With their restricted territories, as well as by the jealousies which animated their rulers, the German states lay, an easy prey, at the mercy of any ambitious foreign leader. In their union, Europe hoped to lay the foundations of continental peace. Such a federation, it was thought, would safeguard the other European countries from a concerted German attack, as it seemed highly improbable that the entire confederacy would join in a war undertaken by any one of its members for purposes of self-aggrandizement. By this arrangement provision was made for the strengthening of a number of weak states without the creation of a new powerful unit in the group of European nations. Thirty million Germans, comprising by far the majority of the German-speaking inhabitants of the period, were thus politically welded for the first time in modern history. The idea of nationality had received scant attention in Germany before the nineteenth century. Kant, Fichte and Hegel contributed powerfully to its awakening. Hardly had the concept become familiar to German thought before its relation with language became established. The trend of feeling on the subject is best expressed by Arndt about half a century before the fruition of Bismarck’s life project at Versailles: Was ist das deutsche Vaterland? So nenne endlich mir das Land! So weit die deutsche Zunge klingt Und Gott im Himmel Lieder singt, Dass soll es sein, dass soll es sein, Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein.[264] A literary history of a country is, in great measure, the mirror of its political growth. The development of social aptitudes, of intellectual faculties or of material wants within a given area is, in the last resort, an expansion of the living forces which make for nationality and which, ultimately, find their way to literary records. Nationality and literature are thus bound together by geography and history. Whatever be the period under observation, the spirit of the day pervades them both. A striking example of this relation is observable in medieval France, where the troubadours personified the feudal conditions which prevailed in the country. And furthermore literature, as a human product, partakes of all the limitations which are subtly imposed by the land on the fancy. It varies therefore, according to region, in mental temperament, tastes and emotions or modes of thought.