Count Bismarck proved his political foresight by the rapidity with which he seized on the Schleswig-Holstein question as being the axis on which turned the entire evolution (if ever it should be possible!) of the imperial German unity. About that he hesitated not one moment. He adopted the whole theory of Dahlmann, who alone spoke it out in words in 1848-9, but he feared to plunge at one leap into the vortex of his own threatening conclusions and tried for several years to stave off the "pay day." He was somewhat slower to recognize the identity of feeling through all the Germanic races, to realize the equally strong vibration, the psychologic harmony quivering through heart and soul from North to South, through the mysteriously hidden dramas of fifteen hundred years. He believed himself a narrow Particularist Borussian, a "Pomeranian Giant," and let a score of years go by before clearly making out by touch that the strange change of tonality, of sound, and significance that superposed the patriotism of the South to that of the North was a mere inharmonic change, and that according to the rotation of the two circles, each, in reality, underlay the other in turn. It would be a fatal mistake to imagine that M. von Bismarck allowed himself to be led into the Danish campaign. He did nothing to bring it about, but the instant it showed itself on the cards he took advantage of it in the most predetermined, authoritative way, leaving his Austrian accomplice and victim no possibility of escape. From the hour when, in 1853, he boarded Count Richberg on the Carlsbad Railroad, and forced his enemy of the _Francfort Bund_ to become his humble servant and carry out all his designs, to the hour when, in 1865, he drove Franz Joseph to sign the Condiminium on what he knew was a mere waste paper, he was resolved to turn to account the extraordinary opportunity offered him by the incredible blindness and insensate terror of revolution of his allies. In the Austrians, the dread of what the smaller States, encouraged by Hungary, might attempt, paralyzed every other consideration, and besides that, the abortive little plans of Count Beust, in Saxony, served to point out to him what other Germans were, in a purely German sense, thinking of, and he decided that the grand historic game thrust upon his perceptions and waited for by all around him, should be played by himself alone. Then he played it, not before seeing at once what it must entail, but by no means assured that he could win.