Footnote 1:  German writers are fond of calling it “Prussia-Germany” (Preussen-Deutschland), a phrase of Treitschke’s.]

Thus the national idea in Germany has been cramped, contorted, and perverted by the Prussian system and the dynastic frontiers.  Had the dreams of 1848 been realised, there might have been no Franco-German War, no Alsace-Lorraine question, no war of 1914.  And what of our third test of nationhood?  Do the people of Germany feel that their government adequately expresses their general will, that it is truly representative, by which is not necessarily meant that it is democratic in form?[1] There is no doubt that in 1848 the educated classes of Germany did actually desire a democratic form of polity.  In that year Germany was as liberal as Italy; she also had risings in almost every State, not excluding Prussia itself, which were everywhere answered with promises of a “constitution.”  But when reaction came in Germany, as in Italy, Prussia did not, like Piedmont, stand out for freedom and make itself the model State of Germany; on the contrary she reverted to her old military absolutism at the first opportunity.  And so the dreams of German liberty, like the dreams of complete German unity, disappeared before the stern necessity of accepting the supremacy of a politically reactionary State; and the Prussianisation which followed did much to neutralise altogether the liberalising influences of the south.  It is therefore possible to maintain that the political institutions of Germany have come to represent more and more the genius and will of the population.  “The Germany of the twentieth century,” maintains a recent writer, “is not two but one.  The currents have mingled their waters, and the Prussian torrent now has the depth and volume of the whole main-stream of German thought."[2]