The Junker is particularist, at least he was. The political and administrative centralization which the Jacobins achieved in France inspires him with horror. For him it is disorder. He sees in it nothing but a dust heap of individuals crushed beneath a formula. Even today, when the German accuses France of anarchy, that is what he means. He figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune. Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the professors which at heart he despises. He is agrarian and militarist, that is to say, conservative and enamored of force. In 1830 four-fifths of the population lived by agriculture and the landlord governed his peasants patriarchally. He kept the conservatist spirit of a rustic, a very lively sense of authority and the military instinct. He had scant liking for distant enterprises or adventures. He was at once religious, warlike, and realist, knowing how to nurse his ambitions and to confine his view to what was within reach. Bismarck for a long time was the decided opponent of naval armaments and colonial policy, in short, of imperialism. Even his projects for social reform--insurance against sickness, against old age--which have been accepted as concessions to modern ideas, were due entirely to his monarchical and patriarchal conception of the State. He copied the ancient decrees of Colbert as to naval personnel. He would have gone as far as assurance against non-employment. In the dominion of the King, he said, no one should die of hunger. The Junker made a force of Prussia; he made Prussia itself. It was due to him that she passed after 1815 from the form of a Polizeistaat to the form of Kulturstaat, the latter only an expansion of the former. In place of a watchful, regulating, and vexatious State she became an organized State, the instructor of youth, the protector of religion, the source of inspiration for agricultural reforms, and all great commercial and industrial enterprises. This State was not an emanation from the national will, but the creator of a nation, the living and moving self-incarnation of the Hegelian "idea," that is to say, the Divine thought. Of all the German aristocracy the noble of Pomerania or Brandenburg, the Prussian Junker, represented this social type most definitely. In the south the liberal tendencies--to be exact, the memories of the French Revolution--persisted far into the nineteenth century. But it is well known that German unity was accomplished by military force and against liberalism.