Chapter XXIV: The New German Empire

The new Empire now established in Germany is neither so new a creation nor so distinctly a unified State as its name might seem to convey. It is rather to be described as an extension of the North German Confederation under the form of a federal monarchy, whose peculiar constitution makes it unlike all other monarchies and all other federations. It consists of twenty-five States of all sizes, from Prussia with a population of 33,000,000 down to Schaumburg-Lippe with a population of 42,000. Three of its members—Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg—are free cities, survivors of the ancient Hanseatic League. The rest are hereditary monarchies, governed by sovereigns who are, according to the constitution of each particular State, more or less restrained or advised by legislatures of a more or less representative character. As these twenty-five States are very unequal in size and in power, so also do they differ in their relations to the Empire as a whole, for Prussia, by far the greatest, practically predominates over all the rest, while a few of the larger—Bavaria, Saxony, and Würtemberg—stand in a privileged position.

The Constitution of the Empire is best understood when it is regarded as a developement of the Germanic Confederation which was erected in 1815, upon the ruins of the ancient Empire. It has been evolved out of that League of States (Staatenbund) into a federal State (Bundesstaat) by three stages. The first was the exclusion of Austria and formation of the North German Confederation under the presidency of Prussia in 1866. The second was the conclusion of a series of military treaties between the North German Confederation and the South German States in 1866-1867. The third was the formal union of the North and South German States, under the name of an Empire, in 1871. Of these three steps towards unity the last seems the most imposing and certainly made the greatest impression upon the world at large. But the two former were really more important, for in 1866 a national popular assembly was created for all North Germany, and immediately thereafter a tie of immense practical importance was formed between all the German States. Thus the existing Constitution, though it dates from April 16, 1871—some important amendments were made in 1873 and 1888—is in its essential features that which was enacted in 1866. Its details are too numerous and intricate to be here set forth, but the general character of the federal scheme and of the several organs of government may be briefly summarized.

In every federation the critical point is the distribution of powers between the central or federal authority, and those local authorities which are the component members of the united body. Here the central or federal (i.e. imperial) authority controls the army and navy, foreign relations, railways, main roads and canals, posts and telegraphs, coinage, weights and measures, copyrights and patents, and legislation upon nearly the whole field of civil and criminal law, together with the regulation of the press and of associations, and of imperial finance, including of course the customs tariff which is one and the same for all Germany. Bavaria, however, retains the management of her own railways, and both she and Saxony and Würtemberg enjoy certain other special exemptions or privileges. But though comparatively little legislative power is left to the States, administration remains almost entirely in their hands, and it is they who appoint and dismiss nearly all the executive officials, a concession to their rulers which may be deemed illogical, but which the political circumstances of the country prescribed. Judicial power is in so far a federal (imperial) matter, that the greater part of the law which the Courts administer (including the law of procedure) is contained in the imperial statute-books. But the judges are everywhere appointed by the State and act under its authority, although the uniform interpretation of such parts of the law as rest on imperial legislation is secured by the existence of a Supreme Court of Appeal (Reichsgericht), which sits at Leipzig. It will thus be seen that this federal Empire is for legislative purposes more fully unified than the other four great federations of modern times—the United States, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia—since in all these State legislatures retain wider powers than do the State legislatures of Germany. But Germany is less unified for the purposes of administration, both executive and judicial, than are those four communities, and her constitution admits, as regards the amount of rights left to the several component States, differences between the greater and the lesser altogether opposed to that principle of equality which those federations have deemed essential to their peace and stability.

The organization of the central or federal government of the German Empire is not less exceptional than is the structure of its federal system. The head of the executive is the Emperor. His office is not elective, as in the days of the Holy Empire, but hereditary, being indissolubly attached to the office of king of Prussia; and the imperial title therefore descends according to the family law of succession of the house of Hohenzollern. Outside his Prussian dominions, the Emperor enjoys little power in civil matters. He has no veto on legislation, though (as will presently appear) he has another means of controlling it. He appoints very few civil officials. His importance in the scheme of government depends on the fact that he is commander-in-chief of the army and navy, that he has the conduct of foreign affairs (action taken in which is, however, communicated to the federal Council), and that as Prussian king he exercises a predominant influence in the federal Council (Bundesrath) which constitutes one House of the imperial legislature. There is no imperial Cabinet, but the Chancellor of the Empire, who is usually also Prime Minister of Prussia, discharges, with the assistance of several secretaries of State, the function of chief minister for all imperial affairs. He presides in the federal Council and has the right, which he constantly exercises, of speaking in the other House. But he is responsible to his imperial master only and not to the representatives of the people.

The imperial legislature is also a peculiar creation, for it consists of two chambers more dissimilar in origin and functions than are the two Houses of other federations. One chamber, the federal Council (Bundesrath), is really a prolongation of the old Diet of the Holy Empire, which, beginning as a sort of semi-popular assembly in Carolingian times, had passed through many phases before it perished in 1806, to be after a fashion restored in 1815, and again in 1866 for the North German Confederation. This Council consists of delegates, or rather diplomatic agents, appointed by and representing the sovereigns of the several States comprised in the Empire. Of these delegates, fifty-eight in all, seventeen belong to Prussia (she practically controls three others also), six to Bavaria, four to Saxony, four to Würtemberg, three to Baden, three to Hessen, two to Mecklenburg-Schwerin, two to Brunswick, and one each to the remaining smaller States. The Bundesrath meets at Berlin and sits in secret. Its members have no individual discretion, but vote under orders from their respective State governments, so that all the votes of any State which has more than one vote are cast in the same way, and can be cast whether or no all its delegates are present. This Chamber therefore represents not the peoples of the States, like the American or Australian Senates, but the governments of the States, which may or may not, according to the constitution of each State, be amenable to their respective peoples. It exercises various administrative and judicial functions, and has a legislative power which is in practice more important than that of the other Chamber, because bills originate more frequently in it than in the latter. Presided over by the imperial Chancellor, who is deputed thereto by the Emperor, the Bundesrath is the organ which expresses the collective sovereignty of the several princes of Germany considered as heads of the States which form the Empire; and through it the greater States, or any strong combinations of States, are able to make their influence felt. It is, however, above all things the organ through which Prussia, by far the greatest, asserts her predominance, and asserts it none the less effectively because the method is covert. She commands little more than a third of the votes, for when the Constitution was framed Bismarck prudently contented himself with a smaller representation than that to which her population would have entitled her, since he sought to soothe the apprehensions of Bavaria and other States of the second rank. But her strength and her prestige usually enable her to get her own way in the Council, and the power of the Emperor, which appears small when the civil functions formally attached to his office are examined, has become great through his control of the Bundesrath, as well as through his position at the head of army and navy.

As this Council of officials represents the flock of German princes, now shepherded by the strenuous will of Prussia, so the other and elective chamber represents the German nation. It bears the old historic name of Diet (Reichstag), but it is a new creation, such as pre-revolutionary Germany never knew. First in 1848 did there appear a popular assembly whose menacing and fitful light was extinguished in the following year. Bismarck, when he created the North German Confederation, found it needful to draw the peoples of the several States together by a parliament in which they could be represented, and when that Confederation was expanded into an Empire of all Germany, the stature of this parliament grew with the increased need for such an expression of national unity.

The Reichstag is elected by universal suffrage in electoral districts which were originally equal; and has 397 members, of whom 235 come from Prussia. It sits for five years, but may be dissolved by the federal Council with the consent of the Emperor. All the members of the Bundesrath can appear and speak in it; and the Chancellor is frequently present to explain the views or defend the action of the imperial government. It enjoys full powers of legislation, yet in practice these powers are reduced by the fact that some of the most important revenue laws, having been enacted for a term of years, cannot be changed except by the consent of the Bundesrath; and it wants one important attribute of the parliaments of Britain, France, and Italy, in the peculiarity that neither the imperial Chancellor nor any other executive official is responsible to it, or can be displaced by its vote. It has therefore no control of administration, except in so far as administration is affected by criticism or depends upon legislation and upon the voting from time to time of supplies for administrative purposes. Moreover, as already observed, nearly all executive work rests with the States, whose officials are appointed by and are responsible to the State governments. In no country are officials more capable, in none perhaps does official work attract so much of the best practical talent which the nation supplies. Partly from traditional habit, which in all the German States has left foreign relations to be managed by the sovereign, partly because it feels its own weakness in being unable to displace the Chancellor, the Reichstag interferes very little in questions of external policy. It has been for many years divided into four, five, or even six groups, the mutual repulsion of which has hampered concerted action to resist or guide the imperial executive. Yet with these drawbacks, and though it has not gained upon the other organs of government, it has drawn to itself much political ability, has been the scene of many striking debates, and is an effective agency in welding together the populations of the various States into a truly united German nation.

This outline may serve to shew what is the constitutional character of the new Empire. It is a State centralized in what concerns its foreign policy, its military and naval organization, and the larger part of its legislation, but not centralized as respects its officials, whether executive or judicial. It is more completely centralized as respects its North German members, who were practically bound fast to Prussia by her triumph in 1866, than as respects its four large South German members who joined by treaty after that year. Legally regarded, it is less of a unitary State than the old Empire was in the days of Henry VII, or even perhaps in those of Maximilian I, but far more of a unitary State than Germany was at any time after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Practically of course the country has attained a higher stage of effective action for common purposes than was ever attained before.

Since the formation of the East Frankish or German kingdom under Conrad I (ad 911) Germany has never, except during Napoleon’s ascendancy from 1805 to 1814, ceased to be nominally a nation and a State. But the phases through which she has passed in those ten centuries are notably unlike those which mark the evolution of the other great European countries. In France, Spain, and England during the same period the tendency was constantly towards the consolidation into a strong unified kingdom of the various races that made up the population as well as of the principalities into which the territory was divided. In Italy there was down till the French Revolution no such tendency; that country, disunited ever since the entrance of the Lombards in the sixth century, remained no more, and perhaps no less, disunited in 1794. But in Germany the centripetal forces which had generally tended to prevail from Conrad I to Henry IV were suddenly arrested by the strife with the Popes and the wars of the Emperors in Italy. After Frederick II, the centrifugal forces decisively prevailed; and the process of dissolution went on, slowly but steadily, till the Peace of Westphalia, after which the country was nothing more than a loosely-constructed Confederation. But if that process had been slow, the reverse process was surprisingly swift. Germany had never seemed more disunited than she was in 1864. In 1866 she began the work of political reunion, and in 1871 that work was practically complete.

To the intellectual and moral causes which enabled her statesmen to accomplish this work so promptly I shall presently return. Meantime let me endeavour to answer a question which will be put by those who have followed the story of the nation from the days of the first Frankish Emperor who brought all Germans under his sceptre. They will ask—What are the actual forces at work today? What are the prospects of this recently-organized federal State? Are the centripetal tendencies stronger now than they were in the seventeenth century? Will it, like the old Empire, dissolve into separate political communities? Or will it follow the path which popular sentiment has, ever since 1813, marked out for it, by becoming a compact and united Power, such as France has been for some centuries, such as Italy became under Victor Emanuel?

When the new Empire started on its career in 1871, not a few observers in foreign countries doubted whether it could long hold together. They pointed to the complicated nature of a constitution which might prove hard to work, and which must involve constant friction. They dwelt on the elements of jealousy and discord that were present, not merely in the existence of separate Courts, where a long descended dynasty was surrounded by a proud nobility, but also in the differences of character, habits, traditions, and religion among the various German races. Admitting the warmth of national sentiment evoked by the war of 1870, they insisted that this sentiment could not be relied on to keep the whole people together in more peaceful days or under the rule of less able and forceful ministers than Bismarck had shewn himself. And they were confirmed in these forebodings by the belief which still haunted them that the Germans were an unpractical race, likely to be led astray by their love for theories, ill fitted to work a piece of political machinery more abnormal if not more intricate than is either the British or the American Constitution.

The event has belied these predictions. Comparatively few constitutional difficulties have arisen, comparatively few political crises have turned upon the federal structure of the government or the claims of the States as against the central authority. The leadership of Prussia has not been challenged by the minor States. Germany has, without becoming Prussian, grown to be more and more a united nation; and, so far from falling back into its old divisions, or splitting up into racial sections, it has developed a cohesive force and a Pan-Germanic sentiment which may even draw to itself, when the time comes for the dissolution of the ill compacted Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the eight millions of Germans who inhabit the western half of that spacious realm.

Among the causes which have enabled the federal constitution to work smoothly and consolidated the unity of the nation, the first place must be assigned to the external pressure which the presence of two formidable neighbour Powers, France and Russia, has applied. An immense and highly-disciplined army has been deemed a necessity; and the circumstance that nearly every citizen is or has been a soldier has kept the spirit of German pride and German patriotism at a high temperature, has inculcated the habit of obedience, has given an imposing prestige to the imperial Commander-in-chief.

Unlike its venerable predecessor, this new Empire rests on a national basis. No foreign Power is a member of the Empire in respect of German territory. No State except Prussia holds any territory in which German is not the prevailing tongue. No one of the federated States can now make any separate alliance with any foreign Power. Hardly any are even represented at a foreign court.

It has been the good fortune of the federal Empire that State lines have not coincided with the lines on which either material interest or religious feeling has built up political parties. Neither in Prussia nor in any of the other greater States does one kind of economic interest, either the agricultural or the commercial, either the mining or the manufacturing, prevail to the exclusion of the others. So, though Prussia is mainly Protestant, there is a large Roman Catholic population on the Lower Rhine and in Westphalia as well as in Posen; and, though Bavaria is mainly Roman Catholic, there is a considerable Protestant population in the Upper Main basin and in the Palatinate. Parties have been based on real or supposed class interests or on economic doctrines or on religious sympathy. They have not been, except in the case of the Poles of Posen, local parties. Similarly, and largely for this reason, the political controversies that have from time to time arisen have not appealed to, and have not tended to excite, either State feeling against the central government, or animosities between the States themselves. Neither the conflict maintained by Bismarck and Falk against the claims of the Roman Catholic hierarchy which lasted from 1873 till 1886, nor the efforts to check by penal legislation the growth of Socialism, nor the disputes over the protective tariffs from time to time enacted, have evoked disruptive tendencies. Occupied with such questions as these, men were not led to occupy themselves with the constitutional structure of the government. Thus it has befallen that the chief political parties have found their adherents in every one of the greater States and have not tended to identify themselves with any particular State or group of States. The spirit of party, which in some federations has proved a powerful segregative force, has in Germany worked rather to associate in pursuit of the same aims politicians belonging to different States, making them feel their interests to be common, and giving them the habit of co-operation in the Reichstag. Nor is it idle to remark that South-western and South-central Germany, the region which had least felt Prussian influence and in which jealousy of a Prussian head of the nation might have been chiefly expected, was the region in which the memories and traditions of the mediaeval Empire had retained most force and freshness, and in which therefore popular sentiment was found naturally disposed to acquiesce in a restoration of the imperial title.

Let it be also noted that the establishment of the new Empire coincided with, and in some measure accelerated, a swift and striking developement of industrial resources. Germany was already becoming a great manufacturing and trading community. Increased trade and population led to the making of more railways, and to more traffic upon them, and thus the immense growth of internal intercourse and of wealth drew the various parts of the country more closely together, causing each to feel how much it gained from being united to the rest under one government and one system of law. These economic changes induced a change in the minds of men. Old-fashioned ‘particularism’ waned and idealistic republicanism vanished. Thought and will were directed to practical ends. Militarism and Industrialism, which have been perhaps the most potent forces in modern Germany, alike aided the assimilative process. The former embraced, the latter did not repel, the idea of a Pan-German monarchy. Both welcomed centralization.

Much then of the success which has attended the constitution of the new Empire has been due to the favouring conditions and circumstances of the time, much to the sagacity of Bismarck and his fellow statesment who in constructing their scheme preferred practical convenience to theoretic symmetry. Yet the chief reason why the building has proved itself stable lies in the fact that its foundations were long ago laid deep and firm. The permanence of an institution depends not merely on the material interests that support it, but on its conformity to the deep-rooted sentiment of the men for whom it has been made. When it draws to itself and provides a fitting expression for that sentiment, the sentiment becomes thereby not only more vocal but actually stronger, and in its turn imparts a fuller vitality to the institution. In the case of Germany, as in that of Italy, there had been for at least two generations before 1870 a constant ripening towards change and a growing desire for unity, although the strength of this feeling was not revealed till the moment came which gave it scope for vigorous action. First brought into self-conscious life by the great struggle of the War of Liberation, it was slowly developed and directed by a variety of concurrent forces; partly by that longing for political freedom and equal civil rights which found its nearest enemy in the tyranny of many of the petty princes; partly by the decline, evident through all Europe, of the ancient sentiment of personal loyalty, and the substitution therefor of a rational conception of the nature of government and the rights of the people; partly by the dread of France and the resolve to prevent her from again extending her frontier to the Lower Rhine; partly by the better knowledge of their brethren which increased facilities of communication gave to every branch of the German race; but most of all by what we call the instinct or passion of nationality, the desire of a people already conscious of a moral and social unity, to see such unity expressed and realized under a single government, which shall give it a place and name among civilized states. The most powerful factors in the creation of this national spirit were the varied literary activity of Germany since the days of Lessing, the bracing-up of moral fibre by the teachings of Immanuel Kant, the strenuous intellectual life which produced not only two famous poets but a brilliant group of philosophers, historians, and jurists, together with the awakened interest and pride of the people in their earlier history, which was one of the firstfruits of that literary revival. Causes not dissimilar were at work in Italy, though there the actual oppression of foreign rulers made the sentiment more vehement. And it need not be doubted that the example of the efforts which Italy, Hungary, and Poland, not to speak of smaller peoples, were making to attain or reconquer national political life, had its influence upon the Germans, however little sympathy those efforts may have found among them.

Time, and the long labours of many earnest hearts addressing their countrymen through the press and in the Universities, were needed to mature this feeling of moral, to strengthen this passion for political unity, to make it familiar and dear to the mass of the people, to give it a hold upon their imagination. It was not wonderful that in looking on the apathy of their fellow citizens and the selfishness of their princes, these pure and noble spirits should sometimes have despaired of success. And even when the feeling had been created and the occasion came which displayed its strength, it might have failed to fulfil its work, had not the power to use and guide it been lodged in the hands of a forceful and keen-sighted practical statesman. It was with Germany even as with Italy, where the work of Gioberti, Manin, Mazzini, and their brethren might have remained unfinished but for Cavour. And, as in Italy, the work was not carried through in the way or by the means which the first labourers had for the most part intended or desired. The creation of a state de novo on ground cleared of all the existing principalities, a state which, even if in form a monarchy (though most would have preferred a republic), should be based on the recognition of popular rights, was what the idealistic politicians of both countries had looked forward to. But in both it was by the advance of an existing state, which extended itself to include wider and wider territories, and gave to them its organization, that the unity of the nation was brought about. And this was done with little or no change in the internal constitution of a growing kingdom, little movement (except in the way of an extended suffrage) towards a resettlement of society on democratic foundations. In the constitution of the North German Confederation and the new German Empire, there is no mention and slight indirect recognition of those ‘Fundamental Rights of the German people’ on which the Frankfort Parliament of 1848-1849 spent so much precious time and toil.

The Prussian State by which the work was accomplished, had not in earlier days shewn much sense of what came to be afterwards called its ‘German mission.’ Neither in the words or acts of the great Frederick (nor indeed in those of his predecessors) is there a trace of what may be called Pan-Teutonic patriotism, of any enthusiasm for the splendour and happiness of Germany as a whole. Frederick’s purpose was to build up a strong and well-administered Prussian kingdom. For his German neighbours he had no more regard than for Frenchmen or Swedes; for the German language and literature little but contempt. The policy of his first two successors was distinctly Prussian rather than German; and the romantic Frederick William the Fourth disappointed the hopes of the nation almost as grievously in 1849 as Frederick William the Third had done thirty-five years before. No European court had been more consistently practical than that of Berlin; nor had any been apparently less conscious of a magnificent national vocation. Her rulers, themselves eschewing sentimental considerations, had seldom tried to awaken these in the minds of the people, or to turn them to account where they existed. When their own interests coincided with those of Germany at large, it was well: but they were not accustomed to proclaim themselves her champions, or the apostles of her national regeneration. Nevertheless it had for a long time been evident that if a political regeneration was to be brought about by force, it was from Prussia alone of the existing principalities that anything could be hoped, since she alone united the character, the traditions, and the material power that were needed to lead the country. Ever since the Reformation the policy of the Hapsburg princes had been regarded with aversion by the more intelligent and progressive part of the nation; while Prussia, recognized from the days of the Great Elector as the leading Protestant power, had become the representative of intellectual liberality and enlightenment. In recent times she had, by the foundation and wise encouragement of the two great universities of Berlin and Bonn, conferred eminent benefits on German learning and science, and gained a corresponding hold upon the respect of the educated classes. If the Prussians were in some respects less richly gifted than those of the middle and southern states, they possessed a practical energy and decision in which the latter were sometimes deficient; they acted while the others speculated and waited. Prussia had given the first example in Germany of a well-governed modern state, instinct with life, efficient in its working; and in creating it she was rendering an invaluable service to the German people. For this state, being a strong reality, which had stood the test of adversity and been matured by experience, whose well-knit administrative organization commanded the respect, if not always the affection, of its subjects, was found able to expand itself, so as to embrace the other populations and territories which from time to time were added to it. And it expanded, not only, as Austria had done in earlier centuries, towards the east, among races alien in blood and speech, some of whom have remained unfriendly, but also and chiefly westwards, over districts whose inhabitants, being themselves Germans, were rapidly fused and became not less patriotically-minded than those of the Mark of Brandenburg itself. After the fall of Napoleon it acquired and assimilated a large and rich dominion in the Rhineland and Westphalia; in 1866 it was enlarged by other territories hardly less important, while at the same time its military, and (to a great extent) its financial system, were applied to North German principalities. Thus the difficulty of creating a state de novo was avoided by the extension of the existing state; and if Germany, as idealistic politicians complain, has in a certain sense been turned into a larger Prussia, so too in no less measure is Prussia herself permeated by the spirit of Germany as a whole.

Looking therefore to the form which the political reconstruction of Germany has taken, this reconstruction may fairly be said to be Prussia’s work. But that work could never have been accomplished without the efforts of those very ‘sentimental’ or ‘romantic’ politicians who found themselves first ridiculed as visionaries or persecuted as agitators, and then pushed aside when the moment for action came. For it was they who prepared the feelings of the nation for this revolution, and who raised to the height of a national movement, justified by the popular will, what would otherwise have been a career of violent self-aggrandizement. It was with Germany as with Italy, where the work of Cavour, the practical statesman, could never have been accomplished without the previous labours of Mazzini, the prophet and moral reformer who fired the hearts of his countrymen.

It is often asked how far the new German Empire can be deemed to be the successor and representative of the ancient Holy Empire as it stood from ad 800 till ad 1806. Those who have followed the events recounted and grasped the theory set forth in the preceding chapters will have no difficulty in answering this question. The new creation of 1866-1871 has never claimed to have inherited the legal status of the ancient monarchy which had expired sixty years previously. Its rights are only such as it has formally and expressly received from the constitution and the treaties which called it into being. And whoever looks above the bare legal rights to the general position and character of the new institution will perceive that it could not be a mere restoration, and that if it were it could not be a solid and durable state. Circumstances had so completely altered, that it became necessary to set up something which should correspond to the new conditions and embody the new spirit. So the present German Empire, which is a sort of expansion of the Prussian Kingdom to embrace all Germany, is hardly more like the realm of Frederick Barbarossa or Maximilian than the empire of Charles the Great was to that of Constantine or Theodosius. The Holy Empire claimed universal dominion because it represented the unity of all mankind; and though these pretensions had become obsolete, they were never formally renounced. It was almost as much an ecclesiastical as a secular institution. Ecclesiastical princes were among its Electors; its head must be in communion with the Holy Roman Church which, to the last, he solemnly bound himself to defend. But the new Empire claims nothing outside Germany and those colonial territories which Germany has recently acquired. It has no official connection with any church, and its head is in fact a Protestant. Its true historical predecessor might thus seem to be that German or East Frankish kingdom which Conrad the First and Henry the Fowler ruled before Otto the Great obtained the throne of the Roman Empire. The memory of this German kingdom was preserved by the fact that for some centuries Otto’s successors were crowned kings of Germany at Aachen before they were crowned emperors at Rome, but otherwise the Kingdom and the Empire were, as has been shewn in an earlier chapter, so welded together that they become at last one entity, called in later days the ‘Roman Empire of the German Nation.’ Of the two elements whose long union in one person thus ended in a fusion, the new Empire represents one element only, that German royalty which Otto held before his fateful journey to Rome. So historic sentiment may imagine the present Empire to be such a kingdom as that of Otto would have been had it, remaining purely German, been extended to include all the regions which the Germans now inhabit from the Meuse to the Vistula, and may figure to itself the Emperor William of Hohenzollern as the successor not so evidently of the Hapsburg monarchs of the eighteenth century as of the Saxon King Henry I who in an expedition against the Wendish heathen stormed their fort of Brannibor, and there, to guard his north-eastern frontier, laid the foundations of that Mark of Brandenburg which has grown into the Prussian monarchy.

If therefore we regard either the Germanic nation as it was before it entangled itself with Italy and Rome, or the Germanic nation as it was when after the days of Charles the Fifth Italy and Rome had been lost to it, but before it had been cleft in twain by the Treaty of Westphalia, we may call the new Empire the legitimate representative of the unity of the nation as embodied in its monarchy. It is a militant monarchy, as were the monarchies of Charles and Otto. It is a national monarchy, for it includes all Germans except those who live under the sceptre of the Hapsburgs, those who in the Baltic provinces of Russia are forced to obey an alien and ill-beloved Power, and those more fortunate Germans who in the northern and eastern cantons of Switzerland have given to Europe an admirable example of ordered freedom. For the chief of this monarchy the imperial name has been revived, both on account of its venerable associations and because it serves to express, as it did in the last few centuries of its life, the titular superiority of the head of a federal state over the kings, grand dukes, and other princes who compose the Germanic body. In this respect it partially reproduces the relation which the Emperors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bore to the electors of that time. To the earlier Middle Ages, the idea of an emperor of a local area, whether great or small, was no doubt repugnant, for mediaeval doctrine could imagine only one Emperor, lord of all Christians, just as it could recognize only one spiritual head of the Catholic Church. It is perhaps some lingering sense of this feeling, as well as a wish not to infringe on the territorial rights of the heads of the several States, that has caused the official style of the sovereign to be ‘German Emperor,’ that is, Emperor in Germany, or Emperor of German race, not ‘Emperor of Germany.’ The Germans have indeed had reason to regret the influence of the ancient title, for it was through the efforts to maintain the commanding place in Europe which this title carried with it that their sovereigns were distracted from the duties they owed to their own people, and that princes sprang up who wrested from the crown nearly all the authority which had once belonged to it. But if in this the influence of that great shadow of the past be thought pernicious, let it be therewithal remembered that to the ancient Empire is in large measure due this latest revival of national existence. It was the tradition of a glorious past when Germany led the world that made the Germans again a united people, the central power of continental Europe. And though the deep-rooted Prussian sentiment of King William I was at first averse to the adoption of that historic style which commended itself to the imagination of his son (afterwards the Emperor Frederick), the name of Emperor has served both to reconcile the greatest of the German princes to the loss of their titular independence and to imprint more deeply upon the mind of the people the sense that they are one not only in blood and speech, but also in the historical continuity of their national life.

The parallelism between the course of events in Germany and in Italy which has several times already been referred to is strikingly seen in the events of 1870. As the war of 1866, in putting an end to the long dualism of Austria and Prussia, made a united Germany possible and simultaneously gave to Italy her Venetian provinces, so the war of 1870, while it brought about the re-establishment of the Germanic Empire, completed the unity of Italy also by making Rome again her possession and her capital. The Popedom which, in the thirteenth century, inflicted a fatal wound upon the Holy Empire, had in modern times allied itself with Austria and the petty despotisms of the Italian peninsula, had done its utmost to check as well the union as the freedom of the Italian people, and had raised almost to the rank of an article of faith those pretensions to temporal sway which had been one cause of its hostility to the mediaeval Emperors. It now found itself involved in the misfortunes of its old ally France, and saw that temporal sway perish along with the triumph of its former Teutonic enemies. The first German victories compelled the recall of the French troops from Rome, and allowed the Italians to establish themselves there; a few months later the swelling current of success brought about the union of North and South Germany in a single state. The same great struggle which restored political unity to the one nation cemented it in the other; and at the very moment when the imperial name was revived in the Transalpine countries the ancient imperial seat upon the Tiber became the capital of an Italian monarchy. The two great races whose national life had been sacrificed to the mediaeval Empire regained it together, and regained it by the defeat of that Empire’s ancient antagonists, the ecclesiastical power and the monarch of France. The triumph of the principle of nationality was complete. Old wrongs were redressed; old problems solved. The world seemed to have closed one page in its history, and men paused to wonder and conjecture what the next might have to unfold.