The doctrine of
political salvation by fidelity to racial unity--the creed of
the Nationalists--had its complement in the doctrine of
salvation through political rights and personal freedom--
the creed of the Liberals.
political salvation by fidelity to racial unity--the creed of
the Nationalists--had its complement in the doctrine of
salvation through political rights and personal freedom--
the creed of the Liberals.
Robertson - Bismarck
6
BISMARCK
organised control of a foreign sovereign and placed its
military and economic resources at the disposal of a foreign
dictator. Hence, in the new confederation the Member-
States were forbidden to make war on each other, to con-
clude separate alliances with foreign Powers, while their
membership was conditioned by mutual guarantees of the
several territorial possessions included in the Union.
The Federal Act and the Federal Constitution implied
the existence of a common German interest, and the duty
of Germany organised in the League of Thirty-Nine
States to promote and defend it. It was not only a
German but a European duty. The interest of Europe
required the organisation of the German States for
certain common purposes; the settlement arrived at in
a European congress recognised the interest of Europe in
providing the organisation and maintaining it.
There has always been a German problem. There
always will be. In 1815 the heart of the matter is reached
by two questions: How far did the new confederation
meet the requirements of Germany and of Europe?
What provision, if any, was made for adaptation to future
and unforeseen needs or demands, either specifically German
or more generally European?
It is easy to pile up a formidable indictment against the
German work of the Congress of Vienna, particularly from
the relentless criticism of a later generation, which reckons
the Settlement of 1815 as one of the injuriae temporum
inflicted by heartless diplomatists and malevolent European
Powers on a hapless and helpless Germany--and to show
that it had every imaginable defect.
It is not difficult to prove that the Settlement was a
galling disappointment to ardent Nationalists so different
as Stein, Humboldt and Arndt, and a cause of rage to
fierce Prussian Particularists such as Blucher. All these
things and much else--are they not written in the
chronicles of great and small German historians? It is more
relevant to the purpose in hand to analyse than to indict.
The Federal Diet, whether in the ordinary session of
seventeen delegates, or in the plenum of sixty-nine repre-
sentatives in which every sovereign State was represented,
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 7
was the one effective federal institution. The Diet was
not a parliament but a congress of diplomatic represen-
tatives whose votes as defined by the mandates of their
governments alone could alter the fundamental laws. It
was presided over by the Austrian representative, who
had a casting vote. Austria, therefore, was recognised
as the head of the confederation.
We must further note that: (1) There was no federal
executive to execute the Diet's decrees, a duty which fell
on each Member-State; (2) no federal military force existed
except on paper, and all efforts, notably by Prussia after
1815, to make a federal army a reality, broke down, not
only in detail but in principle: for the question of the
supreme command raised the insoluble dualism of Austria
and Prussia; (3) no alteration in fundamental laws, or-
ganic institutions, individual rights or religious affairs,
could be made except by a unanimous vote, i. e. a liberum
veto to block change was vested in every State, however
petty; (4) the governments of the States were alone
represented- and the governments meant the ruling
dynasties. The German people were not directly repre-
sented, nor, unless they could influence the several govern-
ments, had they any voice in federal decisions and policy.
The complete failure of the Federal Diet to realise even
the most modest aspirations of nascent German national-
ism and a growing liberalism, was due as much to the
policy of the German governments as to the inherent
defects of the constitution. Had those governments been
ready to utilise the powers provided in the Federal Act,
the thirty years between 1815 and the Revolution of 1848
might have witnessed a progressive series of moderate
reforms, which would probably have averted that revo-
lution with all its disastrous consequences. In their
anxiety to avert revolution, the governments of Germany
after 1815 stored up the forces which made revolution
inevitable. The Diet fell under the control of Austria,
which meant under the control of Metternich. It came
to be a machine for either doing nothing or dutifully
registering the decree of a reactionary system, based on a
particular interpretation of German, Austrian and Faro-
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? 8
BISMARCK
pean interests. The suspension or mutilation of liberal
constitutions in the German States, the denial of a free
press, the interference with individual liberty and with
the freedom of thought and teaching in the universities,
the hostility to all change as necessarily democratic and
revolutionary, have damned the Diet with a double dose
of the original sin of Metternich himself. But Metter-
nich, who imposed this policy on a willing Emperor and
a despotically governed Austria, could not have imposed
it on the Federal Diet without the ready complicity of
the German governments.
The Federal Constitution did not make those govern-
ments what they were; but it provided them with an
effective machinery for carrying out a reactionary, centri-
fugal and particularist policy. Popular representation and
control were on principle excluded. But had the Federal
Act set up a truly Federal Parliament and a truly Federal
Ministry, it is practically certain that the quarrels between
1815 and 1848 would have been continuous and irrecon-
cilable. So deep was the antagonism between the prin-
ciples of the dynasties and the popular conception of
government, so profound the economic and constitutional
differences between the several States, so keen the jealousies
and fears of the dynasties--so disunited were the nationalist
or popular parties in political principles and ends--that
Germany would have been rent by secessions or plunged
into a civil war from which France, Russia and Great
Britain could not have held aloof.
Federalism, as a system of political organisation, it must
be remembered, and as a political solution for the ad-
ministrative difficulties of modern States, was in 1815
in its infancy; Europe in 1815 had neither thought out
the theory and principles, nor acquired the political ex-
perience required for its successful establishment. The
literature and experience of 1917 are relatively rich in
both respects; but even in 1917 there are obvious gaps
which the political life of the United States, of the
modern German Empire, of the Dominions of Canada
and Australia, and the Swiss Republic do not auto-
matically fill. And the Germany of 1815 was not only
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 9
and necessarily poor in the philosophy, literature and
experience of federalism: it had but recently revived its
education in political philosophy and speculation. The
new Germany was henceforward asking with increasing
earnestness and thoroughness fundamental questions:
What under modern conditions is a State? What is its
basis? What are its rights? Whence does it derive
its authority, and over whom, and to what extent?
What are the relations of a State with other States? What
are the laws or principles of the evolution of States?
What is nationality? What are the respective values of
States based on civilisation (Kulturstaat), States based on
political or governmental unity (Etnhtitsstaat), States based
on nationality (Nationalstaat)? What is the ethical and
political import of citizenship based on cosmopolitan
ideals (Weltburgertum) as opposed to citizenship con-
ditioned and restricted by the claims of race, the terri-
torial State and the individual as such? Hard questions,
indeed, the answering of which might well tax the best
brains and the ripest political experience of Germany for
two generations to come.
The worst defect of the Federal Constitution was not
its failure to realise conceptions of German unity, im-
mature and limited by the exceptional experience of the'
Napoleonic and Revolutionary era, nor its curtailment
of freedom of thought and political liberty, but its com-
plete failure to provide a sobering and stimulating political
education for the educated middle class of a loosely
united German nation. The Germany of 1815 had
passed through an abnormal ordeal since 1789. But the
men of 1848, intellectually able, of a high sincerity and
purpose, fired by an inspiring idealism without which no
nation has ever achieved what endures, were as fettered
by political inexperience as were the men who made the
French Revolution. They had not learned what govern-
ment demands, because all means for learning the lesson
had been denied them, both on principle and as a fact.
The Germany which produced scholars such as Savigny,
Boeckh, Lachmann, Bopp, the two Schlegels, the two
Humboldts, the brothers Grimm, and Gesenius; in science,
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? 10
BISMARCK
Ritter, von Baer, Gauss, Oersted, Liebig, Virchow and
Helmholtz; in history, Niebuhr, Ranke, Waitz, Pertz and
Bohmer; in theology, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Baur and
Dollinger; in art, Rauch, Cornelius and Kaulbach; in
music, Schubert, Schumann, Spohr, Mendelssohn and
Meyerbeer; and in philosophical thought, minds so
powerful and original as those of Hegel, Schelling,
Schopenhauer, Herbart, Clausewitz and List--the Ger-
many that witnessed the zenith and sunset of Goethe's
genius and the career of Heine, was singularly deficient
in statesmen of the first order and in the literature, as
distinct from the philosophy, of politics. It was a mar-
vellous spring in a nation's intellectual growth, with the
pageant of its intellectual summer to come after 1848--
but the sources and masters of its political wisdom were
English or French.
It is no less striking how German statesmen from
Metternich to Bismarck and von Bulow, while extolling
the supremacy of German intellect, have denied to the
mass of their countrymen political capacity--forgetting
that the development of political capacity in a nation is
as much a question of opportunity as of ability. The
science and art of government are more exacting even
than the science and arts of the intellectual and imagina-
tive life. If ability is a necessary condition, a free field
for its exercise, the remorseless tests of criticism, failure and
responsibility are even more indispensable for citizenship
than for thinkers, scholars and artists. The worst of all
schools for a nation's political life are irresponsible politi-
cians appealing to a disfranchised, uninstructed, irrespon-
sible and alienated public opinion. Nations generally pay
a heavier price for their sins of omission than for their
sins of commission. For the Germany of 1815-48 the
exclusion of its educated middle-class from an active and
corporate share in political life is the gravest indictment
that Metternich and the system of Metternich incur. 1
1 Hohenlohe {Mem. , i. 109) wrote: 'In south-western Germany the idea
of unity is regarded as a matter of life and death, and is the unceasing object of
anxious thought to politicians and eager excitement to the masses . . . the
true cause lies in the fact--more or less consciously recognised--that the greater
portion of the German nation has no voice in determining its destinies. ' (1847. )
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM n
The political problems and difficulties of the German
Confederation after 1815 were further complicated by
the peculiar character of its'component members. Luxem-
burg united to the ruling house of the new Netherlands
kingdom was a member of the confederation: the King
of Denmark as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein was repre-
sented for Holstein but not for Schleswig: Hanover until
1837 was united to the British Crown, and after 1837,
though the personal union of the Hanoverian and British
Crowns was severed, the connection with' the British
royal house was of the closest: Oldenburg was dynas-
tically connected with the reigning house of Russia: the
house of Saxe-Coburg in 1830 provided the new kingdom
of Belgium with its sovereign, and in 1840 the British
Queen with a Prince-Consort, reinforcing the British
interest in and influence on German affairs: the whole
of the kingdom of Prussia was not included in the con-
federation: and the Empire of Austria was only repre-
sented for ' the German ' parts of the Empire. -
The Federal Diet, in consequence, was composed of
diplomatic representatives from States purely Germanic
and from States only partially so, the interests of which
were frequently determined by non-German, or anti-
German, considerations. The Diet, therefore, directly
or indirectly, was brought into close relation with the most
delicate and difficult problems of European policy.
Apart from the European origin of the Federal Consti-
tution, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, the Nether-
lands, and Denmark had the right and the interest to
intervene effectively in the deliberations and actions of the
Diet, and such intervention would not spring from purely
Germanic considerations. The history of the problems
of Poland, Schleswig-Holstein, Luxemburg, of Slavonic,
or Magyar, or Italian Austria, are a continuous commen-
tary on this anomalous situation. In short, it was im-
possible to. solve these problems either by the Federal Diet
alone or without its co-operation.
One great European State alone, France, was excluded
from all share--and its exclusion pointed unmistakably
to a fresh phase of the historic struggle for the control of
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? 12
BISMARCK
the Rhine. The creation of the German Confederation
registered 'a Germany unredeemed' and a France un-
satisfied. The refusal of the Prussian demand in 1814
for 'the restoration' of Alsace and Lorraine had been
balanced by the removal of France from the Rhenish
Provinces occupied since 1795. But the French flag on
Strasburg and Metz, the federal flag on the fortress of
Mainz, and the Prussian flag at Coblenz, signalised baffled
ambition and inextinguishable ideals for French and
German patriots. Neither France nor Germany could
regard the Treaties and Settlement of 1815 as the last
word. Any remodelling, therefore, of the Federal Con-
stitution of 1815, any alteration of the composition or
powers of the German Confederation, touched every live
wire in the European State system.
The Settlement of 1815 had made the German problem
an international problem. The unification of Germany,
even more than the unification of Italy, could not be
effected without a revolution -in the European State
system defined by the Vienna treaties.
No less could it be accomplished without an internal
revolution in Germany and the formation of a new German
mind. The system of Metternich had the merit of clearly
conceived principles adapted to secure precise ends. The
maintenance, moreover, of a status quo has all the advan-
tages of the defensive in war. On the side of the con-
servative forces were vested interests, historic traditions,
established institutions, the dynasties, and a bitter ex-
perience of revolution. Everywhere in Europe from the
Neva to the Seine, from the Tagus to Copenhagen, fire and
sword had done their fell work. Since 1789, the horror
of war was subtly interlaced with the horror of re-
volution. A Europe emaciated in spirit and resources
by twenty-five years of unbroken struggle, felt that
peace was worth having at any price, and that liberty
could be purchased too dearly. And Europe (ex-
cluding the Ottoman Empire) had peace for nearly forty
years.
The succeeding thirty years accomplished much in
formulating demands, and clothing them with precision
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 13
and clear objectives, which it is easier to appreciate to-day
than in 1848. The horror of war and the fear of re-
volution had slowly evaporated. The young generation
was open to persuasion that there were far worse things
than war: that peace could be purchased by sacrifices
too costly for individual, State and nation, and that when
other means were unavailable or futile, revolution was
justifiable and necessary. The solid achievements of
German brains in every department of human activity
had implanted in the educated German mind certain
potent convictions: that what had already been accom-
plished by German brains in philosophy, classical scholar-
ship, in philology, literature, history, the physical sciences
and the aesthetic arts, was as nothing to what could be
accomplished in all these departments if German brains
could have a freer field and a purer air to work in; that
in political no less than in the intellectual life, German
brains would show their creative powers; that the future
lay open to the highest' kultur' nation, true to its mission
and the obligation to realise its civilised self; that the
primacy in science and civilisation, once Italian, French
or British, was unmistakably passing to the German
nation; and fourthly, that there was a causal relation
between the efficacy of a nation's form of government and
its efficacy in national science (Wissenschafi) in its finest
and broadest sense. No less significant, the renaissance
of the German universities were both cause and effect
of the renaissance of the German people. Prussia, in its
hour of humiliation after Jena, founded the University
of Berlin. The firm belief of the Prussian reformers,
building greater than they knew, was that the moral re-
generation of the kingdom demanded no less imperatively
an intellectual regeneration; Breslau in Silesia was made
a university town in 1815, and the re-hoisting of the
Prussian flag in the enlarged Rhenish Provinces was
emphasised by the reconstitution of the University of
Bonn. The foundation of universities as a memorial of
victory in the field and as indispensable organs of national
strength and unification, remains a remarkable element in
Prussian statecraft.
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? >>4
BISMARCK
Outside Prussia, Heidelberg, Gottingen, Jena, Leipzig,
Munich, Tubingen, were especially distinguished. A
full generation before the Zollverein accomplished in 1868
the economic unity of Germany, the universities had
achieved a unity of culture impressive as much for the
solidarity of its foundations as for the tenacity of its grip
on the German mind.
The brotherhood of German learning brought about
the brotherhood of German learners. The Bavarian
who came to Berlin to attend the courses of a Ranke or a
Savigny, the Prussian who had heard Dahlmann at
Gottingen or Droysen at Kiel, the Saxon who went to
Strauss or Baur at Tubingen or Dollinger at Munich had
realised that Germany was not a geographical expression,
and that there were spiritual and intellectual bonds uniting
all Germans which kings, diplomatists and treaties could
not mar or destroy. In any young generation a settled
conviction that ideas are power, the most potent because
the most pervasive of all realities, will always develop
a high-explosive political force. Epigrams on professors
are as easy as they are popular; and the German pro-
fessoriate is the unfailing butt of the Philistine of every
nation; but in an epoch when young Germany was
dreaming dreams and seeing visions, it was an inestimable
service to the German mind that in the class-rooms of the
universities German youth was taught by men who had
a right to be heard the value of knowledge for know-
ledge's sake, and learned the lesson that national supre-
macy in science, whether of language, literature, history,
or the physical world, could only be acquired by the
severest self-discipline and the most exacting thoroughness
--by toil, silence and endurance. The German pro-
fessor had a German audience, outside his class-room, fit
and certainly not few. Savigny's and Ranke's pam-
phlets, France and Germany, the Division and Unity of
Germany, The Great Powers, are examples of the ferment-
ing influences that could distil from an academic pen.
And they could be multiplied at will. Carlyle said that
the skins of the French aristocracy bound the second
edition of Rousseau's works: it was not only the skins of
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 15
French aristocrats which bound the later editions of
many German works of learning.
Through historical research, above all, the German
nation rediscovered its past and read in it a guarantee
of the future. The German people learned from the path-
making science of the Grimms, Bopp, Pertz, Waitz, Giese-
brecht, von Maurer, Gervinus and Dahlmann, how deep
were their roots in the past, and what great intellectual
and political achievements the German race had wrought.
From the dim centuries of warring tribalism emerged
the illumination of the Teutonic genius of Charles the
Great, who combined the Central Empire, which formed
the legacy of Imperial Rome, with the gifts of the Teutonic
mind. Germany was bidden to march through the cycle
of the Middle Ages, illustrious with imperial rulers--
Carolingian, Saxon, Franconian, Hohenstaufen, Luxem-
burg, Habsburg--and to note how a Holy Roman Empire
of the German nation had preserved for civilisation the
religious, moral, political and intellectual unity of Europe
under the wings of the Teutonic Eagle; to recall the
winning for Christ and the German conception of civili-
sation from Lithuanian, Wend, Slav and Avar of the Baltic
lands almost to the banks of the Neva; to ponder on
Vienna and the marches of the East--barriers against
Magyar and Turk. It was re-taught the inexhaustible
services of the German Reformation and German Pro-
testantism to the free and critical spirit of man; it was
invited to contrast the two centuries of internecine strife
and political degradation ushered in by the Thirty Years'
War and the bondage of the German nation to foreign
masters, until Lessing and Winckelmann in the sphere of
mind, Frederick the Great in the sphere of facts, pointed
the way to a promised land beyond the wilderness in
which they had wandered. Poetry, philology, comparative
mythology and folk-lore, the comparative study of insti-
tutions, palaeography and the archives, the philosophy of
law--history in its widest streams, explored and mapped
by the severest science--were exhibited to enforce a single
moral--the greatness of the German contribution to the
civilisation of the past, a greatness in proportion to its
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? I6
BISMARCK
fidelity to its racial and national character, and the cer-
tainty that a similar fidelity in the future would produce
no less momentous results for Germany and humanity.
Arndt could proclaim that the healing of the world would
be found in the German spirit.
The grandeur and unity of the German race sank deep
into the hearts of a disillusioned generation. The German
mind, it concluded, had been at its best when Europe
had been politically organised round a German Empire,
with West and East duly subordinated to the central
framework. The 'natural frontiers' claimed by France
were a denial of geography, and an insolent outrage on
the natural rights of the indivisible German nation. Did
not the renaissance of the German spirit require the racial
unity of the German people to be expressed once more in
a national and central political organisation? Slowly
but surely the mind of the new Germany became imbued
with the doctrine and ideas of nationalism, rooted in the
reinforced concrete of racial origins and the laws of political
evolution, imposing as a corollary the duty of freeing
all Germans from the servitude of non-German political
or intellectual domination. Wherever Germans of a com-
mon speech, race, and literature lived, whether in the
artificial Confederation of 1815 or outside it, wherever
such Germans were prevented from realising their national
and racial self--that was unredeemed Germany. The
ideal of a national State in a free nation was thus built up,
line upon line, precept upon precept.
The doctrine of
political salvation by fidelity to racial unity--the creed of
the Nationalists--had its complement in the doctrine of
salvation through political rights and personal freedom--
the creed of the Liberals.
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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? i8
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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? 26
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.
BISMARCK
organised control of a foreign sovereign and placed its
military and economic resources at the disposal of a foreign
dictator. Hence, in the new confederation the Member-
States were forbidden to make war on each other, to con-
clude separate alliances with foreign Powers, while their
membership was conditioned by mutual guarantees of the
several territorial possessions included in the Union.
The Federal Act and the Federal Constitution implied
the existence of a common German interest, and the duty
of Germany organised in the League of Thirty-Nine
States to promote and defend it. It was not only a
German but a European duty. The interest of Europe
required the organisation of the German States for
certain common purposes; the settlement arrived at in
a European congress recognised the interest of Europe in
providing the organisation and maintaining it.
There has always been a German problem. There
always will be. In 1815 the heart of the matter is reached
by two questions: How far did the new confederation
meet the requirements of Germany and of Europe?
What provision, if any, was made for adaptation to future
and unforeseen needs or demands, either specifically German
or more generally European?
It is easy to pile up a formidable indictment against the
German work of the Congress of Vienna, particularly from
the relentless criticism of a later generation, which reckons
the Settlement of 1815 as one of the injuriae temporum
inflicted by heartless diplomatists and malevolent European
Powers on a hapless and helpless Germany--and to show
that it had every imaginable defect.
It is not difficult to prove that the Settlement was a
galling disappointment to ardent Nationalists so different
as Stein, Humboldt and Arndt, and a cause of rage to
fierce Prussian Particularists such as Blucher. All these
things and much else--are they not written in the
chronicles of great and small German historians? It is more
relevant to the purpose in hand to analyse than to indict.
The Federal Diet, whether in the ordinary session of
seventeen delegates, or in the plenum of sixty-nine repre-
sentatives in which every sovereign State was represented,
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 7
was the one effective federal institution. The Diet was
not a parliament but a congress of diplomatic represen-
tatives whose votes as defined by the mandates of their
governments alone could alter the fundamental laws. It
was presided over by the Austrian representative, who
had a casting vote. Austria, therefore, was recognised
as the head of the confederation.
We must further note that: (1) There was no federal
executive to execute the Diet's decrees, a duty which fell
on each Member-State; (2) no federal military force existed
except on paper, and all efforts, notably by Prussia after
1815, to make a federal army a reality, broke down, not
only in detail but in principle: for the question of the
supreme command raised the insoluble dualism of Austria
and Prussia; (3) no alteration in fundamental laws, or-
ganic institutions, individual rights or religious affairs,
could be made except by a unanimous vote, i. e. a liberum
veto to block change was vested in every State, however
petty; (4) the governments of the States were alone
represented- and the governments meant the ruling
dynasties. The German people were not directly repre-
sented, nor, unless they could influence the several govern-
ments, had they any voice in federal decisions and policy.
The complete failure of the Federal Diet to realise even
the most modest aspirations of nascent German national-
ism and a growing liberalism, was due as much to the
policy of the German governments as to the inherent
defects of the constitution. Had those governments been
ready to utilise the powers provided in the Federal Act,
the thirty years between 1815 and the Revolution of 1848
might have witnessed a progressive series of moderate
reforms, which would probably have averted that revo-
lution with all its disastrous consequences. In their
anxiety to avert revolution, the governments of Germany
after 1815 stored up the forces which made revolution
inevitable. The Diet fell under the control of Austria,
which meant under the control of Metternich. It came
to be a machine for either doing nothing or dutifully
registering the decree of a reactionary system, based on a
particular interpretation of German, Austrian and Faro-
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? 8
BISMARCK
pean interests. The suspension or mutilation of liberal
constitutions in the German States, the denial of a free
press, the interference with individual liberty and with
the freedom of thought and teaching in the universities,
the hostility to all change as necessarily democratic and
revolutionary, have damned the Diet with a double dose
of the original sin of Metternich himself. But Metter-
nich, who imposed this policy on a willing Emperor and
a despotically governed Austria, could not have imposed
it on the Federal Diet without the ready complicity of
the German governments.
The Federal Constitution did not make those govern-
ments what they were; but it provided them with an
effective machinery for carrying out a reactionary, centri-
fugal and particularist policy. Popular representation and
control were on principle excluded. But had the Federal
Act set up a truly Federal Parliament and a truly Federal
Ministry, it is practically certain that the quarrels between
1815 and 1848 would have been continuous and irrecon-
cilable. So deep was the antagonism between the prin-
ciples of the dynasties and the popular conception of
government, so profound the economic and constitutional
differences between the several States, so keen the jealousies
and fears of the dynasties--so disunited were the nationalist
or popular parties in political principles and ends--that
Germany would have been rent by secessions or plunged
into a civil war from which France, Russia and Great
Britain could not have held aloof.
Federalism, as a system of political organisation, it must
be remembered, and as a political solution for the ad-
ministrative difficulties of modern States, was in 1815
in its infancy; Europe in 1815 had neither thought out
the theory and principles, nor acquired the political ex-
perience required for its successful establishment. The
literature and experience of 1917 are relatively rich in
both respects; but even in 1917 there are obvious gaps
which the political life of the United States, of the
modern German Empire, of the Dominions of Canada
and Australia, and the Swiss Republic do not auto-
matically fill. And the Germany of 1815 was not only
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 9
and necessarily poor in the philosophy, literature and
experience of federalism: it had but recently revived its
education in political philosophy and speculation. The
new Germany was henceforward asking with increasing
earnestness and thoroughness fundamental questions:
What under modern conditions is a State? What is its
basis? What are its rights? Whence does it derive
its authority, and over whom, and to what extent?
What are the relations of a State with other States? What
are the laws or principles of the evolution of States?
What is nationality? What are the respective values of
States based on civilisation (Kulturstaat), States based on
political or governmental unity (Etnhtitsstaat), States based
on nationality (Nationalstaat)? What is the ethical and
political import of citizenship based on cosmopolitan
ideals (Weltburgertum) as opposed to citizenship con-
ditioned and restricted by the claims of race, the terri-
torial State and the individual as such? Hard questions,
indeed, the answering of which might well tax the best
brains and the ripest political experience of Germany for
two generations to come.
The worst defect of the Federal Constitution was not
its failure to realise conceptions of German unity, im-
mature and limited by the exceptional experience of the'
Napoleonic and Revolutionary era, nor its curtailment
of freedom of thought and political liberty, but its com-
plete failure to provide a sobering and stimulating political
education for the educated middle class of a loosely
united German nation. The Germany of 1815 had
passed through an abnormal ordeal since 1789. But the
men of 1848, intellectually able, of a high sincerity and
purpose, fired by an inspiring idealism without which no
nation has ever achieved what endures, were as fettered
by political inexperience as were the men who made the
French Revolution. They had not learned what govern-
ment demands, because all means for learning the lesson
had been denied them, both on principle and as a fact.
The Germany which produced scholars such as Savigny,
Boeckh, Lachmann, Bopp, the two Schlegels, the two
Humboldts, the brothers Grimm, and Gesenius; in science,
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? 10
BISMARCK
Ritter, von Baer, Gauss, Oersted, Liebig, Virchow and
Helmholtz; in history, Niebuhr, Ranke, Waitz, Pertz and
Bohmer; in theology, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Baur and
Dollinger; in art, Rauch, Cornelius and Kaulbach; in
music, Schubert, Schumann, Spohr, Mendelssohn and
Meyerbeer; and in philosophical thought, minds so
powerful and original as those of Hegel, Schelling,
Schopenhauer, Herbart, Clausewitz and List--the Ger-
many that witnessed the zenith and sunset of Goethe's
genius and the career of Heine, was singularly deficient
in statesmen of the first order and in the literature, as
distinct from the philosophy, of politics. It was a mar-
vellous spring in a nation's intellectual growth, with the
pageant of its intellectual summer to come after 1848--
but the sources and masters of its political wisdom were
English or French.
It is no less striking how German statesmen from
Metternich to Bismarck and von Bulow, while extolling
the supremacy of German intellect, have denied to the
mass of their countrymen political capacity--forgetting
that the development of political capacity in a nation is
as much a question of opportunity as of ability. The
science and art of government are more exacting even
than the science and arts of the intellectual and imagina-
tive life. If ability is a necessary condition, a free field
for its exercise, the remorseless tests of criticism, failure and
responsibility are even more indispensable for citizenship
than for thinkers, scholars and artists. The worst of all
schools for a nation's political life are irresponsible politi-
cians appealing to a disfranchised, uninstructed, irrespon-
sible and alienated public opinion. Nations generally pay
a heavier price for their sins of omission than for their
sins of commission. For the Germany of 1815-48 the
exclusion of its educated middle-class from an active and
corporate share in political life is the gravest indictment
that Metternich and the system of Metternich incur. 1
1 Hohenlohe {Mem. , i. 109) wrote: 'In south-western Germany the idea
of unity is regarded as a matter of life and death, and is the unceasing object of
anxious thought to politicians and eager excitement to the masses . . . the
true cause lies in the fact--more or less consciously recognised--that the greater
portion of the German nation has no voice in determining its destinies. ' (1847. )
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM n
The political problems and difficulties of the German
Confederation after 1815 were further complicated by
the peculiar character of its'component members. Luxem-
burg united to the ruling house of the new Netherlands
kingdom was a member of the confederation: the King
of Denmark as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein was repre-
sented for Holstein but not for Schleswig: Hanover until
1837 was united to the British Crown, and after 1837,
though the personal union of the Hanoverian and British
Crowns was severed, the connection with' the British
royal house was of the closest: Oldenburg was dynas-
tically connected with the reigning house of Russia: the
house of Saxe-Coburg in 1830 provided the new kingdom
of Belgium with its sovereign, and in 1840 the British
Queen with a Prince-Consort, reinforcing the British
interest in and influence on German affairs: the whole
of the kingdom of Prussia was not included in the con-
federation: and the Empire of Austria was only repre-
sented for ' the German ' parts of the Empire. -
The Federal Diet, in consequence, was composed of
diplomatic representatives from States purely Germanic
and from States only partially so, the interests of which
were frequently determined by non-German, or anti-
German, considerations. The Diet, therefore, directly
or indirectly, was brought into close relation with the most
delicate and difficult problems of European policy.
Apart from the European origin of the Federal Consti-
tution, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, the Nether-
lands, and Denmark had the right and the interest to
intervene effectively in the deliberations and actions of the
Diet, and such intervention would not spring from purely
Germanic considerations. The history of the problems
of Poland, Schleswig-Holstein, Luxemburg, of Slavonic,
or Magyar, or Italian Austria, are a continuous commen-
tary on this anomalous situation. In short, it was im-
possible to. solve these problems either by the Federal Diet
alone or without its co-operation.
One great European State alone, France, was excluded
from all share--and its exclusion pointed unmistakably
to a fresh phase of the historic struggle for the control of
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? 12
BISMARCK
the Rhine. The creation of the German Confederation
registered 'a Germany unredeemed' and a France un-
satisfied. The refusal of the Prussian demand in 1814
for 'the restoration' of Alsace and Lorraine had been
balanced by the removal of France from the Rhenish
Provinces occupied since 1795. But the French flag on
Strasburg and Metz, the federal flag on the fortress of
Mainz, and the Prussian flag at Coblenz, signalised baffled
ambition and inextinguishable ideals for French and
German patriots. Neither France nor Germany could
regard the Treaties and Settlement of 1815 as the last
word. Any remodelling, therefore, of the Federal Con-
stitution of 1815, any alteration of the composition or
powers of the German Confederation, touched every live
wire in the European State system.
The Settlement of 1815 had made the German problem
an international problem. The unification of Germany,
even more than the unification of Italy, could not be
effected without a revolution -in the European State
system defined by the Vienna treaties.
No less could it be accomplished without an internal
revolution in Germany and the formation of a new German
mind. The system of Metternich had the merit of clearly
conceived principles adapted to secure precise ends. The
maintenance, moreover, of a status quo has all the advan-
tages of the defensive in war. On the side of the con-
servative forces were vested interests, historic traditions,
established institutions, the dynasties, and a bitter ex-
perience of revolution. Everywhere in Europe from the
Neva to the Seine, from the Tagus to Copenhagen, fire and
sword had done their fell work. Since 1789, the horror
of war was subtly interlaced with the horror of re-
volution. A Europe emaciated in spirit and resources
by twenty-five years of unbroken struggle, felt that
peace was worth having at any price, and that liberty
could be purchased too dearly. And Europe (ex-
cluding the Ottoman Empire) had peace for nearly forty
years.
The succeeding thirty years accomplished much in
formulating demands, and clothing them with precision
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 13
and clear objectives, which it is easier to appreciate to-day
than in 1848. The horror of war and the fear of re-
volution had slowly evaporated. The young generation
was open to persuasion that there were far worse things
than war: that peace could be purchased by sacrifices
too costly for individual, State and nation, and that when
other means were unavailable or futile, revolution was
justifiable and necessary. The solid achievements of
German brains in every department of human activity
had implanted in the educated German mind certain
potent convictions: that what had already been accom-
plished by German brains in philosophy, classical scholar-
ship, in philology, literature, history, the physical sciences
and the aesthetic arts, was as nothing to what could be
accomplished in all these departments if German brains
could have a freer field and a purer air to work in; that
in political no less than in the intellectual life, German
brains would show their creative powers; that the future
lay open to the highest' kultur' nation, true to its mission
and the obligation to realise its civilised self; that the
primacy in science and civilisation, once Italian, French
or British, was unmistakably passing to the German
nation; and fourthly, that there was a causal relation
between the efficacy of a nation's form of government and
its efficacy in national science (Wissenschafi) in its finest
and broadest sense. No less significant, the renaissance
of the German universities were both cause and effect
of the renaissance of the German people. Prussia, in its
hour of humiliation after Jena, founded the University
of Berlin. The firm belief of the Prussian reformers,
building greater than they knew, was that the moral re-
generation of the kingdom demanded no less imperatively
an intellectual regeneration; Breslau in Silesia was made
a university town in 1815, and the re-hoisting of the
Prussian flag in the enlarged Rhenish Provinces was
emphasised by the reconstitution of the University of
Bonn. The foundation of universities as a memorial of
victory in the field and as indispensable organs of national
strength and unification, remains a remarkable element in
Prussian statecraft.
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BISMARCK
Outside Prussia, Heidelberg, Gottingen, Jena, Leipzig,
Munich, Tubingen, were especially distinguished. A
full generation before the Zollverein accomplished in 1868
the economic unity of Germany, the universities had
achieved a unity of culture impressive as much for the
solidarity of its foundations as for the tenacity of its grip
on the German mind.
The brotherhood of German learning brought about
the brotherhood of German learners. The Bavarian
who came to Berlin to attend the courses of a Ranke or a
Savigny, the Prussian who had heard Dahlmann at
Gottingen or Droysen at Kiel, the Saxon who went to
Strauss or Baur at Tubingen or Dollinger at Munich had
realised that Germany was not a geographical expression,
and that there were spiritual and intellectual bonds uniting
all Germans which kings, diplomatists and treaties could
not mar or destroy. In any young generation a settled
conviction that ideas are power, the most potent because
the most pervasive of all realities, will always develop
a high-explosive political force. Epigrams on professors
are as easy as they are popular; and the German pro-
fessoriate is the unfailing butt of the Philistine of every
nation; but in an epoch when young Germany was
dreaming dreams and seeing visions, it was an inestimable
service to the German mind that in the class-rooms of the
universities German youth was taught by men who had
a right to be heard the value of knowledge for know-
ledge's sake, and learned the lesson that national supre-
macy in science, whether of language, literature, history,
or the physical world, could only be acquired by the
severest self-discipline and the most exacting thoroughness
--by toil, silence and endurance. The German pro-
fessor had a German audience, outside his class-room, fit
and certainly not few. Savigny's and Ranke's pam-
phlets, France and Germany, the Division and Unity of
Germany, The Great Powers, are examples of the ferment-
ing influences that could distil from an academic pen.
And they could be multiplied at will. Carlyle said that
the skins of the French aristocracy bound the second
edition of Rousseau's works: it was not only the skins of
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 15
French aristocrats which bound the later editions of
many German works of learning.
Through historical research, above all, the German
nation rediscovered its past and read in it a guarantee
of the future. The German people learned from the path-
making science of the Grimms, Bopp, Pertz, Waitz, Giese-
brecht, von Maurer, Gervinus and Dahlmann, how deep
were their roots in the past, and what great intellectual
and political achievements the German race had wrought.
From the dim centuries of warring tribalism emerged
the illumination of the Teutonic genius of Charles the
Great, who combined the Central Empire, which formed
the legacy of Imperial Rome, with the gifts of the Teutonic
mind. Germany was bidden to march through the cycle
of the Middle Ages, illustrious with imperial rulers--
Carolingian, Saxon, Franconian, Hohenstaufen, Luxem-
burg, Habsburg--and to note how a Holy Roman Empire
of the German nation had preserved for civilisation the
religious, moral, political and intellectual unity of Europe
under the wings of the Teutonic Eagle; to recall the
winning for Christ and the German conception of civili-
sation from Lithuanian, Wend, Slav and Avar of the Baltic
lands almost to the banks of the Neva; to ponder on
Vienna and the marches of the East--barriers against
Magyar and Turk. It was re-taught the inexhaustible
services of the German Reformation and German Pro-
testantism to the free and critical spirit of man; it was
invited to contrast the two centuries of internecine strife
and political degradation ushered in by the Thirty Years'
War and the bondage of the German nation to foreign
masters, until Lessing and Winckelmann in the sphere of
mind, Frederick the Great in the sphere of facts, pointed
the way to a promised land beyond the wilderness in
which they had wandered. Poetry, philology, comparative
mythology and folk-lore, the comparative study of insti-
tutions, palaeography and the archives, the philosophy of
law--history in its widest streams, explored and mapped
by the severest science--were exhibited to enforce a single
moral--the greatness of the German contribution to the
civilisation of the past, a greatness in proportion to its
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? I6
BISMARCK
fidelity to its racial and national character, and the cer-
tainty that a similar fidelity in the future would produce
no less momentous results for Germany and humanity.
Arndt could proclaim that the healing of the world would
be found in the German spirit.
The grandeur and unity of the German race sank deep
into the hearts of a disillusioned generation. The German
mind, it concluded, had been at its best when Europe
had been politically organised round a German Empire,
with West and East duly subordinated to the central
framework. The 'natural frontiers' claimed by France
were a denial of geography, and an insolent outrage on
the natural rights of the indivisible German nation. Did
not the renaissance of the German spirit require the racial
unity of the German people to be expressed once more in
a national and central political organisation? Slowly
but surely the mind of the new Germany became imbued
with the doctrine and ideas of nationalism, rooted in the
reinforced concrete of racial origins and the laws of political
evolution, imposing as a corollary the duty of freeing
all Germans from the servitude of non-German political
or intellectual domination. Wherever Germans of a com-
mon speech, race, and literature lived, whether in the
artificial Confederation of 1815 or outside it, wherever
such Germans were prevented from realising their national
and racial self--that was unredeemed Germany. The
ideal of a national State in a free nation was thus built up,
line upon line, precept upon precept.
The doctrine of
political salvation by fidelity to racial unity--the creed of
the Nationalists--had its complement in the doctrine of
salvation through political rights and personal freedom--
the creed of the Liberals.
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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? i8
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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? 20
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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? 22
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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? 26
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.
