Having thus indicated briefly the position, the perils, and the ambitions of the other Great Powers of Europe, let us turn to consider the proper subject of this essay, the policy of Germany. And first let us dwell on the all-important fact that Germany, as a Great Power, is a creation of the last fifty years. Before 1866 there was a loose confederation of German States, after 1870 there was an Empire of the Germans. The transformation was the work of Bismarck, and it was accomplished by "blood and iron." Whether it could have been accomplished otherwise is matter of speculation. That it was accomplished so is a fact, and a fact of tragic significance. For it established among Germans the prestige of force and fraud, and gave them as their national hero the man whose most characteristic act was the falsification of the Ems telegram. If the unification could have been achieved in 1848 instead of in 1870, if the free and generous idealism of that epoch could have triumphed, as it deserved to, if Germans had not bartered away their souls for the sake of the kingdom of this world, we might have been spared this last and most terrible act in the bloody drama of European history. If even, after 1866, 1870 had not been provoked, the catastrophe that is destroying Europe before our eyes might never have overwhelmed us. In the crisis of 1870 the French minister who fought so long and with such tenacity, for peace saw and expressed, with the lucidity of his nation, what the real issue was for Germany and for Europe:-- There exists, it is true, a barbarous Germany, greedy of battles and conquest, the Germany of the country squires; there exists a Germany pharisaic and iniquitous, the Germany of all the unintelligible pedants whose empty lucubrations and microscopic researches have been so unduly vaunted. But these two Germanies are not the great Germany, that of the artists, the poets, the thinkers, that of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Liebig. This latter Germany is good, generous, humane, pacific; it finds expression in the touching phrase of Goethe, who when asked to write against us replied that he could not find it in his heart to hate the French. If we do not oppose the natural movement of German unity, if we allow it to complete itself quietly by successive stages, it will not give supremacy to the barbarous and sophistical Germany, it will assure it to the Germany of intellect and culture. War, on the other hand, would establish, during a time impossible to calculate, the domination of the Germany of the squires and the pedants.[1]