The pith of the whole lies in Professor Bruehl's own expression: "In German unity," he says, "the idea precedes everything else, engenders the fact _l'est l'Unite nationale d'abord; Unite l'etat ensuite_," and nowhere in any historical phenomenon has the idea had a larger part to claim. But here you have at once to get rid of what, in Sybel's narrative, rests on mere documentary evidence! All anachronisms have to be set aside. As against the vigor of Levy Bruehl's living men, the make-believe of the past, with its caste-governed puppets, stares you in the face. After the rout at Sedan, after the startling transmutation of long dormant but still live ideas into overwhelming facts, you realize how entirely the mere Prussian chronicle of events in their official garb deals with what is forever extinct. These dead players have lost their significancy; they but simulate humanity from the outside,--are simply "embroidered vestments stuffed like dolls with bran," or like the moth-eaten uniforms of the great Frederick in the gallery at Potsdam. When Levy Bruehl, alluding to Stein and his searching reforms after the disasters of later years, says: "_Il voulait une nation vivante_" he wanted a living nation! He unchains the great idea from the bondage where it had lain for centuries, and whence the men of 1813 set it loose; he reinstates the past even to its legendary sources, and evokes memories which were those of heroic ages, and which had still power to inspire the present, and re-create what had once so splendidly lived. This life is in truth the German idea in its utmost truth; it was life and power that these men wanted, the life born in them from their earliest hour and kept sacred through all time by their poetry, their song, their native tongue. It is all this which is German and not Prussian. The Hohenzollerns have nothing to do with all this idealism,--and it is this which constitutes the peculiar and sovereign spirit of German unity to which the modern philosophy of Frederick II. was so long a stranger, and to which the Iron Chancellor became a hearty convert only at the close; the chivalrous element of the great elector is but a link between what had been the Holy Roman Empire and what is to be the national union after Leipsic and the War of Freedom--culminating in its supreme and inevitable consequence in 1871. The heroes (and they were heroes) of the distant North were as Brandenburgers, "electors," component parts, be it not forgotten, of a Teutonic whole, "of one great heart," (as Bunsen wrote long years ago to Lord Houghton),[5] "though we did not know it." [5] Life of Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, by Wemyss Reid. 2 vols. London, 1891.