Chapter XXIII: The Progress of Germany Towards National Unity

In ad 1806 the Holy Empire died and was buried and to all appearance soon forgotten. No outworn shape of the past could have seemed less likely to be ever recalled to life, for the forces which had so long assailed and had at last destroyed it were stronger than ever, and threatened with extinction even that feeble shadow which, under the name of the Germanic Confederation, affected in some fashion to represent the unity of the German nation. Fifty years passed away; new questions arose; Europe ranged itself into new parties; men’s minds began to be swayed by new feelings. Time drove fast onwards, and the Holy Roman Empire seemed left so far behind among the mists of the past, that it was hard to believe that living men had seen it and borne part in its government. Then suddenly there arises from these cold ashes a new, vigorous, self-confident German Empire, a State which, although most different, as well in its inner character as in its form and legal aspect, from its venerable predecessor, is nevertheless in a real sense that predecessor’s representative. An account of this new creation of our own days, perhaps the most striking and fertile epoch in European annals, is therefore a fitting, if not a necessary, pendant to the history of the elder Empire; it is, in fact, the latest act of a long drama, which gives a new and more cheerful meaning to all that has gone before. For not only does the new Empire hold that central place among Continental States which the old Empire once filled: it is, in a moral and intellectual sense, the offspring of the old Empire, and, but for the pre-existence of the other, could never have itself come into being.

It has been shewn in the earlier chapters of this treatise, how from the days of the Emperor Henry III, when the Holy Empire reached the maximum of its power, every succeeding change tended to sap its vitality, loosen its cohesion, diminish its material resources, weaken its hold on the love and faith of its subjects. The first crisis was marked by the death of Frederick II, when Italy was lost beyond hope of recovery; the second by the Reformation, and particularly by the Treaty of ad 1555; the third by the Peace of Westphalia, when Germany was legally reconstituted as a sort of federation of mutually suspicious and unfriendly states; the fourth, one may perhaps say, by the Seven Years’ War, when one vigorous member successfully resisted the whole force of Austria and some minor German powers, backed by the armies of France and Russia. It is easy for us now to see, that as after the first of these crises the Empire had no longer any chance of making good its claim to be a world-monarchy, co-extensive with Christianity, so after the second its prospects as a national State, claiming to unite all Germany under a single effective administration, were practically hopeless. The Germans, however, as was natural, did not see this until in 1648 the admission of the substantial independence of the princes had turned the imperial dignity into a mask under which the harsh features of the Hapsburg sovereigns tried in vain to conceal themselves. Over the sentiment of the people its name still retained some power, for it was associated with the glories of their earlier history, with heroic memories enshrined in song, with claims of world-supremacy which they could not bring themselves to forget. But it was no longer a rallying-point for national feeling, a centre to which the country looked for inspiration and guidance. There was indeed but little national feeling in the Germany of that age, little political hope or ardour, little interest in the welfare of the State as a whole, for there was nothing to stir men’s feelings as Germans or citizens, no struggles for great common objects against foreign powers, no play of political life at home, no assemblies, no free press, no local self-government. But, even if a national feeling had been awake, it would hardly have attached itself to the old Empire, which was not only cumbrous and antiquated, but seemed strange and in a way un-German, just because it was more than German; and which found the support of Rome now almost as injurious as her enmity had been in times gone by, since the friendship of Rome meant the hatred and jealousy of the Protestants. It can hardly be said that the Empire was so utterly dead but that it might have been vivified by a really great man, just as such an one might perhaps make the English or the Spanish monarchy a power even to-day. But had this come to pass, it would have been because the genius gave life to the office, not, as of old, because the office inspired its holder. And it was not so to be. The imperial throne did not find a man of the first order to fill it; and continued to stand rather because nobody appeared to overthrow it, than because any good reason remained for it in the changed order of things.

The denationalization of Germany had indeed gone beyond politics. As after the establishment of foreign rule in Italy, Italian art and letters had become frigid and affected, so with that extinction of any free or united public life in Germany which followed the Thirty Years’ War, the blossoms of literature which had put themselves forth in the age of the Reformation were nipped and withered away. In Lewis the Fourteenth’s time, French influence became dominant in Germany, no less in poetry and criticism, than in matters of dress, furniture, and etiquette; and the ambition of German men of letters was to put off what they were hardly ashamed to call their native barbarism, and imitate the sparkling elegance of their Western neighbours and enemies. French was the fashionable language; French ideas and modes of thought were no less supreme than Greek ideas had been at Rome in the last half century of the Republic; French men of letters and science were imported, as apostles of enlightenment, by the best of the German princes, just as Germans have in later times been drawn into Russia by the Tsars.

Just when this reign of foreign taste was most undisputed, just when the political life and national sentiment of Germany seemed bound in a frozen sleep, a change began; and it began, like many other great changes, from an unpromising quarter and in an unconscious way.

From the time of the Swabian Emperors, the Margrave of Brandenburg was one of the most considerable princes of the Empire, and before the reign of Rudolf the First he had become definitely recognized as an Elector with the office of Archchamberlain. His dominions consisted of the Mark proper, or Old Mark, to which were added the New and the Middle Mark, a flat, sandy territory of heaths and woods lying along the Elbe and the Havel, which had been conquered from the Wends in the days of Henry the Fowler, and gradually filled by a Teutonic population, together with a more or less vague authority, or claim of authority, over the Slavonic tribes to the north and east. In ad 1411 this territory was delivered over to Frederick, sixth Burggrave of Nürnberg, by the Emperor Sigismund, whom he had served faithfully, and to whom he had advanced moneys, which the latter in this way repaid, giving Brandenburg as a sort of pledge which was not likely to be redeemed: and in 1415 Sigismund formally conferred the Mark and the electoral dignity upon Frederick and his heirs, still, however, reserving (but on the occasion of the formal investiture of 1417 omitting this reservation) the right of redeeming his grant by the payment of 400,000 Hungarian gold gulden, and retaining to himself and his male heirs the reversion in the Electorate, expectant on the extinction of Frederick’s line, an event which has not yet happened. This Burggrave Frederick was the lineal descendant of a certain Conrad of Hohenzollern (first Burggrave in the days of Frederick Barbarossa), scion of an old Swabian family whose ancestral castle stands in the high limestone plateau of the Rauhe Alp, not very far from Hohenstaufen and from Altorf, the original seat of the Welfs; and this Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of the present Emperor William the Second. From the time of Elector Frederick the house of Hohenzollern held Brandenburg, adding to it by slow degrees various other scattered territories, with claims, which for a time could not be made good, to other territories, and in particular acquiring, in 1605 and 1618, the district known as East Prussia, lying along the Baltic beyond the Vistula, as the heritage of Albert the last Grandmaster of the Teutonic knights. The Hohenzollerns embraced Protestantism, and after having played (in the person of the Elector George William) a rather contemptible part in the Thirty Years’ War, produced a really distinguished prince in Frederick the Great Elector, who reigned in the latter half of the seventeenth century. He freed East Prussia from the supremacy of Poland, consolidated his straggling dominions into a well-ordered state, and gave to his subjects, by the lustre of his military successes, a sort of incipient consciousness of national existence.

In 1700 his son Frederick, having secured or purchased the approval of the Emperor Leopold, but not without a furious protest from Pope Clement XI, whose prophetic spirit dreaded and denounced in Hildebrandine fashion the admission of a heretic to the most sacred of secular offices, called himself king of Prussia, taking his title from the above-named Duchy of East Prussia, and crowning himself at Königsberg, its ancient capital, on January 18, 1701. This region was not a part of the Holy Empire, and its original inhabitants, the Old Prussians, were not Germans at all, but a Lithuanian people, who had remained pagans and barbarians till they were half conquered, half exterminated, by the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and their country Germanized by a constant immigration from the West. It is a curious freak of history, not unlike that which has extended the British name to the Teutonic and Gaelic inhabitants of the largest European island, that has transferred the name of this declining race to the greatest of modern German states.

This assumption of royalty, the work of a prince who contributed nothing else to the greatness of his house, was a matter of far greater consequence than might have at first appeared. At that time no other member of the Empire (except the Emperor himself, who was king of Bohemia, and the Elector of Saxony, who had in 1697 been chosen king of Poland) wore a crown, and the new dignity was soon felt to have raised its owner into a higher European position, for it made him the fellow of the sovereigns of France, England, Denmark, Sweden, and brought him into what soon became a rivalry with his titular superior the Emperor. Had Austria been wise, she would have rejected a bribe far larger than that by which her compliance was purchased, would even have dispensed with the goodwill of Brandenburg in the struggle of the Spanish Succession, rather than have yielded to this young antagonist a moral advantage of such moment. For the time, however, little change seemed to have been made. Frederick the First was feeble and peaceful: the eccentric Frederick William I, who followed him, had a dutiful reverence for his Emperor, and prized his regiment of giants too highly to care to risk them in war. He was, moreover, thrifty to the verge of parsimony; and his energy, which was considerable, found scope for its exercise in a careful oversight of the revenue and civil service of the country which largely contributed to the successes of his son.

The greatness of the Prussian monarchy begins with Frederick II, the most remarkable man who had succeeded to a throne since Charles V. The military talents by which Europe knows him best, are a less worthy title to the admiration of posterity, than the ardour he shewed for good administration, for the prosperity and happiness of his people. Along with the instinctive desire of a powerful and active mind to have everything done in the best way, he had a complete superiority to prejudice and tradition, a love of justice, and a genuine sympathy, not indeed for political liberty, but for cultivation and enlightenment. It was at bottom this, fully as much as the glories of his campaigns, that made him, in spite of his cold heart and scornful manner, a favourite with his own people and an object of curiosity, even of pride, throughout Germany. Upon that country the moral effect of his reign was great. It stirred the national spirit to see a German prince defend his naturally weak kingdom against the allied might of Austria, France, and Rusia, and come out of the terrible struggle with undaunted confidence and undiminished territories. While the other states of the Empire were languishing under an old fashioned and wasteful misgovernment, Prussia set the example of an administration which, while rigidly frugal, strove to develope the resources of the country, of a highly-disciplined army, of a codified law, of a reformed system of procedure, of a capital to which men of literary and scientific eminence were gathered from all quarters. While bigotry and feudalism reigned on the Danube, Frederick made Berlin the centre of light for North Germany; and in this way effected as much for his kingdom as he had done by the seizure of wealthy Silesia, giving it a representative position, a claim on German interest and sympathy which there had been little in its earlier history, or in that of his own house, to awaken. But in all this it would be a mistake to attribute to the great king a conception of what it became afterwards the fashion to call ‘Prussia’s German Mission,’ the conscious foresight of a German patriot anxious to pave the way for the unity of the nation. There is little in Frederick’s words or acts to shew such a feeling; what he planned and cared for was the strength and wellbeing of his own Prussian State. And when at the end of his life he took a lead in the politics of the Empire, by forming the League of Princes to oppose the ambitious designs of Joseph II, his purpose was simply to maintain the status quo,—that status quo whose dangers were so terribly displayed by the events of the next twenty years. That League is memorable, not as being in any sense a project of reform, but as the first instance in which Prussia appears heading a party among the German States in hostility to Austria: it is the beginning of that Dualism, as the Germans call it, which at last reached a point where nothing but a life and death struggle could decide between the rival powers.

What glory Prussia had gained under Frederick II she seemed determined to lose under his unworthy successor. Nothing, except indeed the behaviour of the minor German princes, could have been weaker, meaner, less patriotic than her conduct in the struggle with France which began in 1792. In 1791 she had allied herself with Austria, but their relations, as might have been expected, soon ceased to be cordial. Frederick William II began to negotiate with the French Republic, in the hope of getting something for himself out of the confusion, and in 1795 concluded with France the separate Peace of Basel, by which a line of demarcation was drawn between North and South Germany, the former being declared neutral. When in 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine had been formed under Napoleon’s protectorate and the Holy Empire extinguished, Prussia, which by a convention (February 15, 1806) had obtained possession of Hanover, part, it need hardly be said, of the dominions of her late ally, the English king George III, endeavoured to unite the Northern States in a league, at whose head should stand her king, with the title and prerogative of Emperor, the Direktorium being composed of himself and the rulers of Saxony and Hessen-Cassel. Talleyrand, however, found it easy to baffle this scheme, on which he had at first pretended to smile—it is memorable as the first appearance of the conception of a North-German Confederation—and soon afterwards the defeats of Jena and Auerstädt, followed by that of Friedland, left Prussia at Napoleon’s mercy, 1806. if mercy he had any. By the Peace of Tilsit she submitted, losing her lands west of the Elbe, and in all more than half of her territories, recognizing the Confederation of the Rhine, and abandoning all claim to interfere in German politics. Meanwhile Saxony, the kingdom of Westphalia which Napoleon had just created, and the other purely German members of the old Empire, joined the Rhenish Confederation, that is to say, enrolled themselves the vassals of the Parisian crown. French domination was offensive everywhere, but nowhere so offensive as in Prussia, the feebleness of whose Court seems to have emboldened Napoleon to treat her with an insolent scorn he never thought of shewing to the more tenacious, though not more patriotic, Hapsburgs. Hence, too, when the uprising came, and the swelling wave of popular enthusiasm tossed back the French beyond the Elbe, the Weser, the Rhine itself, it was the much-suffering Prussian people that was foremost in the fight; it was northern heroes of the sword and pen, many of them not Prussians by birth, but drawn to Prussia as the centre of national hopes, that won the admiration and gratitude of a liberated Fatherland; while the French, who had been wont to treat the North Germans with a strangely misplaced contempt, felt for them, after the campaigns of Leipzig and Waterloo, a hatred not less bitter than that they bore to England herself.

This great deliverance was far more the work of the people than of King or Court; but as was natural, it induced a burst of loyalty which strengthened and glorified the Prussian monarchy in the eyes of Germany, and gave it an opportunity of placing itself at the head of the nation. For the national feeling which had smouldered for two centuries or more, had now risen into a strong and brilliant flame; and it was on Prussia, more than on any other state, that its light was shed. Austria’s merits as well as her faults did not permit her to be popular; Bavaria and Würtemberg had been aggrandized by Napoleon; Saxony had adhered to him throughout; Prussia had suffered most grievously and triumphed most signally. Now would have been the time for her to answer to the great cry that went up for freedom and unity, to secure by firm action the rights of the people in a consolidated German state.

But the hour came without the man. Frederick William III was well intentioned indeed, but feeble and narrow-minded; and his court had not yet recovered from its horror at the principles of 1789 and the acts of 1793. As the want of representative institutions and of the habit of combination for political purposes gave the desire for unity no means of expressing itself practically, it remained an aspiration, a sentiment, nothing more. Thus, when the Congress of Vienna met to reconstitute Europe and Germany, the princes were masters of the situation; and they used their advantage with characteristic selfishness. The proclamation of Kalisch issued by the sovereigns of Prussia and Russia, when they leagued themselves against Napoleon (March 25th, 1813), announced the object of the two powers to be ‘to aid the German peoples in recovering freedom and independence, and to afford to them effective protection and defence in re-establishing a venerable Empire.’ The reconstitution of the country, it was added, was to be effected solely by the united action of the princes and peoples, and was to proceed ‘from the ancient and native spirit of the German nation; that Germany, the more perfectly this work was executed in its principles and compass, might so much the more appear again among the peoples of Europe in renovated youth, strength, and unity.’ But at the Congress nothing was heard, and indeed nothing would have been listened to, of the kind. When it opened, Hardenberg the Prussian minister presented a scheme which, although it recognized in the princes an independence in some respects considerable, and already conceded to them by the treaties securing their adhesion against France, proposed to treat Germany as being for many purposes a united state, under institutions whose tendency would have been to make her less and less of a mere league. Austria however, under the chilling influence of Metternich, himself perhaps prompted by the darker spirit of Frederick von Gentz, received these proposals with dull disfavour: the minor potentates, headed by Bavaria and Würtemberg, entered energetic protests against anything which could infringe on their sovereignty, protests so sweeping that even Austria was obliged to remind them that under the old Empire certain rights were assured to German subjects, while the envoy of Hanover exclaimed against the ‘Sultanism’ of these members of the late Confederation of the Rhine. At last, after a long period of confusion and uncertainty, in which projects for the restoration of the ‘ancient venerable Empire’ were frequently put forward, and supported among others by Stein, a counter-scheme, propounded by Metternich, when he found that he could not secure the complete independence of the German princes, was moulded into the Act of Foundation of the Germanic Confederation. The work was hastily done, under the pressure of alarm at Napoleon’s return from Elba, and professed to be only an outline, which was to be subsequently improved and filled in. The diplomatists were exhausted by a long course of bickering and intrigue upon this and other questions; many were dissatisfied, but every one saw that his opponent’s power of hindering was greater than his own power of forcing a proposition through; and as it was clear that something must be done, people brought themselves to a sort of acquiescence, which, though it professed to be only temporary, could not easily be recalled, and made it harder to reopen the discussion. So the proposed completion, as was natural in a matter of so much delicacy and difficulty, never took place; and the revised draft of the Act of Confederation, adopted on June 10th, 1815, a week before Waterloo, was in all its main features the constitution which lasted down till 1866. Prussia yielded with unaccountable readiness—unaccountable except on the hypothesis that her ministers, Hardenberg and William von Humboldt, despaired at such a time and among such people of effecting anything satisfactory—the points on which she had at first insisted; and made little further objection to the carrying out of Metternich’s views. Her king was a faithful member of the Holy Alliance: her government adhered to the principles associated with that compact, and was content in internal questions to follow humbly in the wake of Austria. While the Reaction was triumphing in the rest of Europe, Particularism triumphed at Vienna, and the interests of the German people were forgotten or ignored.

The federal constitution, while recognizing fully the sovereignty of the princes in their own territories, had made only the feeblest provisions for the concession of popular rights and the establishment of representative institutions in the several states. Almost the only expression which it allowed to be given to the idea of national unity was in the creation of a central federal body, the Diet, wherein only the princes and not their subjects were represented, which was empowered to act in foreign affairs, and which could be made by the great princes the means of repressing any liberal movements on the part of an individual member. But this did not satisfy Metternich. The excitement produced by the War of Liberation did not at once subside: the ideas of freedom, national unity, national greatness, which it had called forth, had obtained a dominion over the minds of the German youth; and were eloquently preached by some of the noblest spirits among its teachers. These ideas, however, innocent as they would now appear, and well founded as was the jealousy of Russian influence which prompted their expression, were watched with fear and suspicion by the narrow minds of the Prussian king and the minister of Francis of Austria. In 1819, therefore, Metternich brought together, as if by accident, the ministers of ten leading German courts at Karlsbad in Bohemia, and procured their assent to a series of measures extinguishing the freedom of the press, restraining university teaching, forbidding societies and political meetings, and erecting a sort of inquisition at Mentz for the discovery and punishment of democratic agitators. These measures were soon after adopted by the Federal Diet at Frankfort, and followed by conferences of ministers at Vienna, out of which grew the instrument known as the Vienna Final Act (Schlussakt) of 1820, whereby the constitution of the Confederation was modified in a reactionary and anti-national spirit. Such securities as existed for the rights of the subject in the several states were diminished, while the Diet saw its powers enlarged whenever they could be employed for the suppression of free institutions, and received a frightfully wide police jurisdiction through the territories of the minor princes.

This Karlsbad Conference struck the keynote of the policy of the Federal Diet during the three and thirty dreary years that lie between 1815 and the brief though bright awakening of 1848. If the selfishness of rulers were not the commonest moral of history, there would be something extraordinary as well as offensive in the horror of change and reform which was now exhibited by these very princes who had, with Napoleon’s help or connivance, carried out by the mediatization of their weaker neighbours a revolution far more sweeping, and in point of law less defensible, than any which the patriotic reformers now proposed. These potentates, especially those of Northern Germany, were for the most part possessed by the same reactionary feelings as their two great neighbours; their rule was harsh and repressive, conceding little or nothing to the demands of their subjects, and prepared, especially after their alarms had been renewed by the revolution of 1830 in France, to check the most harmless expressions of the aspiration for national unity. Such unity now appeared further off than ever. While the old Empire lasted, princes and peoples owned one common head in the Emperor, and lived under a constitution which had descended, however modified, from the days when the nation formed a single powerful state. Now, by the mediatization of the lesser principalities, the extinction of the Knights of the Empire (Reichsritterschaft), the absorption of all the free cities save four, the class which had formed a link between the princes and the mass of the nation had been removed; the sovereigns had, in becoming fewer, become more isolated and more independent; they were members rather of the European than of the German commonwealth. Those moral effects of the War of Liberation, from which so much had at first been hoped, now seemed to have been lost utterly and for ever.

Meanwhile the German liberals laboured under the immense difficulty of having no legitimate and constitutional mode of agitation, no lever, so to speak, by which they could move the mass of their countrymen. They were mere speakers and writers, because there was nothing else for them to do; dreamers and theorists, as unthinking people in more fortunate countries called them, because the field of practical politics was closed to them. In only a few of the states did representative assemblies exist; and these were too small and too limited in their powers to be able to stimulate the political interests of their constituents. Prussia herself had no parliament of the whole monarchy until 1847: up to that year there had been only local Landes-Stände, estates or diets for the several provinces.

The liberal party had two objects to struggle for—the establishment or extension of free institutions in the several states, and the attainment of national unity. As respects the first of these, it may be remarked that the mere passion for freedom in the abstract has never produced a great popular movement. Long habit has made Englishmen, Swiss, and Americans think liberty essential to national happiness; yet liberty has in general been desired rather as a means than as an end: and there must always exist, in order to rouse a nation to disaffection or insurrection, either such a withdrawal of rights previously enjoyed as wounds its pride and its conservative feeling, or else the infliction by the governing power of positive evils which affect the subject in his daily life, his religion, his social and domestic relations. Now in Germany, and particularly in the Prussian State, such liberties had not been known since primitive times; and there were few serious practical grievances to be complained of. From the time of Frederick the Great Prussia had been well and honestly administered. Conscience was free, trade and industry were growing, taxation was not heavy, the press censorship did not annoy the ordinary citizen, and the other restraints upon personal freedom were only those to which the subjects of all the Continental monarchies had been accustomed. The habit of submission was strong; and there existed over most of Germany a good deal of loyalty, unreasoning perhaps, but not therefore the less powerful, towards the long-descended reigning houses. In several of the petty states there was indeed serious misgovernment, and an arbitrary behaviour on the sovereign’s part which might well have provoked revolt. Hessen-Cassel, for instance, was ruled by the unworthy minions of a singularly contemptible prince; and in Hanover King Ernest Augustus on his accession in 1837 abolished by a stroke of the pen the constitution which had been granted by his predecessor William. But these states were too small for a vigorous political life; the nobility depended on the Court and were disposed to side with it; the power of the Confederation hung like a thunder-cloud on the horizon, ready to burst wherever Austria chose to guide it. It was therefore hard for the liberals to excite their countrymen to any energetic and concerted action; and when the governments thought fit to repress their attempts at agitation, this could be harshly done with little fear of the consequences.

In labouring for the creation of one united German state out of the multitude of petty principalities, the party of progress found themselves at a still greater disadvantage. There was indeed a desire for it, but only a sentimental desire; an idea which worked powerfully upon imaginative minds, but had little hold on the world of fact and reality, little charm for the steady-going burgher and the peasant whose vision was bounded by his own valley. Practical benefits might no doubt have been expected from its realization, such as the establishment of a common code of laws, the better execution of great public works, the protection of the nation from the aggressions of France and Russia; but these were objects whose importance it was hard to bring home to the average citizen in peaceful times. The seven millions of Germans who owned allegiance to Austria presented a constant difficulty. They were nearly all Roman Catholics. They had in the course of centuries drifted away from their brethren to the north and west. They had comparatively little sympathy with liberal ideas in politics, and they had stood outside the main current of German literary developement. Yet they were of Teutonic stock, and in any scheme for the national union of all Germany room must be found for them. And where was the movement towards German unity to begin? Not in the Federal Diet, of all places, for it consisted of the envoys of princes who would have been the first to suffer. Not in the local legislatures, for they had no power to deal effectively with such questions, and would speedily have been silenced had they attempted by discussion to influence the policy of their masters. It was therefore only through the carefully guarded press, and occasionally in social or literary gatherings, that appeals to the nation could be made, or the semblance of an agitation kept up. There was no point to start from: it was all aspiration and nothing more; and so this movement, to which so many of the noblest hearts and intellects of Germany devoted themselves (though the two greatest stood aloof), made during many years little apparent progress. A Customs Union (Zollverein) was indeed created, ad 1833-1835, which eventually came to include all the German States except Austria, and a tie thereby established whose material advantages were soon felt; but this was done by the individual action of Prussia and the several States which one after another entered into her views, not by the Diet as a national work. Meanwhile the strictness of the repressive system was still maintained: Prussia, 1840. though now ruled by the more liberal Frederick William the Fourth, was still silent: the influence of Metternich was still supreme.

Then came the revolution of 1848. The monarchy of Louis Philippe fell with a crash that sounded over Europe, and every German and Italian throne rocked to its foundation. In Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, not to speak of smaller capitals, there came, sooner or later, risings more or less formidable; more popular constitutions were promised or granted by the terrified princes: the Federal Diet, after a hasty declaration in favour of the liberties it had so long withheld, made way for a national Parliament, which was duly summoned, and met at Frankfort on the 18th of May, 1848. As the king of Prussia, cherishing a sentimental respect for Austria together with a natural dislike to revolution, refused to accept leadership, this assembly appointed as Administrator of the Empire (Reichsverweser) the Archduke John of Austria, while the Diet, joining in this appointment of the Archduke, virtually abdicated its functions. Then the Assembly set to work to frame a constitution for united Germany. According to the draft, completed early in 1849, Germany was to be a federal state, under a hereditary Emperor, irresponsible, but advised by responsible ministers; and with a parliament of two houses, one representing the states, members of the Empire; the other the people. On the 28th of March the Assembly offered the imperial dignity to the king of Prussia. He hesitated to accept it without the consent of the other sovereigns; and exactly a month afterwards definitely refused it, perceiving the jealousy of some of the princes, although twenty-nine of them had already expressed their approval of the scheme; disliking several parts of the new constitution, fearing to give an implied sanction to revolutionary proceedings, and feeling himself unfit to take the helm of the German state at a moment of such difficulty and confusion. His refusal was a great and, as it proved, a fatal discouragement to the liberals, for it disunited them, and it destroyed their hopes of a powerful material support. Nevertheless the Frankfort assembly sat for some months longer, till, having migrated to Stuttgart, it dwindled down at last into a sort of Rump parliament, and was ultimately suppressed by force, while Prussia, at first in conjunction with Hanover and Saxony, started other and narrower plans for national organization, schemes modelled upon those of 1785 and 1806, but of which nothing ever came. Meantime the governments had recovered from their first alarm. Austria had reconquered North Italy, and had by Russia’s help overpowered the Magyars; France had re-established the Pope at Rome; everywhere over Europe the tide of reaction was rising fast. In 1850 Austria and Prussia took from the Archduke John such shadow of power as still remained to him as Reichsverweser, and at the conferences of Olmütz Prussia resumed her attitude of submissive adherence to Austria’s policy. By the middle of 1851 the Confederation was re-established on its old footing, with its old incapacity for good, its old capacities for mischief, and, it may be added, its old willingness to use those capacities for the suppression of free institutions in the more progressive states.

The effects, however, of the great uprising of 1848 were not lost in Germany any more than in Italy and Hungary. It had made things seem possible—seem even for a moment accomplished—which had been till then mere visions; it had awakened a keen political interest in the people, stirred their whole life, and given them a sense of national unity such as they had not had since 1814. By shewing the governments how insecure were the foundations of their arbitrary power, it had made them less unwilling to accept change; and had taught peoples how little was to be expected from the unforced good-will of princes. From this time, therefore, after the first reaction had spent itself, one may observe a real though slow progress towards free constitutional life. In some of the smaller states, and particularly in Baden, it soon came to be the policy of the government to encourage the action of the local parliament; and the Prussian assembly became in its long and spirited struggle with the crown a political school of incomparable value to the rest of Germany as well as to its own great kingdom.

One other thing more the events of 1848-1850 did most effectively for the Germans, if indeed that wanted doing. They made clear to the nation the hopelessness of expecting anything from the Confederation. During the last sixteen years of its existence, nothing, except the promulgation under its sanction of a general code of commercial law, was done by the Federal Diet for national objects. Its deliberations had for many years been carried on in secret. It spoke with no authority to foreign princes, and behaved with sluggish irresolution in the question which was again beginning to agitate Germany, of the succession to Schleswig and Holstein, and the relation of these duchies to the Danish Crown.

The restoration of the federal constitution in 1850-1851 was at the time regarded as merely provisional, accepted only because Austria and Prussia could not be got to agree upon any new scheme; and the successive projects of reform which thereafter emanated, sometimes from governments, sometimes from voluntary associations, kept the question of the reorganization of Germany and the attainment of some sort of national unity, constantly before the people. Thus, although nothing was done, and the tedious discussions which went on moved the laughter of other nations, the way was secretly but surely paved for revolution. In 1859 the liberals organized themselves in what was called the National Union (National-Verein), a body containing numerous members in nearly all the German States, and among them many distinguished publicists and men of letters. It held general meetings from time to time; and, when occasion arose, its permanent committee issued pamphlets and manifestoes, explaining the views and recommending the policy of the party. That policy was vague, so far as practical measures were concerned, yet clear in its ultimate object—viz. the union of all Germany in one federal state (whether republican or monarchical) and, if necessary, the absolute exclusion of Austria therefrom. This last feature procured for it from her adherents and from the German conservatives generally the name of the Little German (Kleindeutsch) party; and they, assuming the title of Great Germans (Grossdeutschen, i.e. the advocates of a Germany which should include Austria), founded in 1862 a rival association, which called itself the Reform Union, and in like manner held meetings and issued manifestoes. It found strong support in Hanover, Bavaria, and Würtemberg, but comparatively little in the middle states, and of course still less in Prussia. Its policy was mainly defensive; while the National Union, whose tendencies would naturally have been philo-Prussian and aggressive, found itself embarrassed by what seemed the resolutely reactionary attitude taken up by the Prussian king and ministers in the affairs of their own kingdom. A contest respecting the organization and payment of the army had broken out between the Government and the Chamber—a contest embittered first by the accession to the throne of the feudally-minded King William I (theretofore Regent), 1861. whose assertion of the principle of divine right at his coronation at Konigsberg had surprised and disquieted thinking people, and afterwards by the admission to the chief place in the ministry of a statesman who was then supposed to be the champion of tyranny and feudalism, even of the Austrian alliance. During the struggle which raged in the years 1862-1864 over the right of the Chamber to control taxation, and which at some moments seemed to threaten revolution, it was hard for the reformers to hope for anything from a power which levied without the consent of the Chamber the taxes it deemed necessary for the support of the army, and treated the representatives of the people with a roughness under which no one could tell that there lay concealed a substantial community of purpose.

The liberals of the South and West were therefore in 1863 disposed to abjure Prussia as given over to a reprobate mind; and Austria thought she saw her opportunity. Encouraged by the measure of success which had attended his efforts to bring together in an imperial council (Reichsrath) representatives from the different provinces of the ill compacted monarchy, Schmerling, then chief minister at Vienna, conceived the hope of recovering the ancient primacy of the Hapsburgs, and thrusting the now unpopular Prussia into the background. Accordingly in August, 1863, the Emperor Francis Joseph invited the reigning princes and representatives of the free cities to meet him at Frankfort, to discuss a scheme of federal reform which he there propounded, and which, while it increased the power of Austria, appeared to strengthen the cohesion of the Confederation, and to introduce a certain popular element into its constitution. All save one attended; but that one was the king of Prussia. He had in the preceding year taken for his prime minister Otto Eduard Leopold, Freiherr of Bismarck-Schonhausen in the Old Mark of Brandenburg, a man who, having been Prussian representative in the Federal Diet from 1851 to 1859, had learned by experience the weakness of that body and its subservience to Austria, and was now becoming impatient to try some speedier and more forcible method than diplomatic discussion of ending the existing deadlock. Convinced that it was only ‘by blood and iron’ that Germany could be welded into a national State, he had resolved to create a powerful army and to place it completely under royal control; but, as he could not yet avow his designs, the conflict between him and the majority of the Prussian Chamber continued acute until the day came when the liberals saw what those designs had been, and how triumphantly they had been carried through. Under Bismarck’s advice, King William refused to have anything to do with the Austrian scheme, which fell therewith to the ground, and the Diet was troubled by no change for the rest of its unhonoured life.

Austria, however, would probably have tried to carry through her project had not another question suddenly arisen, which turned all thoughts in a different direction, threw the German powers into new relations to one another, and became at last the cause of the dissolution of the Confederation itself. In November, 1863, Frederick VII, king of Denmark, died; and the contest so long foreseen and delayed between the Danes and the Germans, respecting their rights over Schleswig and Holstein, broke out with unexpected vehemence.

The Danish constitution of 1855 had incorporated these two duchies with Denmark for all purposes, although Holstein had always been a part of Germany, while Schleswig was by law indissolubly united to Holstein, and although the inhabitants even of Schleswig were in great majority of German speech. The Federal Diet had protested long ago against this constitution as an infraction of its rights, but it was not till October, 1863, that it decreed federal execution against Denmark. When, a few weeks later, Christian IX succeeded to the throne in virtue of the arrangements which Frederick VII had been empowered to make by the Treaty of London in 1852, no steps had as yet been taken to give effect to the decree. But the eyes of Europe were at once turned upon the new sovereign, whose title was disputed, and when, under the pressure of the heated populace of Copenhagen, he acceded to the constitution incorporating the duchies with Denmark, he found himself and his kingdom at once committed to the struggle. Prince Frederick of Augustenburg claimed Schleswig and Holstein, and was supported not only by a considerable party in both duchies, but by the general sentiment of the Germans, who saw in his candidature the only chance of saving the duchies from the Danes. The agitation in Germany soon grew vehement, and that the faster because the question was one upon which all parties and sections could unite. The National Union and Reform Union met, fraternized, and appointed a joint permanent committee, which issued addresses to the nation, established Schleswig-Holstein Unions throughout the country, and promoted the enlistment of bands of volunteers, who hurried to the border. Even the Federal Diet, though the opposition of Prussia and Austria prevented it from recognizing Frederick as Duke, carried out (against the will of those powers) the resolution for federal execution by sending, in December, 1863, a body of Saxons and Hanoverians to occupy Holstein.

Prussia had a difficult game to play, and she played it with consummate skill. Her ministers were unwilling to aid the Prince of Augustenburg, both because she was bound to Denmark as one of the signatories of the Treaty of London, and because their views of the future included other contingencies which it would then have been premature to mention. But if hope and the voice of the nation called on them to act, prudence forbade them to act alone. It was essential to carry Austria along with them, not only because the Austrian alliance would be needed if England, France, and Russia threatened war, but because she could in this way be made to share the unpopularity which backwardness in the national cause was bringing upon Prussia, and because she was thus alienated from Bavaria, Hanover, and the other states of the second rank, with which her relations had been, especially since the Frankfort Congress, so close and cordial. When the co-operation of Austria had been secured—partly by adroitly playing on her fears of the democratic and almost revolutionary character which the Schleswig-Holstein movement was taking in Germany, partly through her own reluctance to let Prussia gain any advantage by acting alone against Denmark—Bismarck resolved to take the control of the quarrel out of the hands of the Diet, so as to decide the fate of the two duchies in the way most favourable to his own plans for the reconstruction of North Germany. Accordingly Prussia and Austria appealed to certain provisions of the Treaty of London recognizing the special rights of Schleswig; and summoned Denmark to withdraw at once the law of November 18th, 1863, whereby Schleswig was finally incorporated with the Danish monarchy. When the Danes refused, a strong Prussian and Austrian force was poured into the duchies, not without indignation on the part as well of the rest of Germany as of the Prussian liberals, who believed that the object of this invasion was to check the national movement, expel Prince Frederick, and hand over Schleswig to Christian IX. Early in 1864 the united army passed the Dänewerk, stormed Düppel, overran Jutland, and had the Danish king and people at their mercy. A Conference was summoned in London: but it broke up without effecting anything; and when the Germans resumed hostilities, and it was clear that the expected help from England, Russia, or France would not be forthcoming, Denmark submitted, and by the Treaty of Vienna (October, 1864) ceded Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg to the allied powers absolutely. Prussia then pushed the Saxons and Hanoverians out of Holstein, and began to strengthen herself and make arrangements for the administration of the territory she occupied; while Austria, seeing this, began to hesitate, and suspect, and doubt whether her course had been altogether wise. She was soon to be still more cruelly undeceived.

Now that the Danes were for ever dispossessed, the question arose—what was to become of the duchies. Everybody expected the recognition of Prince Frederick of Augustenburg: the Diet was clearly in his favour, and Austria seemed quite willing. Prussia, however, refused to consent. Her crown lawyers, to whom the whole matter had been referred, while not attempting to advocate certain ancient heriditary claims that had been put forward on behalf of the house of Hohenzollern, pronounced in an elaborate opinion that the title of Christian IX was legally preferable to that of Prince Frederick, and that, as the king’s title had passed by the cession to the two allied powers, the latter were now free to deal with the ceded territories as they pleased. Nevertheless, she professed herself ready to recognize Frederick as duke upon certain conditions, which were declared to be essential to the safety of Prussia on her north-west frontier, as well as to the protection of Schleswig-Holstein itself against the hostility of Denmark. These conditions included not only a strict defensive and offensive alliance of the new principality with Prussia, but an incorporation of its army and fleet with hers, an absorption of its postal and telegraphic system, the cession of its fortresses, and, in fact, a pretty complete subjection to her authority in military matters and in external politics. These proposals were, as was expected, rejected by Prince Frederick. He relied on Austria, and was buoyed up by the sympathy which his pretensions found not only in the rest of Germany, but even in the Prussian Chamber, where the liberal majority maintained unshaken its opposition to Bismarck’s foreign policy and schemes of military organization. Meanwhile, voices began to be raised in the duchies for annexation to Prussia; Austria grew more and more suspicious; the relations of the officials of the two Powers established in the conquered territory became daily less friendly. Things seemed fast ripening towards a war, when, on the mediation of Bavaria and Saxony, the Convention of Gastein was signed between the rival sovereigns in the autumn of 1865. By this treaty Schleswig was in the meantime to be held by Prussia, Holstein by Austria, the question of the ultimate disposal of both duchies being reserved; while Austria sold her rights over Lauenburg to Prussia for 2,500,000 rix-dollars. This was felt to be a hollow truce, and its hollowness, despite the efforts of the Diet to arrange matters, was soon manifest. The Austrian authorities, knowing that they could not permanently retain Holstein, allowed an agitation to be kept up there on behalf of Prince Frederick. Prussia vehemently protested against this, and required Austria to maintain the status quo. Notes of complaint and recrimination were constantly passing between the two Powers, notes whose tone became always more menacing. Then each accused the other of arming, Austria summoning the Diet to take steps to restrain Prussia, Prussia beginning to shadow forth plans for a reform in the federal constitution. Meanwhile both states were arming fast, and it became clear that the only question was which could first strike a blow, and upon what allies each could rely. Prussia had secured Italy, which desired to expel the Austrians from Venetia: Austria managed to carry with her most of the greater German princes. In the memorable last sittings of the Diet of June 11th and 14th, 1866, Austria’s motion to mobilize the federal contingents, with a view to federal execution against Prussia, was supported by Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Würtemberg, Hessen-Cassel, Hessen-Darmstadt, and several of the minor states, thus giving her a large majority; while, for Prussia’s counter-proposition for a reform in the constitution of the Confederation, there voted only Luxemburg and four of the ‘curiae,’ consisting of northern and middle states of the third rank, seventeen in all out of the thirty-three. The partisans of both sides having thus committed themselves, there was no use in further resisting Austria in the Diet; so Prussia, having entered her protest against its proceedings, withdrew from the Confederation, declared war upon Hanover and Saxony on June 16th, upon Austria on June 18th, and pushed her armies forward with a speed which seemed almost to paralyze her opponents.

The shortness of the war and the completeness of the victory surprised Europe, for though every one saw the gain to Prussia from the simultaneous attack delivered by Italy, few had known how great was the superiority of the Prussian to the Austrian armies in firearms, in organization, and in the military skill of the commanders. At Königgrätz in Bohemia the main Austrian army was overthrown on July 3, and forced to retire on Vienna, while shortly before her German allies suffered defeats scarcely less crushing. She fared better in Italy, but the disaffection of the Magyars, added to the shock her prestige had received, made it doubtful whether she could gain anything by prolonging the struggle. Bismarck was wisely content to spare her the humiliation of ceding any German territory, and in retiring from Venetia she lost a province which was a source rather of weakness than of strength. The Peace of Prague which followed marked a turningpoint in German history. By it Prussia increased and consolidated her dominions through the annexation of the rich and populous territories of Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Hessen-Cassel, and Nassau, together with the free city of Frankfort. She also secured her supremacy in Germany by creating a Federation of the North German States under her own presidency. The constitution of this Federation left some measure of independence to the minor princes, permitting them to send and receive diplomatic agents to and from other courts, levy local taxes, and summon their local legislatures as heretofore. But it effected a fusion of their military forces, which were placed under the king of Prussia; it vested in him, as president, the conduct of the foreign policy of the Confederation, and the right of making war and peace (this last with the consent of the federal parliament): and it transferred to the control of the federal parliament, over which the king presided through his nominee the federal chancellor, legislation upon a variety of important topics, including the taxation for federal objects, the control of the currency and the postal and telegraphic system. These provisions secured Prussia’s ascendancy in Germany; and although much that was anomalous and incomplete might be remarked in the scheme, as could hardly fail to be the case where one member had twenty-four millions of population and the remaining twenty-one only five millions among them, it formed a cohesive nucleus, all the more cohesive that it was comparatively small; and by accustoming the citizens of different principalities to act together in a common assembly, it gave them a feeling of common citizenship, which mitigated such discontent as might have been produced by the loss of local independence. Nevertheless the problem that had lain before Germany might seem only half solved. The exclusion of Austria from the Germanic body did no doubt make for national union, extinguishing that Dualism which had distracted the country ever since the rise of Prussia in the days of Frederick the Great. But with Austria went her German population of seven millions, filling the vast territories of Upper and Lower Austria, Tyrol, Styria, and parts of Bohemia and Carinthia—districts which had during many centuries formed a part of the old Empire. The new league, moreover, at whose head Prussia placed herself, included only the states north of the river Main, and thus, if it drew closer than before the bonds between those states, drew also a more marked distinction than heretofore between the two halves of the country, leaving the great principalities of Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden in a much more complete isolation. Germany, in fact, might appear to have purchased the completer unity of her northern half by the sacrifice of her unity as a whole.

It had been stipulated in the Treaty of Prague, at the instance of France, that the South German States should be at liberty to enter into a separate independent league of their own; and the French government doubtless hoped that now, when the scheme of a North German federation, first broached in 1806, had been at length carried out, something like Napoleon’s old Confederation of the Rhine, under the protectorate of France, would reappear in the South as a counterpoise to Prussia’s power. Very different was the turn which events took. Within a few months after the war of 1866, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, and Hessen-Darmstadt, conquered foes whom Bismarck had judiciously conciliated by sparing them loss of territory and by exciting their fears of France, and who moreover wished to join the new Zollverein which Prussia was forming, entered into secret military treaties with the North German Confederation, whereby they bound themselves to unite their armies to its army, in the event of any attack on Germany by a foreign power.

Temporary as the organization of the North German Confederation evidently was, no one predicted for it a life of five years only; and few expected its developement into a grander and more comprehensive union to be the work of its bitterest enemy. The alarm of France at the disclosure of Prussia’s military power by the campaigns of 1866, and at the increase of her strength through the extension of her dominions, was heightened by the publication of the secret treaties just referred to. Peace was with difficulty preserved when the question of the cession of Luxemburg arose; 1867. and from that time, at least, both countries felt that there existed only a truce full of suspicion between them. Louis Napoleon seems to have been hurried into speedier action by the belief that the military treaties had been extorted from the South German Powers, that those Powers, and especially Bavaria, would not support Prussia should war break out—he had not realized the strength of national feeling in South Germany—and that there was disaffection among the inhabitants of the newly annexed districts, which ought to be taken advantage of as soon as possible. But men were astonished that the inept diplomacy of the French Emperor should have fired the train so suddenly, and should, in letting himself appear to be the aggressor, have done his best to make the war which was declared against Prussia with ‘a light heart,’ a national war, in which all Germany felt its interests and feelings involved. This it at once became. Seldom had such a national rising been seen—so swift, so universal, so enthusiastic, sweeping away in a moment the heartburnings of liberals and feudals in Prussia, the jealousies of North and South Germans, of Protestants and Catholics. Every citizen, every soldier, felt that this was a struggle for the greatness and freedom of his country; and the unbroken career of victory which carried the German arms over the east and centre of France, proved, in the truest sense, what strength there is in a popular cause. For it was, even more than the admirable organization of their armies, the skill of their generals, the corruption and weakness of the Bonapartist court—it was the passionate ardour of the whole German people, who felt that at last a crisis had come when patriotism called on them to put forth their utmost efforts, that secured for them a triumph to the completeness of which European history scarcely supplies a parallel.

Never before for centuries, not even in the War of Liberation of 1814, had the nation felt and acted so completely as one. All saw that the time had now come to give this practically realized unity its formal political expression; nor was there a doubt as to what that form should be. The imperial name under which Germany had won her first glories in the great days of the Middle Ages, was that to which the sentiment of the nation turned; and it spared the susceptibilities of the sovereigns whose adherence to the national cause had given them a better claim on the regard of their subjects than most of them had before possessed. By a strange caprice of fate, it was in a hall of the palace at Versailles, which the arch-enemy of Germany had reared, that the first of the German potentates offered to the king of Prussia, in the name of princes and peoples, that imperial crown which his brother had refused in 1849. On the 18th of January following, sixty-five years after the dissolution of the old Empire, King William was proclaimed Emperor, and Germany became again a single state in the eyes of Europe.