When the war had once clearly shown what its end would be, they were few who could appreciate it. In France where were they who had ever heard the truth about "1806 and Jena"? or who, after the 4th September, '70, were capable of realizing that the just retribution for Jena was Sedan? All glory was given to one man--to Bismarck. For the six long months, till March, '71, he was the arch-destroyer--nothing else was taken into account; if _he_ chose to establish a new holy Roman empire, of course he could do it; but it would be the work of his Titanic will, and nothing on earth could resist--_since France could not!_ Thus reasoned French vanity, and if this curious condition of the public mind in France be not understood, the reconstitution of united Germany into a great cohesive state will never be rightly attained as a matter of fact. France, therefore, continued (and did so until quite lately) to hold to the individual or accidental theory of a military unity achieved by fortuitous victories, to which the constant agitations of a whole people for hundreds of years, were in no sense conducive. Another fact that must also be acknowledged is, that this theory once firmly established, any remorse for the mysterious crimes of Napoleon I. was diminished if not erased. On the contrary, his conquests, his violent despotism, his wonderful supremacy--unjust in every sense, immoral, tyrannical, equally acquired and forfeited by the Corsican Invader, was regarded as an example; when defeat had to be recognized as undeniable, the national delusion soon came to take the form of retrieval, and the notion gained ground that what _la chance_ or the luck of a great statesman had put together, might, from the same cause, be taken to pieces again! Granted the principle of personal intervention, of the success of either one man or of even a group of two or three leading spirits, who was the original inventor, who the doer of the deed, the framer of the fact that threatened the world with a new master? This query was not started for eighteen long years; not until the catastrophe that threatened the House of Hohenzollern with the loss of its noblest son, served to recall to the mind of all Europe what a thorough hero and citizen, what a perfect, undeviating German the crown prince had always been.