No More Learning

In its origins, liberalism and the liberal movement
were separate from, and anterior to, the intellectual re-
naissance. French and English formative influences were
jointly mingled. The theory of natural rights, intrinsic
and superior to any other rights, however acquired, demo-
cratic government, the basis of the Stats not in authority,
custom or prescription, but in the indivisible and inalien-
able sovereignty of the nation, law as the expression of an
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 17
infallible general will--these and kindred basic ideas were
mainly derived from the French Revolution and the
principles of 1789. The study of English history and the
English Constitution--the development of a kindred
Teutonic race--provided a practical programme:--Limited
State authority, representative institutions, a popular and
statutory suffrage, ministerial responsibility, financial
control of the executive by the representative chamber,
government in accordance with the will of a majority,
free to choose, a system of local self-government linked
with the central government, an unfettered press, an
independent judiciary and statutory guarantees for the
liberty of the individual citizen against executive abuse
of power. The liberal movement exhibited many forms
and combinations from the extreme radicalism of the
theoretical Republicans to the moderate programme of
a limited monarchy of the English type. The move-
ment was strongest in the southern States, which had been
most deeply saturated with French revolutionary thought,
but it was remarkably active also in the Rhenish Provinces,
in Hanover and Weimar, and even in West and East
Prussia, while the universities generally were centres of a
powerful doctrinaire constitutionalism. English political
development since 1832 was influential in shaping the
ideas of the schools of Bunsen, Stockmar, the elder
von Maurer and Gneist, and subsequently of National
Liberalism. Three characteristics in particular are worth
noting: the demand for a larger measure of personal
liberty, secured by law; the importance attached to
fundamental constitutional rights (Grundrechte), general-
ised as principles but defined in a written constitution
which should settle the character of the State; the ideals
of unification through a common law, and common and
uniform constitutional rights. The liberal movement,
whatever its variety or its source, thus linked hands with
the nationalist creed. Both were incomplete unless the
unifying forces they both represented were united tor
common ends in a common organisation. Unity on a
racial basis required unity in the organs and powers of the
State to satisfy scientific theory and practical needs.
B. B
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BISMARCK
Combined they met the argument of the earlier thinkers,
such as Humboldt, that the particularism of Germany was
an essential condition of a manifold cultural development,
free from the obstacles of a rigid uniformity. For in
the national and free polity of the future Rhinelander,
Hanoverian, Prussian, Saxon, Bavarian and Franconian
would develop his particular culture far more advan-
tageously than in the cramped limits and restricted air
of any single German State, however strong and self-
sufficing. The national and sovereign authority of the
unified German State would be the Universal Ordinary,
deliberately permitting local variety and territorial differ-
ences, not incompatible with obedience to the funda-
mental laws of the unified whole.
Another and more potent change had been wrought.
The philosophy of thought and action was ceasing to be
purely speculative and becoming more definitely political,
concentrating on political ends and means, as intrinsically
more important and practical. The earlier conception
of the functions and mission of the German race simply
to be a ' kultur-nation' and organise a ' Kultur-Staat was
steadily superseded by the conception of a mission to be
a political Power vested with the function to organise a
State-polity corresponding to that high purpose: or, more
accurately perhaps, the new conception was superimposed
on the old. The conception of the supreme necessity
and worth of the 'kultur '-nation and State was retained,
but relegated to a secondary place. Deeper analysis and
wider experience did not deny the duty of the German
people to realise this spiritual and intellectual purpose:
they enforced the conclusion that in the world-movement
political power and the State as the supreme expression
of power, right, law and liberty had a higher ethical value,
and must be first realised in order to provide the full
means for the development of spiritual, intellectual and
moral excellence. For Truth, the philosophers em-
phasised, is only fully grasped not independently of, but
through, a progressive realisation. Nationalism and
liberalism effected the transition from the old attitude
to the new, and in a reconciling synthesis would bring
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 19
the activities and aspirations of young Germany on to the
plane of development reached by the great political
Nation-States, France and England.
But in the workaday world there were cruel burrs and
briars, and, as Rosalind said, these were in the heart.
First and foremost were the Federal Constitution and the
Federal Diet. When the young Prince Hohenlohe, a
cultivated Roman Catholic Bavarian noble, in 1847 called
the Diet the bed in which Germany had slumbered for
thirty years, when he noted that travels in the East were
a humiliation for a German, because French, English,
Russians, Austrians, even Turks commanded respect as
members of powerful States, while the German had no
State and no power as such, when he saw the British and
French and Russian flags at sea, national flags symbolising
national power, when, as Treitschke said, the German
sailed the sea like a pirate without a national flag, he only
voiced the inarticulate cry of millions of Germans, con-
scious of what they were accomplishing, but damned to
impotence by the inertia and meanness of thought which
the Diet incarnated. A fierce sense of political degrada-
tion, all the fiercer because it was combined with this
consciousness of power within, and of achievement, had
gripped the new Germany. Great empires and little
minds indeed go ill together. The littleness of the minds
in the Federal Diet exasperated a Germany aware that
the great minds were everywhere except in the councils
of the nation. The astonishing spring and summer of
1848 are only explicable by a passionate conviction that,
whatever took its place, the Federal Diet and all it stood
for must go,- and go for ever. Germans had the right of
other free nations to a share in their own government, to
make a Germany and place her as a State on an equality
with other States: they had a future and a right to deter-
mine it.
Secondly, the national enemy was France. Nothing is
more arresting, alike in the thirty years that followed 1815
and the twenty that followed 1848, than the continuous
revelation of the hatred and fear of France, ceaselessly
simmering below the surface to break out. . with boiling
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BISMARCK
force on the slightest provocation. Hatred and fear com-
bined, shared by all classes, and for reasons frequently
contradictory--hatred of what France had done, fear of
what she certainly would do again.
Stein in 1815 wrote of France as 'the hereditary foe,
the eternal, tireless, destructive enemy,' a sentiment
shared by Blucher, Gneisenau and the Prussians baffled
by Europe in their demand for a humiliating revenge.
But the passions of the War of Liberation, nowhere so strong
as in Prussia, continued to echo in the poetry of Arndt,
Uhland, Uckert, Geibel; and the map which left Alsace
French vibrated with a perpetual challenge. In the inter-
national crisis of 1840 Germany was on the verge of war:
three songs, Becker's 'Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den
freien Deutschen Rhein,' Hoffmann von Fallersleben's even
more famous' Deutschland, Deutschland iiber Alles,' and
Schneckenburger's' Die Wacht am Rhein,' passed at once
into the national literature of the barracks, the schoolroom
and the hearth. In 1842 the commencement of the com-
pletion of Cologne Cathedral was made a great demon-
stration against France. Political thought was no less
anti-French. Haller, whose Restoration of Political
Science was for a generation the Bible of orthodox conser-
vatism, and who restated much of the authoritarian argu-
ment of French ultramontanes, such as J. de Maistre and
Bonald, traced to French Jacobinism and French scepticism
most of the sins and all the ills from which Europe suffered:
Stahl, the brilliant Jew, who continued Haller's work and
whose writings provided a philosophical basis for the
romantic and pietistic conservatism of the Gerlach Circle,
the Brandenburg Political Weekly, and the Camarilla of
Frederick William iv. , was no less denunciatory of French
principles. Indeed, to Conservatives of all schools France
was the mother of every social and political heresy, the
architect of soul-destroying revolution. Even in the
south-west the Liberals and Radicals repudiated their
debt to French thought; and Heine, whose Buch der
Lieder had set all Germany singing through its tears "and
had inspired the marrying of immortal verse to immortal
music, was held to have succumbed to the witchery of the
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 21
Gallic spirit, and lost his influence when he deserted
Hamburg for Paris.
Germany, brooding over its wrongs, political, civic and
racial, found in the rising forces of nationalism, so subtly
fostered by Teutonic erudition, a fresh justification for
the anti-French sentiment inherited from 1815. The
glorification of Teutonic achievement involved that
belittling of all other achievements, which is an indict-
ment framed in self-flattery. History, whether ancient,
mediaeval or modern, recorded for German readers an in-
exhaustible catalogue of the wrongs done to Germany by
alien, jealous and, in reality, inferior races- and States.
France was the chief author and inspirer of these crimes
against Teutonic nationalism, and so there grew up'Jn the
heart of the German people the conviction, panoplied
in the armoury of science, that, from the Treaty of Verdun
in 843, which shattered the Carolingian Empire, to the
wars and treaties of Napoleon, France and the French
race were responsible for German disintegration and
impotence: that until the robberies had been won back
and the crimes expiated, Germany could not live in peace
or enjoy her legitimate and God-given development.
Even the most gracious qualities of the French mind were
made items in the accusation: her literature, her philo-
sophy and her art savoured of the diabolical. Already,
thirty years before Sedan, a France frivolous, sensual,
immoral, vain, sciolist, bloodthirsty and insincere, was
contrasted with a Germany sober, profound, industrious,
scientific, pious and peaceful, the guardian of the morals
of the family and the hearth. The ever-growing demand
for the extirpation of the 'Walsch' element in German
thought, literature, the sciences and arts, rested on an
exposure of the Latin races, and above all of France. Let
two examples suffice: Mommsen's Roman History with its
passionate and ill-concealed sub-current of contempt for
Latin weaknesses, and Sybel's History of the French Revolu-
tion, which put the French nation in the dock of the
Weltgericht. Sybel was an ardent Liberal, and Mommsen
/vas expelled in 1850 from his chair at Leipzig for his share
in the Revolution of 1848. If such was the green tree of
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BISMARCK
academic science, what did not issue from the dry wood of
journalists, pamphleteers and beer-garden politicians?
The general hatred and fear of France was a strong
sentimental force indirectly making for German unity.
As a practical element in the German problem *t was
weakened by one momentous consideration. Previously
and subsequent to 1848--when the simultaneous revolution
in Paris, Berlin and Vienna created a unique situation in
which France and Austria were helpless, a situation which
alone made the Parliament of Frankfurt possible--a
drastic revision of the Federal Constitution involved a
general reopening of the whole Settlement of 1815, Which
was as galling to French as to German nationalism.
In the chancelleries of Europe, and most strongly at
Vienna, the mere prospect created consternation. The
Belgian question in 1831 had been localised and settled
with extreme difficulty by Palmerston's dexterity and
finesse, but Europe had been in measurable distance of a
tremendous war. The avowed object of a general re-
vision of the Federal Act was to make Germany stronger
and more united: to prepare for a final and complete
unification. That this could be carried through without
reopening the question of the Rhine,'the natural frontiers'
of France, and the irreconcilable aspirations of Germany,
was impossible. Belgium in 1839 nac* ^een placed under
international guarantees. French expansion, blocked to
the north-east, could only find its outlet in (German)
Luxemburg and the Rhenish Provinces on the west bank
of ' the free German Rhine. ' One conclusion was certain.
If Germany were strengthened, France would demand
'compensation'; and a completion of German unity
without compensation to France spelled the decisive defeat
of French ambitions and the definite elevation of Ger-
many to a superior position. That France would accept
such a defeat without war was unthinkable.
German particularism was, however, the obstacle to
unification which contemporary opinion both inside "and
outside Germany probably regarded as the most formid-
able and insoluble. That particularism was a singular
blend of facts. ideals and sentiments, which can be dis-
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 23
entangled but make a combination elusive and exceedingly
difficult to measure. Already there was a legendary
view of its origin. The German mind had persuaded
itself that the 'Zersplitterung. Deutschland's' was a
comparatively modern fact, and that the mediaeval and
Reformation epoch had known a united and imperial
Germany. The conviction was an erroneous conclusion
from misinterpreted historical premises. And the in-
juriae temporum of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies were injuries largely inflicted on Germany by the
Germans themselves, and due to the irreconcilable racial
and religious and social divisions of the old Reich and
the Germans who composed it.
Particularism, in short, was a historical product and had
the deepest roots in the stubborn characteristics of the
German mind, which were its cause and effect. The re-
duction of the 360 principalities which made the map of
1789 to the 39 of the Federal Constitution, had strength-
ened rather than weakened the provincial territorialism
which nourished a provincial patriotism; for the absorption
of the pettier, and the secularisation of the ecclesiastical,
principalities by the larger had enormously stimulated
the ambitions and jealousies of States such as Bavaria,
Wiirttemberg, the Hesses, Nassau and Hanover, while the
partition of Saxony was a menace which made the suivivors
in 1815 cling with the tenacity born of fear to their
sovereignty and independence. Particularism was not
confined to the south. The passions or prejudices it re-
presented were as strong at Herrenhausen, Cassel or
Dresden as at Munich, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. It
centred in dynasticism and the princely houses.
Bismarck in a famous chapter of his Reminiscences--a
chapter eulogised by distinguished German historians--
emphasised the existence and claims of these separate
dynastic lines, each with a long history and traditions
behind it, as one of the most stubborn forces for statesman-
ship to reckon with, and his argument is endorsed by the
whole of German history before and after 1815.
German dynasticism was solemnly re-baptized at the
font of legitimism in 1815, with the result that outside
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? BISMARCK
Germany (as well as within) the maintenance of monar-
chical or princely rule was bound up with the principles
of legitimate authority and recognised as providing a
common basis for political conservatism in all countries
and a barrier against revolution. The maintenance of
even a petty German sovereign in his ' rights' appealed
alike to the autocrat of all the Russias, the Pontiff of the
Vatican, a Bourbon at Naples, and the constitutional
sovereign of Great Britain, whose consort came from
Coburg. But this dynastic particularism was the outcome
and expression of deep-laid racial, cultural and economic
differences. Prussian, Hanoverian, Westphalian, Saxon,
Rhinelander, Franconian, Suabian, represented German
types, the differentiation of whose original features had
been heightened and deepened by the physical configura-
tion of the German lands they lived in, internecine
struggles, prolonged political rivalry and opposed economic
needs and claims. The conception of sovereignty ratified
in 1815, absolutely fatal either to a unitary or a truly
federal Germany, implied the divine right of a Saxon or a
Bavarian government to misgovern as against the ille-
gitimate claim to be governed well by a ' foreign ' though
a German authority, and this principle was endorsed by
the. misgoverned.
The greater development of liberalism in the south-
west than in any other region sharpened the resentment
and stiffened the determination of more conservative states
and rulers to resist the moral penetration of their territory
by ideas made in Wiirttemberg or Baden.
In the south-west and centre the memories of the
Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine were stronger
than of the War of Liberation f although ideas in origin
French did not really imply any desire for the restoration
of French political domination. Prince Hohenlohe main-
tained that the undefiled fount of Germanism and of the
present German race lay in Suabia and Franconia; he
always asserted that 'the true home of the idea of uni-
fication' was in the south-west; and it was a common
criticism in the south that the best brains of Prussia had
been recruited from non-Prussian territories: Struve,
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 25
a strong republican and earnest political thinker, pro-
phesied in 1847 that Prussia would, and must, disappear
when Germany awaked to a new life. Particularism had
a strong anti-Prussian side. If at Berlin the southern
States were despised as mechanistic creations of Napoleonic
policy, Prussia so radically different in type, structure and
character from every other German State was criticised
as un-German, artificial--the absolutist, militarist and
bureaucratic polity in its most unattractive and dangerous
form. Prussian power was a formidable reality; her
absorbing capacity and appetite so plainly demonstrable;
and her rulers, her administrators and her people were so
occupied with justifying and proclaiming their merits and
services to Germany that they forgot modesty, tact and
sympathy. To the inefficient efficiency always makes an
uncomfortable partner, and Prussian efficiency was heavily
framed with an assertive Prussian egoism. The evolution-
ary beatitude--Blessed are the strong for they shall prey
upon the weak--was a perpetual reminder to Prussia's
neighbours that unless Naboth had powerful and dis-
interested friends his fate would be the fate of Silesia in
1740, of the Rhinelands and Saxony in 1815. There was
only one Ahab--but there were so many Naboths whose
vineyards marched with the black and white posts of the
Prussian frontier.
Within the charmed circle of the Bund such a friend
was to be found at Vienna alone. Clear-sighted thinkers
at Stuttgart, Munich, or Karlsruhe recognised that
Austrian policy was probably no less selfish than that
of other States, and that Austrian growth was one long
and historic appropriation clause; but in the hands of
Metternich the egoism, mendacity, intrigues and du-
plicity of Austrian diplomacy lost through a high-bred
courtesy and tact half their grossness. The King of
Saxony remembered that Metternich had resisted the
absorption of his kingdom and saved one half of it for its
lawful owner; Bavaria, Wiirttemberg and Baden that their
sovereignty and territorial integrity were dear to the
Austrian heart. The Foreign Office in the Ball-Platz at
Vienna was a cave of Adullam, the doors of which were
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BISMARCK
always open to all legitimate German princes in distress
from Jacobin professors, university students afflicted by
the modern disease of reading and thinking, journalists
demanding that the press should be free, and politicians
deranged enough to regard a vote as a passport to the
millennium--above all to German princes in distress from
Prussian designs.
For Austria itself--if we could forget Prussia--epitom-
ised most of the elements in the German problem. Only
half the Austrian Empire was included in the Bund, and
that not wholly a German half, for Bohemia, Carinthia and
Carniola were not pure German, while Hungary, Galicia,
Dalmatia and the Italian provinces were excluded. The
Federal Constitution was largely her creation; its main-
tenance on rigidly conservative lines had been one of the
chief objects of Metternich's policy, and the collapse
of the Federal Diet followed automatically when Austria
herself collapsed in the spring of 1848. Metternich's
copious Memoirs have drawn for posterity a full-dress
portrait of a good man consistently struggling with ad-
versity--a record of repeated success due to the victory
of high political principles over the forces of evil--of
failure inexplicably caused by the charlatanry of quacks
(such as Canning) masquerading as statesmen. Austrian
policy in Germany was indeed a subtle mixture of dynastic
pride, historic traditions, international and European
ambitionsj reactionary political principles and unquench-
able Austrian appetites. The unique character of the
Austrian Empire, coupled with the inflexible refusal of the
Habsburg House either to be cajoled by success or driven
by defeat from its determination to make a State out of
a European dynasty, necessitated a unique policy. The
territorial composition of the Empire, the product of a
long evolution, and the medley of races united only by
allegiance to a common sovereign which made the Austria
of 1815, brought it into the closest contact with all the
Powers and all the intellectual and political forces of
Europe. German, Italian, Pole, Czech, Little Russian,
Magyar, Rouman, Croat and Serb were combined and had
always been combined--and there is a world of significance
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 27
in the ' always'--ever since there had been an ' Austria. '
Metternich shared none of the ' delusions' of these races:
an Italian or a German who obeyed his Imperial Master
was a good Austrian: a bad Austrian was the Italian,
Slav or German who opposed the Imperial will. Obedi-
ence, not race, was the criterion of citizenship. All the
new ideas from 1789 onwards Metternich regarded as
dangerous nonsense and frauds on a gullible European
public. It was the duty of statesmanship to expose the
fraud and extirpate the poison.
But in the psychology
of Metternich's statecraft it is difficult to decide whether
Jacobinism and liberalism were bad because they threat-
ened to destroy the historic Austria, or were destructive
of Austrian interests because they were intrinsically im-
moral. A professed realist in politics with his eye on the
object--before Realpolitik was the fashionable gospel of
representative assemblies--Metternich founded his policy
on the most incontrovertible of all realities--reason of
State--the reason peculiar to the peculiar Austrian State.
The interests of Europe were assumed to be identical with
the interests of the historic Austria. Germany was like
Italy, a geographical expression, a political distribution
of States with conflicting interests, and an Austrian hege-
mony over which was the form of political rule most
convenient to Europe, if exercised in accordance with
sound principles of conservatism, legitimism, and the
balance of European power.
Accordingly the Federal Constitution and the Diet were
admirably devised to achieve all these ends. They recog-
nised the House of Habsburg in Austria as the heir to the
defunct Holy Roman Empire; they maintained under
European sanctions the separate sovereignty and terri-
torial independence of the German States; they provided
an effective barrier to the west against France and to the
east against Russia, but without injuring them as great
Powers in the State system of Europe; and last and not
least, they assigned an adequate but secondary r61e to
Prussia which shelved her illegitimate claims to equal
place with Austria in the management of Germany.
But if Austria had the hegemony, she did not demand
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BISMARCK
the institutions automatically working to impose an
Austrian will on Germany. Jealous for her own, she was
no less jealous for the rights of others. In the Diet,
Austria, by herself, was in a hopeless minority. She could
only work through and by the other members of the
confederation. True, she had a veto on changes in the
fundamental laws, but so had the pettiest of the federated
members. Metternich, in short, relied on diplomacy, un-
swerving in its aim and unfettered by any scruples as to
methods. His triumph over the German governments
was complete enough to satisfy his exorbitant vanity.
Most of his predecessors at Vienna had been able to hypno-
tise the electors, grand-dukes, landgraves and margraves,
even when they became kings; but Metternich achieved
what no Austrian statesman, neither Kaunitz, nor Thugut,
nor Cobenzl, nor Stadion had achieved--he hypnotised
Prussia. That accomplished, the task of imposing an
Austrian policy on Germany was easy, and Metternich
wisely remained content with the fact. Prussia was
soothingly held up as a model of statesmanlike fidelity
to correct principles. The hypnotisation of the subjects
of the hypnotised governments could safely be left to the
police, the censors of the press, the controlled universities
and the schools. The revolutionary storm swept Metter-
nich away, but not the ambition he represented. Metter-
nich's successors strove faithfully to repeat his magic in-
cantation; they even threatened with the magician's rod;
but the will in Prussia to be hypnotised had been exorcised.
Metternichism collapsed at KQniggratz under the blows
of a Prussia which had deserted ' correct principles' and
returned to the immoral (Prussian) reason of State taught
by Frederick the Great. In the new situation created in
1867 the parts were reversed. Henceforward Prussia was
the hypnotiser, Austria the hypnotised. How this hap-
pened makes the apiarela of Bismarck.
It was certain that as long as Austria was the Austria of
1815 and a great Power in Europe, no change could take
place in the Federal Constitution without her consent, and
that she would not permit changes which either challenged
her presidential supremacy in Germany, or substantially
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 29
altered the balance of power within the Diet, or intro-
duced principles of government into the Germany of the
federation which would detrimentally affect the ad-
ministration of Austrian territories not included within
the jurisdiction of the Diet. In the delicately equipoised
system of checks and counter-checks, cogged into the
central dynastic wheel, by which German, Italian, Slav
and Magyar lands were set off against each other, the
introduction into her German territories of representative
institutions or democratic autonomy would create a
demand for similar concessions in Hungary, Galicia and
Lombardy; the concession to Germany of rights derived
from the sovereign principles of nationalism involved the
admission that Habsburg rule in Italy or Galicia was a
violation of autonomy based on nationalism. Tested by
a racial nationalism the Habsburg was an alien in three-
fourths of his Empire. His rule could only be nationalised
by identifying the Crown with one race and by oppressing
three-fourths of his subjects in the interests of a single
group. Austrian opposition, therefore, to nationalism
and all its consequences was irreconcilable; it justified
itself by a flat denial of the premises and conclusions of the
nationalist creed and was compelled, if challenged, to sup-
press nationalism by force within the Austrian dominions
and to resist its further recognition in the State system of
Europe. The peculiar constitution and position of Austria
confronted German Nationalists with an insoluble dilemma:
the formation of a nationalist State of Great Germany
(Gross-Deutschland) which would bring the whole of the
Austrian dominions into a reorganised Bund, on the
creation of a unitary and small Germany (Klein-Deutsch-
land) from which Austria was excluded. The former
solution violated the logic and sentiment of nationalism
by the introduction of large blocks of non-German races
into a German State; the latter sacrificed the sacred
rights of the Germans of Tyrol and Austria proper to
non-German and anti-German forces. It was no dilemma
to the Habsburgs, for they denied the legitimacy of the
demand, no less than they resisted either of the solutions
suggested. Austrian interest prohibited the inclusion
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BISMARCK
of the whole of the Austrian Empire within the jurisdiction
of the federation, and Austrian interest and Habsburg
pride peremptorily forbade the exclusion of German
Austria from a German federation, however organised;
and the interests of Austria were held to be the interests
of Europe. Austrian policy, therefore, was a defensive
maintenance of the status quo in perpetuity. Against the
champions of every creed which demanded a revision of the
system of 1815, Austria stood forward as the Geist des stets
verneint;1 and she entrenched her immutable negation
in an organisation of cosmopolitan conservatism with
common principles of universal validity registered in the
public law and treaties of Europe.
In politics, time is not, as in war, on the side of a well-
organised defensive, and increasingly is against it when
the defensive is badly organised. The cynical advice of
Prince Eugene to Charles v1. that the best guarantee of
the Pragmatic Sanction was not the public pledges of the
European States, but a well-drilled army and a well-filled
treasury might have been remembered with profit by
Metternich. The claims of nationalism and liberalism,
if pressed, could not be stemmed by Carlsba'd decrees,
by ubiquitous police and obscurantist censors. Metter-
nich's ignorance and neglect of finance was equalled by his
ignorance and neglect of military science and adminis-
tration. His blindness to the significance of a Zollverein
under Prussian presidency was significant. Metternich's
ignorant vanity prevented him from seeing the increasing
importance of economic development, that in a policy
of interests the economic may be the decisive consideration,
that Prussia had stolen many marches on Vienna, and that
in the near future the Austrianised middle and petty
States would be driven to side with a Prussia they disliked
rather than with an Austria they liked; in a word, that
the Zollverein had placed Prussia at the head of an
1 Beust in his Memoirs telfs us (i. 283): 'For years the German courts were
trained by Vienna and Berlin ift the fear of God and of the Czar Nicholas'; and
again (i. 363): 'I well remember what in the early days of my diplomatic
service was the bugbear of Metternich's policy. In conversation every one
feared to express a liberal opinion, as it might be reported at Vienna and ruin
the speaker's future career. '
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 31
organisation which set the dualism between Austria and
Germany in sharp relief. Within ten years of his ex-
pulsion from power the Austrian treasury was bankrupt,
a Russian army had been required to suppress revolution
in Hungary, and the shadows of Magenta and Solferino
were lengthening out to the crowning doom of Sadowa.
The Metternich system pointed a plain moral: conser-
vatism and legitimism were identical with inefficiency.
Austrian supremacy in Germany rested on an identity
of interest with the princes and the power of their
governments. Of the deeper forces, running each year
with a swifter current beneath the tessellated bed of the
Diet, Metternich knew little and cared less. Of political
thinkers he had a poor opinion and a poorer knowledge.
They might be useful as the drudges and typists of the
high diplomacy, hereditary in a hereditary aristocracy.
At best, Gentz and Haller were intellectual flies on the
great wheels of statecraft. Metternich was as incapable
of appreciating a Humboldt, a Hegel, a Ranke, a Giese-
brecht, a Grimm or a Pertz as he was of appreciating
Gioberti, Mazzini or Manzoni. Hence, he never saw the
increasing peril that beset the Austrian defensive in the
manifold intellectual renaissance of Germany outside
Austria, nor the combination of moral fibre and racial
passion which that prolonged intellectual preparation
was stamping on the German nation. 'They tell me,'
said Napoleon,' we have no literature. I must speak to the
Minister of the Interior about it. ' Literature, other
than the belles-lettres of high-bred salons, was for Metter-
nich an affair of the Minister of Education, working with
a copious Index Expurgatorius. Universities, professors,
pamphleteers, a public which read and thought--ideas as
the forces which can make and unmake States and policies
--scientific knowledge (Wissenschaft) providing the criteria
and ends of political activity--these made the malady
of the time,. a time singularly out of joint. That Austria
had lost the intellectual and moral sympathy of the
Germany which worked outside the palaces and the
bureaux of the princelets, and that Austrian apathy was
daily digging a chasm between the governments and their
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BISMARCK
subjects, Metternich did not grasp until the roar of the
Viennese crowd shook the windows of his palace and sent
him panic-stricken into exile. The ideal of Germany as
a 'kultur '-nation he interpreted as many who had read
Madame de Stael's De VAllemagne and nothing else per-
sisted in interpreting it till 1914--a nation blameless,
bourgeois, pedantic and unpolitical--mainly composed
of spectacled professors, philosophers as nebulous as the
smoke of their tobacco, long-haired musicians and univer-
sity students singing the ' Wacht am Rhein' because the
Rhine wine and flaxen-haired Gretchens had got into their
sentimental heads--that old Germany on which Heine
could lay the whip-cord of his affection because he knew
that it no longer, and probably never had, existed. But
to the new Germany the conception of a unified Teutonic
'kultur '-nation meant remorseless struggles for a presi-
dential place in the Areopagus of civilisation, and its
realisation was the pre-condition of a unified Machtstaat
and a unifying Machtpolitik--the State and the policy
that were German power.
Young Germany by 1840 was asking, ' What has Austria
done for our German civilisation; and what is she doing
now to-day? What is Austria contributing to our German
literature, our ideas, our knowledge, our political philo-
sophy? What is the share of the University of Vienna
in the intellectual life of Germany, compared with that
of Berlin, Bonn, Heidelberg, Gottingen, Munich and
Tubingen? ' Vienna, indeed, could point to the drama-
tists Grillparzer and Benedix, Weber and a home for
Beethoven (who was not an Austrian), the waltzes of the
elder Strauss and Giingl, and the waning reputation
of the Medical School. There was a splendid renascence
in Bohemia and Hungary, but it was national, anti-Aus-
trian and anti-German. Austria, in the eyes of many in
Germany, contributed nothing of real weight to the serious
criticism of life, nothing that guided through the darkness
to the splendour of the dawn, breaking red on the horizon.
In the majestic march of the German mind to conquest,
Austria lagged with the vivandieres and the camp-sutlers.
Her institutions were obsolete; her policy and ideas
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 33
threadbare and poverty-stricken. Rancid reaction and
ultramontanism were a sinister background to the new
life of high endeavour, and not to be exorcised by a per-
petual invitation to dance through a summer of roses and
wine.
The national and liberal movements craved a leader
and leadership. But past history and present realities
proclaimed that the leader was not to be found at Vienna
and in the House of Habsburg. A liberal Austria was as
unthinkable and as impossible as a liberal Pope. Goethe's
notable description of his youth, which all Germany read
in the autobiography, Wahrheit und Dichtung, that seemed
to sum up the spiritual experience and antinomies of the
German mind, ' Fritzisch nicht Preussisch gesinnt' (' In
sympathy with Frederick but not with Prussia '), turned
many ardent hearts wistfully to the bleak north. Might
it not be written in the scroll of German destiny that the
mantle of the great Frederick would fall on another and
a greater Hohenzollern?
No German State in the confederation had, since 1789,
suffered more varied vicissitudes, had sunk lower or re-
covered more rapidly than Prussia. The Settlement of
1815 restored the Prussian kingdom to the full measure of
strength enjoyed in 1805, but with a significantly different
geographical configuration. Prussia surrendered much
of the Polish territory acquired in the Second and Third
Partitions, and in compensation received a part of royal
Saxony and rich provinces in the west, which made her
the guardian of the Rhine from Diisseldorf to the suburbs
of Jewish and free Frankfurt. Yet her territories were not
compact, for between the new Rhenish Prussia and the
original nucleus of the Brandenburg Electorate in the Elbe
basin lay Hanover and the Westphalian States, while East
and West Prussia with Silesia made two huge salients
with Poland in the re-entrant of the one and royal
Saxony and (Austrian) Bohemia in the re-entrant of the
other. Prussian patriots regarded the Settlement as an
insult. They had desired to eliminate the Polish and
Catholic elements of the Province of Posen, to- absorb the
whole of Saxony, and (with customary Prussian ' modera-
te c
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BISMARCK
tion ') to reduce their' compensation ' in the west in return
for a consolidation in the centre. Prussia was to be a pure
German State, predominantly Protestant, while the black
and white flag and the double eagle would fly on an un-
broken Prussian kingdom from Coblenz to Konigsberg,
enveloping the north and making Hanover an enclave in
Prussian soil. The ambition was frustrated, but it re-
mained an inextinguishable ideal in baffled Prussian
hearts.
For all that, Prussia was unquestionably the strongest
German State in the federation. And the consequences
of the Settlement operated at once on Prussian policy.
Much of the new acquisitions had never been Prussian,
and their assimilation into the Hohenzollern system was
essential; no easy matter, for the Protestant Saxons
resented the enforced separation from their former State;
on the Rhine a Catholic population with long-established
memories of the sovereign ecclesiastical princes of Cologne,
Miinster and Paderborn, and saturated by French
thought and administration since 1795, resisted the supre-
macy of a sovereign civil state and the categorical
imperatives of the Prussian bureaucracy; in Posen the
aspirations of Catholic and Slav Poles were wholly with
their brothers across the highly artificial frontier that
divided a dismembered Poland from Prussia. And in
Brandenburg and Prussian Pomerania Junkertum retained
its grip on the government.
The next twenty-five years were a bitter disappoint-
ment to the dreams of the men of 1813. The ideal of
Gneisenau and Boyen, bred in the school of Stein, that
Prussia would establish a pre-eminence in Germany on' the
triple supremacy of her army, her science, and her consti-
tution,' withered under the blight of a reactionary sove-
reign. The royal pledge to complete the reforms of Stein
and Scharnhorst by the grant of liberal self-government,
with its apex in a central representative parliament which
would unite the whole nation in co-operation with the
Crown, was deliberately broken. Prussia was re-
modelled into eight administrative provinces and governed
by the central and reorganised executive, a bureaucracy,
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 35
decentralised local estates, and provincial diets so re-
organised as to make the land-owning aristocracy supreme.
Law was a royal ordinance; local, much less national,
control over taxation and expenditure did not exist; the
ministers and civil service were responsible to none but
their royal master; the patrimonial manorial jurisdiction
and administration of Junkertum in Brandenburg, Pome-
rania, and East Prussia, were practically untouched. Prus-
sian unity, in short, was refashioned after 1815 on the lines
of the military and feudal tradition, pieced together from
the days of the Great Elector to the fatal day of Jena.
The monarchy re-established its authority on the rocher
de bronze--the prerogative; the bureaucracy was its
executive instrument; the army and the administration
were staffed and controlled by the noble caste, and the
memorable law of 1814 completing the reforms of Scharn-
horst, which made service in the army compulsory for all
Prussian males, stamped on civil allegiance the inefface-
able imprint of military obedience to the supreme War-
Lord (Kriegesherr), Lord of the Land (Landesherr), and
the Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian nation in arms.
The world outside promptly decided that the new
Prussia was simply the old Frederician State writ large.
Superficially, this was true. But the new Prussia con-
tained elements unknown to the Prussia of the eighteenth
century, and these were developed even under the reaction
of Frederick William in. Education, primary, secondary,
and of the university type, was strenuously reorganised,
and primary education was made as compulsory as military
service. The Prussian universities--Berlin, K6nigsberg,
Breslau, Halle, Bonn--were in the forefront of the in-
tellectual renaissance; and by 1848 a professorial chair
at Berlin was the recognised blue-ribbon of the academic
career. Seldom, indeed, has a university had so much
eminence in its professorial staff in so many departments
of knowledge as that in the Prussian capital. The civil
administration, despised by many of the Junkers, became
extraordinarily efficient, and like the army it was carefully
graded: the men at the top had passed by a severe
apprenticeship through each stage in the official hierarchy.
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BISMARCK
They were experts, trained in obedience, and habituated
to find their initiative in the higher command. The
economic life was taken in hand. The Zollverein or
Customs Union begun in 1819, in order to solve the
difficulties of trade peculiar to a State with foreign en-
claves that broke the Prussian frontier at countless points,
had under Maassen's masterly management included most
of Germany, outside Austria, by direct absorption or by
tariff treaties with similar economic unions. Maassen
was a follower of Adam Smith, and the tariff was low and
simple, avowedly anti-Protectionist and on Free Trade
lines. The economic advance was remarkable, thanks to
sound economic science, the stability of the government,
and the efficiency of the administration. If the new
Prussia was in type autocratic, militarist, and bureaucratic
--a kingdom governed by its Crown and aristocratic
caste--its intellectual and economic activities made its
social structure and political outlook a wholly different
state to the Prussia of Frederick the Great. Between
the governing nobility and the agricultural and industrial
proletariat had grown up a solid middle class, prosperous,
highly educated, very capable, versed in history, steeped
in political ideas, who knew that their brains were indis-
pensable to their country's increasing strength and
mounting ambitions, and who resented their exclusion
from an active share, not in executive tasks, but in shaping
the policy and destinies of Prussia. If they served in the
army, worked in the universities and industries, and paid
more than half the taxation, they had an indefeasible right
to the highest and most responsible duties of citizenship
--a share in the government.
Thirty years of German and European evolution had
reopened not solved the Prussian problem created by
her history and the Settlement of 1815; and the diffi-
culties shelved then and since remained unanswered.
When Frederick William in. was succeeded in 1840 by
Frederick William iv. , men felt that the dead could bury
their dead, but that a new and critical epoch for the living
was at hand. Would Prussia now obtain a constitution
that would satisfy the Liberal party in Prussia? Would
il II I
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 37
Prussian 'foreign' policy satisfy Prussian and German
nationalism?
The cleavage in the various parties and schools of ideas
--the reaction of the internal on the external problem--
made a most complex situation. Tradition, social environ-
ment, class bias, and the infiltration of new categories
of thought operated with varying strength on varying
groups. Prussia since 1815 had been brought into direct
touch with Germany at many new points, and the contact
tore gaps in the old tradition. Her political frontiers
vanished in the sphere of knowledge. Her universities were
recruited from the south and centre of Germany; her own
students went to Gottingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Munich
and Tubingen.