He sees Germany still a mere crazy-quilt of clashing states. There are warring ecclesiastical barons, free cities, petty princelings; Catholic Bavaria against Protestant Prussia; nobles against the people; the people against themselves, divided by God knows what controversies, sane or insane; poets writing their hymns of liberty then dying unheroically by a brickbat flung wildly in some street brawl; jurists trying to hammer together some constitution that will not be blown to pieces by the first explosion of gunpowder;--and all failing! With pugnacious Prussia on the North, with rapacious Austria on the South, with insolent Bavaria hanging off on the Southwest, and the others fighting tooth and nail for the land, that will eventually fall to the strongest--the German problem became an exhibition over many years of the noblest, likewise of the darkest, passions of the human breast. Three dreadful wars were to be fought, 80,000 lives were to be sacrificed, during twenty years of turbulence; and in the blood-drenched interim various monarchs are to make a plaything of the thirty-nine disunited German states. ¶ But the thing had to be gone through with. The historical evolution could not be hastened, although it was often set back. Sick Germany had many a hideous nightmare before the fever passed. Convention after convention, diet after diet, contending monarchs using any plea that will give the upper hand to Prussia or to Austria, or over princes and whimsical knights, from the one who holds his sovereignty because his ancestor had been a king's barber, to another who in a lucky moment had found the queen's lace handkerchief, and after that lived like a parasite on the land;--all these high contracting parties must be sent to the dump heap and the soil sprinkled with precious German brothers' blood, mingling freely with vile blood, before the new political crop can grow. ¶ Between 1750 and 1870 the German problem had been settled over and over again, but was not finally settled till by Bismarck's blood and iron. This means in Frederick the Great's own obstinate way! ¶ We have heard from political fanatics, poets, lawyers, kings, thieves, church-people; all manner of men and not a few women have babbled and cackled; and there has been blood-letting, generation after generation, all up and down the Rhine, the Main, the Spree and the Elbe; then there would follow a lull brought about by some great Charter of Liberty framed by the Liberals, at their latest conference; and when it all went up in smoke, we would hear again that the Prussian government had its own plan, which, quite naturally Austria would never consent to advance. ¶ Indeed, the ox-like patience of the German people, with their great moral dream of "German National faith," was strongly tried.