How
magnanimous
it
sounds!
sounds!
Treitschke - 1915 - Germany, France, Russia, and Islam
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? 152 What We Demand from France
instruction of each individual soldier, and the de-
light in accurate firing, which make him alone,
among the soldiers of France, capable of an effec-
tive partisan war (Parteigdngerkrieg) , and which
have created a species of volunteer popular army --
the franC'tireurs -- in his part of the country alone?
But, alas! when we praise the indestructible
German nature of the man of Alsace, the subject of
our praise declines to receive it. He adheres to his
conviction that he is no Suabian, and that all
Suabians are yellow-footed. He was introduced
by France, sooner than we Germans have been,
into the grand activity of the modem economical
world. To France he owes a most admirable
organization of the means of commercial inter-
course, a wide market, the influx of capital on a
great scale, and a high rate of wages, which, to this
day, draws daily labourers in crowds at harvest-
time from the fields of Baden across the Rhine.
From the French he has learned a certain savoir-
faire; his industrial activity, upon the whole,
stands higher than that of his German neighbour;
and in special branches -- in nursery gardening,
for instance -- he presents a marked contrast to
the easy-going indifference of the natives of Baden.
The son of Alsace is bound to his great State not
merely by ancient loyalty and pride, but by mate-
rial bonds, the power of which we, in our freer
political life, generally fail duly to appreciate. A
bureaucratic centralization possesses this advan-
tage after all, among a thousand sins, that it
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? What We Demand from France 153
penetrates like a binding mortar into every joint
of the social edifice, and renders it unspeakably
difficult to break one of its stones out of the wall.
What labour will be requisite before the threads
which lead across from Strassburg and Colmar to
Paris are all cut! The jonction-nomanie of the
French, their anxiety to make a profit out of the
State, even were it by means of a bureau de tabac,
has penetrated as far as these frontier lands. A
countless host of officials, pensioners and veterans,
swarms in this province. All the great institu-
tions of intercourse and credit are in reality State
establishments. What a power lies in the hands
of the Great Eastern Railway [of France], which,
although a private company in name, is in fact
connected closely with the State ! If the district is
given up to Germany, and this railway remains
what it is, every pointsman and guard on the
line will contribute to the French propaganda.
The smallest amount of resistance will probably
be offered to the reconquest in Lower Alsace, where
a third of the population is Protestant, and where
a vigorous intercourse is carried on with Baden
and the Palatinate. The state of affairs on the
Upper Rhine is far less promising. A powerful
clergy is there, adding fuel to the hatred of the
lively and excitable people against Germany, and
it finds no counterpoise in the Protestant portion
of the population, which amounts only to a tithe.
The manufactories of Mulhausen have their chief
market in France, although a considerable busi-
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? 154 What We Demand from France
ness has been done in the calico and muslin trade
of the place at the Leipzig fairs since the recent
treaties of commerce. The German State is
repugnant to the old reminiscences of this Swiss
city. Its patrician families assiduously display
their French sentiments. Its masses of working-
men, thrown together from long distances, and
who come, for the most part, from Germany,
have always welcomed the hollow pathos of the
Paris demagogues. But it is in German Lorraine
that we are threatened by the most embittered
hostility. In a population almost exclusively
Catholic, German ways of thought and Hfe have
never found so grand a development as in Alsace ;
and for more than a century they have been
abused by all the evil artifices of the French
bureaucracy -- most cynically of all in the old
Luxemburg districts round Diedenhofen; besides
which their ordinar}^ intercourse takes the peas-
antry to two French towns, to Metz and Nancy.
Most assuredly, the task of reuniting there the
broken links between the ages is one of the heaviest
that has ever been imposed upon the political
forces of our nation. Capital and culture, those
faithful allies of the German cause in Posen and
in Schleswig- Hoist ein, are our opponents. Ger-
man ways of thought and life have been terribly
discredited in the upper classes of these western
marches. What we deem horrible, they deem
sacred. They remember with pride how it was at
Strassburg that Rouget de I'lsle once composed
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? What We Demand from France 155
those burning lines which threatened the enemies
of France, the Germans, with death and destruc-
tion; and how the soldiers' Emperor passed out
to his war against us through the gate of Auster-
litz. The city which fought as a heroine in the
spiritual battles of the Reformation boasts to-day
in her own phrase, De porter fierement Vepee de la
France. What appears ridiculous to us seems to
them to speak for itself. They are not ashamed
to call themselves ''Monsieur" Schwilgue or
Stockle. They allow the venerable names of their
towns to be changed into Gaulish perversions,
Hke Wasselonne, Cemay, and Selestat. They
obediently accept the indescribably absurd Ober-
nai (for Oberehnheim) , and consider it fine to
write "antwergmestres^* when they are speaking
in their French historical works of the masters of
the old guilds (Meister der alien Ziinfte). They
are astonished at our shrugging our shoulders as we
contemplate the monument in honour of the indus-
trial grandees of the place, on the market-place at
Rappoltsweiler, and see enumerated on it, in the
style of the tables issued from the Prefectures,
the names Meyer, Jaques, Muller, Etienne, etc.
What to us seems freedom, to them appears
oppression. While taking part in the life of a
State whose parties bow beneath despotism as
their taskmaster, without an exception, they
have lost all perception for the truth that every
healthy kind of freedom imposes burdens and
duties. They look with repugnance upon the
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? 156 What We Demand from France
fundamental principle of the German State, the
duty of all men to serve the State in arms, and
the right of every local community (Gemeinde)
to manage its own affairs. Yet, with all their
devotion, they are not regarded by the Gauls as
their equals. The Frenchman contrives cleverly
to turn the fresh vigour of the man of Alsace
to the best advantage for himself; but he laughs
in secret at these honest tetes carries . It is simply
impossible to domesticate the modem French
art of imdergoing a grand revolution of political
thought and opinion once in every ten years among
these tough Suabians. Even in our own days,
just as in those of the First Revolution, it was
with hesitation and unwillingly that the men
of Alsace followed the periodically recurring gen-
eral desertion of the Flag, which is characteristic
of the party life of the French. When the Presi-
dent Louis Napoleon was engaged in his notorious
Emperor's tour through France, and the whole
country sang the praises of the new idol, he was
confronted by sturdy Republican pride in Alsace
alone. Loyalty of this kind is unintelHgible to
the Frenchman. Even Duruy, who stands nearer
to our culture than most of his fellow-countrymen,
remarks, condescendingly, of the population of
Alsace, after a few words of well-merited encom-
ium: ^^Mais elle delaisse trop lentement son mauvais
jargon allemand et son intolerance religieuse. '^
Mauvais jargon allemand! This is what is said of
the mother-tongue, the straightforward Aleman-
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? What We Demand from France 157
nic, which went so warm and kindly to the heart
of the youthful Goethe! Intolerance religieuse,
this is how they describe faithful adherence to
the evangelical faith ! Such is the distance which
separates the French from the German members
of their State.
It is precisely in this that there lies for us a
pledge of hope. The source of German life is
choked, but it is not dried up. Tear these men
out of the foreign soil, and they are as German
as ourselves. The men of Alsace and Lorraine
who have emigrated to America range themselves
regularly with the Germans, and, like the latter,
are at this day joyously hailing our victories. The
German spirit of the house of Ludwig Uhland met
hardly anywhere so clear an echo as in the songs of
August and Adolf Stober of Alsace. How touch-
ing is the admonition coming from lips such as
these to the Strassburgers :
Around your sons shall wind
Loyalty's bond from hand to hand,
And ever shall them bind
Unto the German fatherland!
And in Kleeburg there, not far from the Gaisberg
which the heroes of Lower Silesia stormed in the
awful fray, stood the cradle of Ludwig Hausser --
the loyal man, who was the first to relate to us in
the spirit of a true German the history of our
War of Liberation. In times past other German
districts have been sunk in depths of degeneration
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? 158 What We Demand from France
as deep as that of Alsace to-day. Under the rotten
dominion of the Crozier, and the iron yoke of the
first Empire, the burghers of Cologne and Coblenz
had hardly been reached by far-off tidings of the
triumphs of Frederick and the poems of Schiller,
of all that was great and genuine in modem Ger-
man history. Ten years of Prussian government
sufficed to recover these lost ones to German life.
If at this day foreign ways have roots incompar-
ably deeper in Colmar and Miilhausen than was
the case of old on the Lower Rhine, the vigour and
self -consciousness of the German nation, on the
other hand, have immeasurably increased since
that time. The people of Alsace are already
beginning to doubt the invincibility of their nation,
and at all events to divine the mighty growth of
the German Empire. Perverse obstinacy, and a
thousand French intrigues creeping in the dark,
will make every step on the newly conquered soil
difficult for us; but our ultimate success is certain,
for on our side fights what is stronger than the
lying artifices of the stranger -- nature herself and
the voice of common blood.
Ill
THE CLAIMS OF PRUSSIA
Who is strong enough to rule these lost lands, and
to recover them, by a salutary discipline, for Ger-
man life? Prussia, and Prussia alone. I am well
aware that there are many sagacious persons in
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? What We Demand from France 159
the North who utter words of warning and entreat
us to leave that awkward question for the present,
and, above all, to abstain, at this moment, from
awakening the wrath of conflicting parties which
has hardly been put to sleep. Singular error!
The question which arises at this point is elevated
above all parties; it is the question, whether a
German peace is to follow this German war,
whether the peace and the war are to be one in
fashion and in spirit, whether, as the German
swords struck their blows only for the sake of the
great Fatherland, the statutes of the peace are to
satisfy the demands of German security and hon-
our and not the miserable suggestions of particular-
ism. This is precisely the moment in which it is
the duty of the Press to speak plainly, while the
brand of the nation's sacred wrath is still being
forged in the fire, and before the glorious unanim-
ity of this war has been overgrown by the petty
play of parties. The eye of our nation is clear-
sighted, and its heart is wide enough, if rationally
instructed, to imderstand what is indispensable for
the security of Germany. Should a traitor here or
there be induced by the open expression of those
national demands, the rejection of which is impossi-
ble, prematurely to doff his mask and to lift up
once more his old favourite cry, "Rather French
than Prussian, " the defection of such gentry would
do no harm to the German cause.
If the war progresses on the grand scale in which
it has commenced, the leader of the Germans will
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? i6o What We Demand from France
conclude peace in the name of the Allies, and cause
whatever cessions of territory have to be demanded
to be made to the Allies in common. Further
arrangements in the conquered territory must then
be left as a matter for mutual discussion between
the German confederates. We Germans should
be most unwilling to exhibit the dreary remains of
our utter disunion to a peace congress, and to show
a contemptuous Europe that our poHtical unity is
very far from being as complete, as yet, as the
unity of the German army. But if these dis-
cussions should not lead rapidly and harmoniously
to a sound conclusion, a resolute and unanimous
public opinion would have to lighten the difficulties
of the task. What was it, besides the jealousy of
foreign countries, which hampered the German
statesmen of 1815? The uncertainty and con-
fusion that reigned in the national mind. One
party wanted to give the Duchy of Alsace to the
Crown Prince of Wurttemberg, and another to the
Archduke Charles. Amdt, himself, insisted only
on securing the freedom of the German river. Let
us show that we have learned in these great times
to live while our fathers knew only how to die for
Germany, and that the unity of the national will
has succeeded that indeterminate sort of national
oneness which inspired the men of the Second
Peace of Paris.
The current talk in the North is, " Let us reward
the* South Germans for their loyalty. " This is
one of those vague fashions of speech which is due
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? What We Demand from France i6i
to sincere feeling, but which in times of popular
excitement might easily lead to dangerous results.
Oh! if the North Germans who echo these phrases,
and fancy themselves very magnanimous and
noble in so doing, could but see how the eyes of
honest and clear-sighted South Germans flash out
with anger at such words! We want no reward,
they say ; if people want to reward us, let them at
all events not reward the particularism of the
Courts which we held down with such effort. I
speak under the impression of earnest warnings,
which reach me from South German friends, and
which entreat me to defend the interests of South
Germany in this review. The course of the
argument which these politicians press on be-
half of South Germany is plain and not open to
question.
France, they say, will not and cannot honour-
ably conclude peace until her army and her
administration are entirely changed. Until a
thoroughly different popular education has built
up a new nation round it, the French people will
never in earnest renounce their natural boundaries,
or their illusion that the weakness of Germany
is their strength. We in Upper Germany cannot
lead our lives in quiet, or witness in contemptu-
ous confidence the feverish rage of these Gallic
vandals, so long as Alsace has not been placed
under a strong protecting power. The Prussian
Eagle alone is able to keep his grip of what he has
once pounced upon. In any weaker grasp the
II
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? i62 What We Demand from France
border country would be but a temporary posses-
sion. We know better than our friends in the
North do the strength of the resistance which will
rise up in Strassburg and Miilhausen against their
Germanization. Prussian territory must be
wrapped, like a protecting mantle, round all our
threatened boundaries from Wesel, past Metz
and Saarlouis, down to Strassburg and Belfort.
Prussia may not always be led by strong men. She
will certainly not be led always by men of genius.
The time may come when Prussian particularism,
which is out of heart at present, may again say
to itself, "Is the shirt not nearer the skin than the
coat? Is it absolutely necessary that North
Germany should always defend South Germany? '*
Such questions ought to be impossible in the
Germany of the future. It is in that view that
we wish to bind Prussia to us by the only bond
which is always sure in politics: the bond of its
own vital interests. We have always regarded it
as a misfortune that the State which leads Ger-
many should be, in appearance at least, exclusively
North German, but the priceless opportunity to
leaven it with South German life is given us, so as
to do away with the misleading and arbitrary
distinction between North and South for ever.
Once before, in one of the pettiest periods of its
history, Prussia filled the httle South German
Anspach-Baireuth with Prussian political feeling.
To-day, in the splendour of power and fame,
she could accomplish a similar task with a like
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? What We Demand from France 163
success. It will be the healing of the German
Empire if our leading Power learns to like and to
value South German ways in their home, if the
citizen forces of her western, and the still immature
social conditions of her eastern, provinces find their
counterpoise -- in one word, if Prussia includes
and reconciles within herself all the opposites of
German life.
What have people in the North to oppose to such
solid arguments? Nothing but the self-sufficient
phrase that Prussia is strong enough to care for no
annexation of territory.
How magnanimous it
sounds! -- but the indolence and pettiness of
particularism lie behind it. Which of the two
lines of policy would be the loftier or the more
German? Is Prussia to enter into a suitable
engagement, flattering to the vanity of the Court of
Munich, and then to observe, at a comfortable
distance, Bavaria struggling to subdue her mutin-
ous province; or is she herself to undertake that
watch upon the Rhine which she alone can keep,
and decisively to take a province which will bring
nothing at first but trouble and resistance to its
new masters? Nothing but an exaggerated deli-
cacy, a false magnanimity, have hitherto prevented
the North German Press from demanding what is
necessary, and what the South German papers,
for example, the courageous Schwdbische Volkszei-
tung, have long been urging. Every other plan
which has been suggested for the future of these
border countries is foolish -- so foolish that it
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? 164 What We Demand from France
requires some self-command to induce one to refute
it. What is the use of attempting to answer the
suggestion that Alsace and Lorraine should form
a neutral State? Has not Europe had enough of
that already in the disgusting spectacle of the
Nation Luxembourgeoise? Only the brain of an
English Manchester man, surrounded by the mists
he blows from his pipe of peace, could conceive
such extraordinary bubbles. No wonder that
every enemy of Germany should approve of this
suggestion. No better way has yet been thought
of to enable France to recover all that she has lost.
The proposal to entrust this outwork of Ger-
many to a secondary State appears scarcely more
unreasonable. One would think we were hurled
back out of the great year of 1870 into the times
of the Federal Diet. We seem, again, to hear
those wise thinkers of the Eschenheimer Gasse,
who kept warning us so earnestly against the
flames of centralization, while the marsh- water of
petty Statedom was rising above our shoulders --
those gallant riflemen patriots who shouted so
lustily for the unity of Germany -- but with Nurem-
berg as its capital! Prince and people in Baden
have acquitted themselves nobly in trying times;
and we can now fully comprehend, and that per-
haps for the first time, what it cost them to main-
tain an honourable national policy here for four
years in face of the enemy. Are we, in return,
to impose a burden on that State which could
not fail to crush it? The plan of founding an
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? What We Demand from France 165
Upper Rhine kingdom of Baden proceeds from
nothing but a too conscientious study of the map ;
and an old North German mistake has procured for
it a few adherents in the North. As Baden has
reckoned among its sons a long line of distin-
guished politicians, from Rotteck and Liebenstein
down to Mathy and Roggenbach, the men of the
North have accustomed themselves to expectations,
founded on the intellectual power of the country,
which no State of the third rank could possibly
fulfil. In Baden itself people are more modest.
Every reasonable man shudders at the thought
of a Diet of Carlsruhe, half made up of the repre-
sentatives of Alsace. If they allied themselves
with the same party in Alsace, who could control
the strong native Ultramontane and Radical
parties which an intelligent Liberal majority keeps
in order at present? Such a State would delight
the eyes of a map-drawer, as the kingdom of the
Netherlands did, when it was welded out of
Belgium and Holland; but, like that, it would be a
political impossibility.
The Government of Baden no doubt regards the
prospect of an acquisition which would be the ruin
of the country with sufficient wisdom and patriot-
ism. All the more must it be listened to with
respect, as it is most nearly concerned in the matter,
when it protests decisively against any increase of
Bavaria by Alsace. I shall not grope in the filth
of a petty past; but it is impossible for people in
Carlsruhe to forget that the desires of Bavaria for
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? i66 What We Demand from France
the Baden Palatinate disturbed the Grand Duchy
for a whole generation, while Prussia was all
that time its honourable protector. Would our
boundaries be safe in Bavarian hands? Let us
picture to ourselves the Bavarian Government
under a king less honestly German than Ludwig II,
surrounded on all sides, as it would be, by the
insubordinate province, kept in a constant state
of irritation by France, until at last the bad
neighbour returns in a favourable hour with the
proposal: Take all Baden and Wiirttemberg, and
give us back our own. Even a State has need to
pray, " Lead me not into temptation ! " What are
all compacts and federal constitutions against
the plain fact of the possession of the land? God
be praised, a result so unworthy as I am describing
is little to be feared in New Germany! The
noble blood that reddens the plains of Worth
and Weissenburg bound the armies of Prussia
and Bavaria in a close alliance. No new Lord
Castlereagh can step forward, as his prototype
did fifty years ago, to tell us scornfully that the
loosely compacted German Bund is not able to
defend Alsace. Yet the troublesome question
presses on us whether Bavaria possesses the in-
tellectual and the political power which are neces-
sary to fuse Alsace into union with itself. Facts
familiar to everyone supply the answer. What
was it that, in 1849, saved the German-minded
Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine for the
kingdom of Bavaria? The sword of Prussia.
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? What We Demand from France 167
The results of Bavarian administration in the
Palatinate are, to put it mildly, extremely modest.
Wanting in all creative power, she has indolently
adopted far too many of the Napoleonic institu-
tions of the province. It is precisely this despotic
administration of the French which must be
rooted out of Alsace. The people of the Palatinate
are German, body and soul, and yet they have
remained half strange, half hostile, to the German
State; and their representative almost always sat
in the Diet at Munich as a close party of fellow-
countrymen. The feeble and unnatural body of
the kingdom had not strength sufficient to break
down the separate life of the province. And it is
just that breaking down of a life of unnatural
separation that is our most serious duty in Alsace.
Let no man tell us that it matters very little in
the New Germany to what single State a district
may be assigned, since the Munich Parliament
must henceforth be content to play the part of a
Provincial Diet. To say so is to assume, foolishly,
that a work has already been completed which can
develop only slowly in the course of many years.
The powerful excitement of this war will certainly
find some statesmanlike expression, but we can-
not yet foresee the form which it may take. The
unity of the armies, which has manifested itself so
splendidly in the war, will continue, beyond all
question, in time of peace also. From that follows,
as an immediate corollary, a common diplomacy;
and from that again a collective German Parlia-
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? i68 What We Demand from France
ment. The North German Confederation must
and will remain true to those two fixed principles
which it laid down, not in fear of France, but from
a true sense of the conditions of Germany. It will
declare then, as it has done before, that we demand
the entrance of no South German State; and w^e
shall not loosen the strong and dearly-bought
compactness of our Confederation in the very
smallest degree. It is by no means certain that
the Bavarian Court will at once enter the Con-
federation on these conditions. If it should,
there will still remain very essential differences
between the separate States. The province of in-
ternal administration can hardly be affected in
the slightest degree of federal legislation.
The administration, the whole new hierarchy
of the Government offices' -- the communes, the
schools -- must all of them be organized in the best
possible way in Alsace-Lorraine. The Prussian
administration has shown indisputably, on the
Rhine, that it is superior, with all its defects, to the
French, or to that of the little States. Compare
the later history of the three great Rhenish towns,
which are limited in their natural development
by fortress walls. In what wretchedness and
beggary did Cologne stand in the days of Napoleon
in comparison with the golden Mainz and the
prosperous Strassburg! How far the stately
metropolis of the Lower Rhine surpasses both her
sisters to-day! All of that is due to the blessing
of Prussian laws. Prussia alone can undertake the
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? What We Demand from France 169
remorseless sweeping away of the French officials in
Alsace, which is indispensable, and replace the
foreign powers by vigorous home ones. Prussia
alone can steadfastly maintain the state of siege
which, we may easily imagine, may be necessary
for a time in some of the districts of the forlorn
land. The worst fault of the Prussian adminis-
tration, its perpetual scribbling, will seem innocent
to the people of Alsace after the corruption and
the statistical mania of the prefectures. A power-
ful State, which has impressed its spirit on the
inhabitants of the Rhine country and the people
of Posen, will know how to reconcile the separate
life of the half -French Germans; and just as
Prussian parties have spread themselves immedi-
ately, in three or four years, over every part of
the new provinces, the people of Alsace will one
day be ready to ally themselves with the various
parties of Prussia, and cease to form a separate
faction in the Parliament at Berlin.
The peace must break many a bond which was
dear to those borderers. Can Germany venture
to add the useless cruelty of separating them
from each other, and giving Metz to Prussia,
and Strassburg to Bavaria? The peace will cut
the people of Alsace off from a powerful nation, in
their connection with which they found their
honour and their pride. Can Germany humiHate
them in the hour of their violent liberation, and
raise the modest white and blue or the red and
yellow flag where waved the tricolor e of the Rev-
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? I70 What We Demand from France
olution, which once conquered the world? No!
These Germans have been accustomed to the larger
views of a great State ; they will not endure being
anything but Prussians, if they must cease to
be Frenchmen. Let us give them something in
exchange for what they have lost -- a great and
glorious State, a powerful capital, a free competi-
tion for all the offices and honours of a great
Empire. In the uniformity of a great State they
have lost all taste for those bewildering conditions
of South German political life which we ourselves
often hardly understand. The}^ might learn to be
Prussian citizens, but they would think it as ridicu-
lous if they were handed over to a king in Munich,
and to a supreme king in Berlin. Here, in fact,
there is no place for those half measures and
artificial relations. Nothing but the simple and
intelligible reality of the German State will serve.
Everything like "federal fortresses," or "territory
acknowledging no authority between itself and the
Empire " -- or by whatever name the too-clever-by-
half devices of gambling dilettantes are known -- is
utterly out of the question.
We, who are old champions of German unity,
have for six years been demanding the incorpora-
tion of the Elbe Duchies into the Prussian State,
although the hereditary claim of a German princely
house stood in the way. Is this review to plead to-
day that a little State should insinuate itself into
the far more dangerously threatened Duchies
of the Rhine, where no claim of right bars the claim
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? What We Demand from France 171
of Prussia? Once give up the standpoint of Ger-
man unity, and cease to ask only what is for the
benefit of the great Fatherland; once begin to
reckon, like a shopkeeper, what part of the prizes
of victory should be assigned to each of the con-
federate allies, and one must be driven to the mani-
fest absurdity that the border territories should be
split up into I know not how many fragments. It
would be a worthy repetition of that ludicrous
sub-division of the Department of the Saar which
brought the sarcasms of Europe on us in 181 5. At
that time, when the consciousness of the strength
of Prussia was yet in its infancy, Gneisenau could
still propose that Prussia should hand over Alsace
to Bavaria, and receive the territory of Anspach-
B aireuth in exchange . All such barters of territory
are out of the question to-day. The nation knows
how casually its internal boundary lines have
been drawn. It tolerates those barriers of sepa-
ration ; but it is with a quiet dislike, and without
any serious confidence ; and it looks unfavourably
on any attempt to draw s ' milar lines anew . Prussia
is not in a condition to hand over its own share
of the rewards of victory to each separate country
and people. If it were really so -- if the friendh-
ness of the Court of Munich to the Confederation
were to be bought only by the cession to them of
at least Northern Alsace, including Hagenau
and Weissenburg -- what an ugly escape it would
be out of our difficulties! how repulsive to the
people of Alsace! But what is essential -- the
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? 172 What We Demand from France
uninterrupted boundary-line stretching from Died-
enhofen to Mulhausen -- can never be given up by
Prussia without serious injury to Germany.
We are told in warning tones of the objections
of Europe. If you go to the foreigner for counsel
he will most likely suggest to you that the Grand
Duke of Hesse, with his Herr von Dalwigk, should
be created King of Alsace. It is so, and we are
surrounded by secret enemies. Even the un-
worthy attitude of England has a deeper root than
her mere indolent love of peace -- it springs from
her unspoken mistrust of the incalculable power
of New Germany. In company with the Great
Powers, Switzerland and the Netherlands see
our growing strength with suspicion. Watched
as we are by angry neighbours, we must trust
gallantly in our own right and in our sword. If
Germany is powerful enough to tear the border
country away from France, she can venture,
without troubling herself about the reluctance of
foreign countries, to hand them over to the pro-
tectorate of Prussia.
But the solution of the question of the people of
Alsace involves the nearest future of the German
State. For Bavaria, strengthened by Alsace, and
hemming in all her South German neighbours,
would be the Great Power of the German South.
No man who comprehends this great time would
dream of replacing the unlucky dualism of Austria
and Prussia by a new dualism of Prussia and
Bavaria, between which a powerless Baden and a
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? What We Demand from France 173
weak Wurttemberg would be kept feebly oscillating.
The day for the secondary States of Germany to rise
into fresh importance is past for ever. The first
Napoleon created the kingdom of the South with
the express intent that that seeming sovereignty
might bar the way against a real and powerful
German kingdom, and that its apparent authority
might undermine the real strength of Germany.
By their German loyalty these sovereigns have
deserved the thanks of the whole nation to-day.
They have obtained our forgiveness for the fault
of their original existence. The blood which had
to flow before North and South could be united
has flowed, thank God, in battle against the
hereditary enemy and not in civil war. Even we
radical partisans of unity are delighted, and have
no intention now of ever diminishing the authority
of the Bavarian Crown in opposition to the wishes
of the Bavarian people themselves. Why should
we be asked to increase the power of the second-
ary States, which is unquestionably too great at
present for any permanent national existence?
Why should we celebrate our victory over the third
Napoleon by strengthening the creation of the
first? We are determined to secure the unity of
Germany, and to leave no treacherous German
balance of power.
Deep-thinking persons advise us to reflect
whether the augmentation of its territory might
not predispose Bavaria to enter the German
Confederation. Those who talk so have little
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? 174 What We Demand from France
notion of the power of the national idea. The
entry of Bavaria is merely a question of time,
and it must come as surely as the blossom passes
into fruit. If Alsace be first made Prussian, and
then admitted, along with Baden, into the Ger-
man Confederation, we may rest secure against the
blindness of the sovereigns of Munich, and wait
in patience till the sense of what will be to her
an advantage constrains Bavaria to come in. If
Alsace fell to Bavaria, our European policy could
not rise out of its everlasting uncertainty, or our
German policy surmount the feeble vacillation
of its past. There is only one way in which the
jealousy of foreign Powers can prevent a just
peace for Germany -- they may try to separate
Bavaria from Prussia. If this be prevented,
pubHc opinion. North and South, will declare
itself unanimously, "It is our will that Alsace
and Lorraine should become Prussian, because
it is only so that they will become German.
? 152 What We Demand from France
instruction of each individual soldier, and the de-
light in accurate firing, which make him alone,
among the soldiers of France, capable of an effec-
tive partisan war (Parteigdngerkrieg) , and which
have created a species of volunteer popular army --
the franC'tireurs -- in his part of the country alone?
But, alas! when we praise the indestructible
German nature of the man of Alsace, the subject of
our praise declines to receive it. He adheres to his
conviction that he is no Suabian, and that all
Suabians are yellow-footed. He was introduced
by France, sooner than we Germans have been,
into the grand activity of the modem economical
world. To France he owes a most admirable
organization of the means of commercial inter-
course, a wide market, the influx of capital on a
great scale, and a high rate of wages, which, to this
day, draws daily labourers in crowds at harvest-
time from the fields of Baden across the Rhine.
From the French he has learned a certain savoir-
faire; his industrial activity, upon the whole,
stands higher than that of his German neighbour;
and in special branches -- in nursery gardening,
for instance -- he presents a marked contrast to
the easy-going indifference of the natives of Baden.
The son of Alsace is bound to his great State not
merely by ancient loyalty and pride, but by mate-
rial bonds, the power of which we, in our freer
political life, generally fail duly to appreciate. A
bureaucratic centralization possesses this advan-
tage after all, among a thousand sins, that it
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? What We Demand from France 153
penetrates like a binding mortar into every joint
of the social edifice, and renders it unspeakably
difficult to break one of its stones out of the wall.
What labour will be requisite before the threads
which lead across from Strassburg and Colmar to
Paris are all cut! The jonction-nomanie of the
French, their anxiety to make a profit out of the
State, even were it by means of a bureau de tabac,
has penetrated as far as these frontier lands. A
countless host of officials, pensioners and veterans,
swarms in this province. All the great institu-
tions of intercourse and credit are in reality State
establishments. What a power lies in the hands
of the Great Eastern Railway [of France], which,
although a private company in name, is in fact
connected closely with the State ! If the district is
given up to Germany, and this railway remains
what it is, every pointsman and guard on the
line will contribute to the French propaganda.
The smallest amount of resistance will probably
be offered to the reconquest in Lower Alsace, where
a third of the population is Protestant, and where
a vigorous intercourse is carried on with Baden
and the Palatinate. The state of affairs on the
Upper Rhine is far less promising. A powerful
clergy is there, adding fuel to the hatred of the
lively and excitable people against Germany, and
it finds no counterpoise in the Protestant portion
of the population, which amounts only to a tithe.
The manufactories of Mulhausen have their chief
market in France, although a considerable busi-
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? 154 What We Demand from France
ness has been done in the calico and muslin trade
of the place at the Leipzig fairs since the recent
treaties of commerce. The German State is
repugnant to the old reminiscences of this Swiss
city. Its patrician families assiduously display
their French sentiments. Its masses of working-
men, thrown together from long distances, and
who come, for the most part, from Germany,
have always welcomed the hollow pathos of the
Paris demagogues. But it is in German Lorraine
that we are threatened by the most embittered
hostility. In a population almost exclusively
Catholic, German ways of thought and Hfe have
never found so grand a development as in Alsace ;
and for more than a century they have been
abused by all the evil artifices of the French
bureaucracy -- most cynically of all in the old
Luxemburg districts round Diedenhofen; besides
which their ordinar}^ intercourse takes the peas-
antry to two French towns, to Metz and Nancy.
Most assuredly, the task of reuniting there the
broken links between the ages is one of the heaviest
that has ever been imposed upon the political
forces of our nation. Capital and culture, those
faithful allies of the German cause in Posen and
in Schleswig- Hoist ein, are our opponents. Ger-
man ways of thought and life have been terribly
discredited in the upper classes of these western
marches. What we deem horrible, they deem
sacred. They remember with pride how it was at
Strassburg that Rouget de I'lsle once composed
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? What We Demand from France 155
those burning lines which threatened the enemies
of France, the Germans, with death and destruc-
tion; and how the soldiers' Emperor passed out
to his war against us through the gate of Auster-
litz. The city which fought as a heroine in the
spiritual battles of the Reformation boasts to-day
in her own phrase, De porter fierement Vepee de la
France. What appears ridiculous to us seems to
them to speak for itself. They are not ashamed
to call themselves ''Monsieur" Schwilgue or
Stockle. They allow the venerable names of their
towns to be changed into Gaulish perversions,
Hke Wasselonne, Cemay, and Selestat. They
obediently accept the indescribably absurd Ober-
nai (for Oberehnheim) , and consider it fine to
write "antwergmestres^* when they are speaking
in their French historical works of the masters of
the old guilds (Meister der alien Ziinfte). They
are astonished at our shrugging our shoulders as we
contemplate the monument in honour of the indus-
trial grandees of the place, on the market-place at
Rappoltsweiler, and see enumerated on it, in the
style of the tables issued from the Prefectures,
the names Meyer, Jaques, Muller, Etienne, etc.
What to us seems freedom, to them appears
oppression. While taking part in the life of a
State whose parties bow beneath despotism as
their taskmaster, without an exception, they
have lost all perception for the truth that every
healthy kind of freedom imposes burdens and
duties. They look with repugnance upon the
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? 156 What We Demand from France
fundamental principle of the German State, the
duty of all men to serve the State in arms, and
the right of every local community (Gemeinde)
to manage its own affairs. Yet, with all their
devotion, they are not regarded by the Gauls as
their equals. The Frenchman contrives cleverly
to turn the fresh vigour of the man of Alsace
to the best advantage for himself; but he laughs
in secret at these honest tetes carries . It is simply
impossible to domesticate the modem French
art of imdergoing a grand revolution of political
thought and opinion once in every ten years among
these tough Suabians. Even in our own days,
just as in those of the First Revolution, it was
with hesitation and unwillingly that the men
of Alsace followed the periodically recurring gen-
eral desertion of the Flag, which is characteristic
of the party life of the French. When the Presi-
dent Louis Napoleon was engaged in his notorious
Emperor's tour through France, and the whole
country sang the praises of the new idol, he was
confronted by sturdy Republican pride in Alsace
alone. Loyalty of this kind is unintelHgible to
the Frenchman. Even Duruy, who stands nearer
to our culture than most of his fellow-countrymen,
remarks, condescendingly, of the population of
Alsace, after a few words of well-merited encom-
ium: ^^Mais elle delaisse trop lentement son mauvais
jargon allemand et son intolerance religieuse. '^
Mauvais jargon allemand! This is what is said of
the mother-tongue, the straightforward Aleman-
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? What We Demand from France 157
nic, which went so warm and kindly to the heart
of the youthful Goethe! Intolerance religieuse,
this is how they describe faithful adherence to
the evangelical faith ! Such is the distance which
separates the French from the German members
of their State.
It is precisely in this that there lies for us a
pledge of hope. The source of German life is
choked, but it is not dried up. Tear these men
out of the foreign soil, and they are as German
as ourselves. The men of Alsace and Lorraine
who have emigrated to America range themselves
regularly with the Germans, and, like the latter,
are at this day joyously hailing our victories. The
German spirit of the house of Ludwig Uhland met
hardly anywhere so clear an echo as in the songs of
August and Adolf Stober of Alsace. How touch-
ing is the admonition coming from lips such as
these to the Strassburgers :
Around your sons shall wind
Loyalty's bond from hand to hand,
And ever shall them bind
Unto the German fatherland!
And in Kleeburg there, not far from the Gaisberg
which the heroes of Lower Silesia stormed in the
awful fray, stood the cradle of Ludwig Hausser --
the loyal man, who was the first to relate to us in
the spirit of a true German the history of our
War of Liberation. In times past other German
districts have been sunk in depths of degeneration
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? 158 What We Demand from France
as deep as that of Alsace to-day. Under the rotten
dominion of the Crozier, and the iron yoke of the
first Empire, the burghers of Cologne and Coblenz
had hardly been reached by far-off tidings of the
triumphs of Frederick and the poems of Schiller,
of all that was great and genuine in modem Ger-
man history. Ten years of Prussian government
sufficed to recover these lost ones to German life.
If at this day foreign ways have roots incompar-
ably deeper in Colmar and Miilhausen than was
the case of old on the Lower Rhine, the vigour and
self -consciousness of the German nation, on the
other hand, have immeasurably increased since
that time. The people of Alsace are already
beginning to doubt the invincibility of their nation,
and at all events to divine the mighty growth of
the German Empire. Perverse obstinacy, and a
thousand French intrigues creeping in the dark,
will make every step on the newly conquered soil
difficult for us; but our ultimate success is certain,
for on our side fights what is stronger than the
lying artifices of the stranger -- nature herself and
the voice of common blood.
Ill
THE CLAIMS OF PRUSSIA
Who is strong enough to rule these lost lands, and
to recover them, by a salutary discipline, for Ger-
man life? Prussia, and Prussia alone. I am well
aware that there are many sagacious persons in
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? What We Demand from France 159
the North who utter words of warning and entreat
us to leave that awkward question for the present,
and, above all, to abstain, at this moment, from
awakening the wrath of conflicting parties which
has hardly been put to sleep. Singular error!
The question which arises at this point is elevated
above all parties; it is the question, whether a
German peace is to follow this German war,
whether the peace and the war are to be one in
fashion and in spirit, whether, as the German
swords struck their blows only for the sake of the
great Fatherland, the statutes of the peace are to
satisfy the demands of German security and hon-
our and not the miserable suggestions of particular-
ism. This is precisely the moment in which it is
the duty of the Press to speak plainly, while the
brand of the nation's sacred wrath is still being
forged in the fire, and before the glorious unanim-
ity of this war has been overgrown by the petty
play of parties. The eye of our nation is clear-
sighted, and its heart is wide enough, if rationally
instructed, to imderstand what is indispensable for
the security of Germany. Should a traitor here or
there be induced by the open expression of those
national demands, the rejection of which is impossi-
ble, prematurely to doff his mask and to lift up
once more his old favourite cry, "Rather French
than Prussian, " the defection of such gentry would
do no harm to the German cause.
If the war progresses on the grand scale in which
it has commenced, the leader of the Germans will
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? i6o What We Demand from France
conclude peace in the name of the Allies, and cause
whatever cessions of territory have to be demanded
to be made to the Allies in common. Further
arrangements in the conquered territory must then
be left as a matter for mutual discussion between
the German confederates. We Germans should
be most unwilling to exhibit the dreary remains of
our utter disunion to a peace congress, and to show
a contemptuous Europe that our poHtical unity is
very far from being as complete, as yet, as the
unity of the German army. But if these dis-
cussions should not lead rapidly and harmoniously
to a sound conclusion, a resolute and unanimous
public opinion would have to lighten the difficulties
of the task. What was it, besides the jealousy of
foreign countries, which hampered the German
statesmen of 1815? The uncertainty and con-
fusion that reigned in the national mind. One
party wanted to give the Duchy of Alsace to the
Crown Prince of Wurttemberg, and another to the
Archduke Charles. Amdt, himself, insisted only
on securing the freedom of the German river. Let
us show that we have learned in these great times
to live while our fathers knew only how to die for
Germany, and that the unity of the national will
has succeeded that indeterminate sort of national
oneness which inspired the men of the Second
Peace of Paris.
The current talk in the North is, " Let us reward
the* South Germans for their loyalty. " This is
one of those vague fashions of speech which is due
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? What We Demand from France i6i
to sincere feeling, but which in times of popular
excitement might easily lead to dangerous results.
Oh! if the North Germans who echo these phrases,
and fancy themselves very magnanimous and
noble in so doing, could but see how the eyes of
honest and clear-sighted South Germans flash out
with anger at such words! We want no reward,
they say ; if people want to reward us, let them at
all events not reward the particularism of the
Courts which we held down with such effort. I
speak under the impression of earnest warnings,
which reach me from South German friends, and
which entreat me to defend the interests of South
Germany in this review. The course of the
argument which these politicians press on be-
half of South Germany is plain and not open to
question.
France, they say, will not and cannot honour-
ably conclude peace until her army and her
administration are entirely changed. Until a
thoroughly different popular education has built
up a new nation round it, the French people will
never in earnest renounce their natural boundaries,
or their illusion that the weakness of Germany
is their strength. We in Upper Germany cannot
lead our lives in quiet, or witness in contemptu-
ous confidence the feverish rage of these Gallic
vandals, so long as Alsace has not been placed
under a strong protecting power. The Prussian
Eagle alone is able to keep his grip of what he has
once pounced upon. In any weaker grasp the
II
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? i62 What We Demand from France
border country would be but a temporary posses-
sion. We know better than our friends in the
North do the strength of the resistance which will
rise up in Strassburg and Miilhausen against their
Germanization. Prussian territory must be
wrapped, like a protecting mantle, round all our
threatened boundaries from Wesel, past Metz
and Saarlouis, down to Strassburg and Belfort.
Prussia may not always be led by strong men. She
will certainly not be led always by men of genius.
The time may come when Prussian particularism,
which is out of heart at present, may again say
to itself, "Is the shirt not nearer the skin than the
coat? Is it absolutely necessary that North
Germany should always defend South Germany? '*
Such questions ought to be impossible in the
Germany of the future. It is in that view that
we wish to bind Prussia to us by the only bond
which is always sure in politics: the bond of its
own vital interests. We have always regarded it
as a misfortune that the State which leads Ger-
many should be, in appearance at least, exclusively
North German, but the priceless opportunity to
leaven it with South German life is given us, so as
to do away with the misleading and arbitrary
distinction between North and South for ever.
Once before, in one of the pettiest periods of its
history, Prussia filled the httle South German
Anspach-Baireuth with Prussian political feeling.
To-day, in the splendour of power and fame,
she could accomplish a similar task with a like
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? What We Demand from France 163
success. It will be the healing of the German
Empire if our leading Power learns to like and to
value South German ways in their home, if the
citizen forces of her western, and the still immature
social conditions of her eastern, provinces find their
counterpoise -- in one word, if Prussia includes
and reconciles within herself all the opposites of
German life.
What have people in the North to oppose to such
solid arguments? Nothing but the self-sufficient
phrase that Prussia is strong enough to care for no
annexation of territory.
How magnanimous it
sounds! -- but the indolence and pettiness of
particularism lie behind it. Which of the two
lines of policy would be the loftier or the more
German? Is Prussia to enter into a suitable
engagement, flattering to the vanity of the Court of
Munich, and then to observe, at a comfortable
distance, Bavaria struggling to subdue her mutin-
ous province; or is she herself to undertake that
watch upon the Rhine which she alone can keep,
and decisively to take a province which will bring
nothing at first but trouble and resistance to its
new masters? Nothing but an exaggerated deli-
cacy, a false magnanimity, have hitherto prevented
the North German Press from demanding what is
necessary, and what the South German papers,
for example, the courageous Schwdbische Volkszei-
tung, have long been urging. Every other plan
which has been suggested for the future of these
border countries is foolish -- so foolish that it
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? 164 What We Demand from France
requires some self-command to induce one to refute
it. What is the use of attempting to answer the
suggestion that Alsace and Lorraine should form
a neutral State? Has not Europe had enough of
that already in the disgusting spectacle of the
Nation Luxembourgeoise? Only the brain of an
English Manchester man, surrounded by the mists
he blows from his pipe of peace, could conceive
such extraordinary bubbles. No wonder that
every enemy of Germany should approve of this
suggestion. No better way has yet been thought
of to enable France to recover all that she has lost.
The proposal to entrust this outwork of Ger-
many to a secondary State appears scarcely more
unreasonable. One would think we were hurled
back out of the great year of 1870 into the times
of the Federal Diet. We seem, again, to hear
those wise thinkers of the Eschenheimer Gasse,
who kept warning us so earnestly against the
flames of centralization, while the marsh- water of
petty Statedom was rising above our shoulders --
those gallant riflemen patriots who shouted so
lustily for the unity of Germany -- but with Nurem-
berg as its capital! Prince and people in Baden
have acquitted themselves nobly in trying times;
and we can now fully comprehend, and that per-
haps for the first time, what it cost them to main-
tain an honourable national policy here for four
years in face of the enemy. Are we, in return,
to impose a burden on that State which could
not fail to crush it? The plan of founding an
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? What We Demand from France 165
Upper Rhine kingdom of Baden proceeds from
nothing but a too conscientious study of the map ;
and an old North German mistake has procured for
it a few adherents in the North. As Baden has
reckoned among its sons a long line of distin-
guished politicians, from Rotteck and Liebenstein
down to Mathy and Roggenbach, the men of the
North have accustomed themselves to expectations,
founded on the intellectual power of the country,
which no State of the third rank could possibly
fulfil. In Baden itself people are more modest.
Every reasonable man shudders at the thought
of a Diet of Carlsruhe, half made up of the repre-
sentatives of Alsace. If they allied themselves
with the same party in Alsace, who could control
the strong native Ultramontane and Radical
parties which an intelligent Liberal majority keeps
in order at present? Such a State would delight
the eyes of a map-drawer, as the kingdom of the
Netherlands did, when it was welded out of
Belgium and Holland; but, like that, it would be a
political impossibility.
The Government of Baden no doubt regards the
prospect of an acquisition which would be the ruin
of the country with sufficient wisdom and patriot-
ism. All the more must it be listened to with
respect, as it is most nearly concerned in the matter,
when it protests decisively against any increase of
Bavaria by Alsace. I shall not grope in the filth
of a petty past; but it is impossible for people in
Carlsruhe to forget that the desires of Bavaria for
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? i66 What We Demand from France
the Baden Palatinate disturbed the Grand Duchy
for a whole generation, while Prussia was all
that time its honourable protector. Would our
boundaries be safe in Bavarian hands? Let us
picture to ourselves the Bavarian Government
under a king less honestly German than Ludwig II,
surrounded on all sides, as it would be, by the
insubordinate province, kept in a constant state
of irritation by France, until at last the bad
neighbour returns in a favourable hour with the
proposal: Take all Baden and Wiirttemberg, and
give us back our own. Even a State has need to
pray, " Lead me not into temptation ! " What are
all compacts and federal constitutions against
the plain fact of the possession of the land? God
be praised, a result so unworthy as I am describing
is little to be feared in New Germany! The
noble blood that reddens the plains of Worth
and Weissenburg bound the armies of Prussia
and Bavaria in a close alliance. No new Lord
Castlereagh can step forward, as his prototype
did fifty years ago, to tell us scornfully that the
loosely compacted German Bund is not able to
defend Alsace. Yet the troublesome question
presses on us whether Bavaria possesses the in-
tellectual and the political power which are neces-
sary to fuse Alsace into union with itself. Facts
familiar to everyone supply the answer. What
was it that, in 1849, saved the German-minded
Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine for the
kingdom of Bavaria? The sword of Prussia.
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? What We Demand from France 167
The results of Bavarian administration in the
Palatinate are, to put it mildly, extremely modest.
Wanting in all creative power, she has indolently
adopted far too many of the Napoleonic institu-
tions of the province. It is precisely this despotic
administration of the French which must be
rooted out of Alsace. The people of the Palatinate
are German, body and soul, and yet they have
remained half strange, half hostile, to the German
State; and their representative almost always sat
in the Diet at Munich as a close party of fellow-
countrymen. The feeble and unnatural body of
the kingdom had not strength sufficient to break
down the separate life of the province. And it is
just that breaking down of a life of unnatural
separation that is our most serious duty in Alsace.
Let no man tell us that it matters very little in
the New Germany to what single State a district
may be assigned, since the Munich Parliament
must henceforth be content to play the part of a
Provincial Diet. To say so is to assume, foolishly,
that a work has already been completed which can
develop only slowly in the course of many years.
The powerful excitement of this war will certainly
find some statesmanlike expression, but we can-
not yet foresee the form which it may take. The
unity of the armies, which has manifested itself so
splendidly in the war, will continue, beyond all
question, in time of peace also. From that follows,
as an immediate corollary, a common diplomacy;
and from that again a collective German Parlia-
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? i68 What We Demand from France
ment. The North German Confederation must
and will remain true to those two fixed principles
which it laid down, not in fear of France, but from
a true sense of the conditions of Germany. It will
declare then, as it has done before, that we demand
the entrance of no South German State; and w^e
shall not loosen the strong and dearly-bought
compactness of our Confederation in the very
smallest degree. It is by no means certain that
the Bavarian Court will at once enter the Con-
federation on these conditions. If it should,
there will still remain very essential differences
between the separate States. The province of in-
ternal administration can hardly be affected in
the slightest degree of federal legislation.
The administration, the whole new hierarchy
of the Government offices' -- the communes, the
schools -- must all of them be organized in the best
possible way in Alsace-Lorraine. The Prussian
administration has shown indisputably, on the
Rhine, that it is superior, with all its defects, to the
French, or to that of the little States. Compare
the later history of the three great Rhenish towns,
which are limited in their natural development
by fortress walls. In what wretchedness and
beggary did Cologne stand in the days of Napoleon
in comparison with the golden Mainz and the
prosperous Strassburg! How far the stately
metropolis of the Lower Rhine surpasses both her
sisters to-day! All of that is due to the blessing
of Prussian laws. Prussia alone can undertake the
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? What We Demand from France 169
remorseless sweeping away of the French officials in
Alsace, which is indispensable, and replace the
foreign powers by vigorous home ones. Prussia
alone can steadfastly maintain the state of siege
which, we may easily imagine, may be necessary
for a time in some of the districts of the forlorn
land. The worst fault of the Prussian adminis-
tration, its perpetual scribbling, will seem innocent
to the people of Alsace after the corruption and
the statistical mania of the prefectures. A power-
ful State, which has impressed its spirit on the
inhabitants of the Rhine country and the people
of Posen, will know how to reconcile the separate
life of the half -French Germans; and just as
Prussian parties have spread themselves immedi-
ately, in three or four years, over every part of
the new provinces, the people of Alsace will one
day be ready to ally themselves with the various
parties of Prussia, and cease to form a separate
faction in the Parliament at Berlin.
The peace must break many a bond which was
dear to those borderers. Can Germany venture
to add the useless cruelty of separating them
from each other, and giving Metz to Prussia,
and Strassburg to Bavaria? The peace will cut
the people of Alsace off from a powerful nation, in
their connection with which they found their
honour and their pride. Can Germany humiHate
them in the hour of their violent liberation, and
raise the modest white and blue or the red and
yellow flag where waved the tricolor e of the Rev-
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? I70 What We Demand from France
olution, which once conquered the world? No!
These Germans have been accustomed to the larger
views of a great State ; they will not endure being
anything but Prussians, if they must cease to
be Frenchmen. Let us give them something in
exchange for what they have lost -- a great and
glorious State, a powerful capital, a free competi-
tion for all the offices and honours of a great
Empire. In the uniformity of a great State they
have lost all taste for those bewildering conditions
of South German political life which we ourselves
often hardly understand. The}^ might learn to be
Prussian citizens, but they would think it as ridicu-
lous if they were handed over to a king in Munich,
and to a supreme king in Berlin. Here, in fact,
there is no place for those half measures and
artificial relations. Nothing but the simple and
intelligible reality of the German State will serve.
Everything like "federal fortresses," or "territory
acknowledging no authority between itself and the
Empire " -- or by whatever name the too-clever-by-
half devices of gambling dilettantes are known -- is
utterly out of the question.
We, who are old champions of German unity,
have for six years been demanding the incorpora-
tion of the Elbe Duchies into the Prussian State,
although the hereditary claim of a German princely
house stood in the way. Is this review to plead to-
day that a little State should insinuate itself into
the far more dangerously threatened Duchies
of the Rhine, where no claim of right bars the claim
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? What We Demand from France 171
of Prussia? Once give up the standpoint of Ger-
man unity, and cease to ask only what is for the
benefit of the great Fatherland; once begin to
reckon, like a shopkeeper, what part of the prizes
of victory should be assigned to each of the con-
federate allies, and one must be driven to the mani-
fest absurdity that the border territories should be
split up into I know not how many fragments. It
would be a worthy repetition of that ludicrous
sub-division of the Department of the Saar which
brought the sarcasms of Europe on us in 181 5. At
that time, when the consciousness of the strength
of Prussia was yet in its infancy, Gneisenau could
still propose that Prussia should hand over Alsace
to Bavaria, and receive the territory of Anspach-
B aireuth in exchange . All such barters of territory
are out of the question to-day. The nation knows
how casually its internal boundary lines have
been drawn. It tolerates those barriers of sepa-
ration ; but it is with a quiet dislike, and without
any serious confidence ; and it looks unfavourably
on any attempt to draw s ' milar lines anew . Prussia
is not in a condition to hand over its own share
of the rewards of victory to each separate country
and people. If it were really so -- if the friendh-
ness of the Court of Munich to the Confederation
were to be bought only by the cession to them of
at least Northern Alsace, including Hagenau
and Weissenburg -- what an ugly escape it would
be out of our difficulties! how repulsive to the
people of Alsace! But what is essential -- the
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? 172 What We Demand from France
uninterrupted boundary-line stretching from Died-
enhofen to Mulhausen -- can never be given up by
Prussia without serious injury to Germany.
We are told in warning tones of the objections
of Europe. If you go to the foreigner for counsel
he will most likely suggest to you that the Grand
Duke of Hesse, with his Herr von Dalwigk, should
be created King of Alsace. It is so, and we are
surrounded by secret enemies. Even the un-
worthy attitude of England has a deeper root than
her mere indolent love of peace -- it springs from
her unspoken mistrust of the incalculable power
of New Germany. In company with the Great
Powers, Switzerland and the Netherlands see
our growing strength with suspicion. Watched
as we are by angry neighbours, we must trust
gallantly in our own right and in our sword. If
Germany is powerful enough to tear the border
country away from France, she can venture,
without troubling herself about the reluctance of
foreign countries, to hand them over to the pro-
tectorate of Prussia.
But the solution of the question of the people of
Alsace involves the nearest future of the German
State. For Bavaria, strengthened by Alsace, and
hemming in all her South German neighbours,
would be the Great Power of the German South.
No man who comprehends this great time would
dream of replacing the unlucky dualism of Austria
and Prussia by a new dualism of Prussia and
Bavaria, between which a powerless Baden and a
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? What We Demand from France 173
weak Wurttemberg would be kept feebly oscillating.
The day for the secondary States of Germany to rise
into fresh importance is past for ever. The first
Napoleon created the kingdom of the South with
the express intent that that seeming sovereignty
might bar the way against a real and powerful
German kingdom, and that its apparent authority
might undermine the real strength of Germany.
By their German loyalty these sovereigns have
deserved the thanks of the whole nation to-day.
They have obtained our forgiveness for the fault
of their original existence. The blood which had
to flow before North and South could be united
has flowed, thank God, in battle against the
hereditary enemy and not in civil war. Even we
radical partisans of unity are delighted, and have
no intention now of ever diminishing the authority
of the Bavarian Crown in opposition to the wishes
of the Bavarian people themselves. Why should
we be asked to increase the power of the second-
ary States, which is unquestionably too great at
present for any permanent national existence?
Why should we celebrate our victory over the third
Napoleon by strengthening the creation of the
first? We are determined to secure the unity of
Germany, and to leave no treacherous German
balance of power.
Deep-thinking persons advise us to reflect
whether the augmentation of its territory might
not predispose Bavaria to enter the German
Confederation. Those who talk so have little
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? 174 What We Demand from France
notion of the power of the national idea. The
entry of Bavaria is merely a question of time,
and it must come as surely as the blossom passes
into fruit. If Alsace be first made Prussian, and
then admitted, along with Baden, into the Ger-
man Confederation, we may rest secure against the
blindness of the sovereigns of Munich, and wait
in patience till the sense of what will be to her
an advantage constrains Bavaria to come in. If
Alsace fell to Bavaria, our European policy could
not rise out of its everlasting uncertainty, or our
German policy surmount the feeble vacillation
of its past. There is only one way in which the
jealousy of foreign Powers can prevent a just
peace for Germany -- they may try to separate
Bavaria from Prussia. If this be prevented,
pubHc opinion. North and South, will declare
itself unanimously, "It is our will that Alsace
and Lorraine should become Prussian, because
it is only so that they will become German.
