opportunity came in 1870, and Bismarck was able to make it appear a war not of his own choosing. The Southern States threw themselves into the arms of Prussia; France was crushed, and Alsace-Lorraine annexed; the German Empire was proclaimed, and modern Germany came into being. There had been no foreigner to expel from German soil, but Bismarck found that an attack upon France served his purpose equally well. [Footnote 1: Perhaps it would be fairer to say that he was incapable of distinguishing between them. See his _Reflections_, i. pp. 315, 316.] Germany was made by a war of aggression, resulting in territorial expansion at the expense of another nation; Italy by a war of liberation, driving the alien from her soil. And the subsequent history of the two nations is eloquent of this difference in their origins. Since 1860 Italy has in the main occupied herself with domestic reforms, with the working out of the "social idea" which had had to wait upon the realisation of the "national idea." She has had, it is true, her "adventures," more especially in Africa, and her Jingoism, which has taken the natural form of Irredentism or the demand for the recovery of Italian provinces still left in Austrian hands; but she has never threatened the peace of Europe, or sought power at the expense of other nationalities. Since 1870, on the other hand, Germany has had to sit armed to defend the booty taken from France. "We have earned in the late war respect, but hardly love," said General von Moltke soon after the conclusion of peace. "What we have gained by arms in six months we shall have to defend by arms for fifty years." At the beginning of 1914 more than forty out of the fifty years named by Moltke had passed by and the situation had undergone no material change. "The irreconcilability of France," writes the late Imperial Chancellor of Germany, "is a factor that we must reckon with in our political calculations. It seems to me weakness to entertain the hope of a real and sincere reconciliation with France, so long as we have no intention of giving up Alsace-Lorraine. And there is no such intention in Germany."[1] The annexation of two small provinces has thus made a permanent breach between two great nations, a breach which has poisoned the whole of European policy during the past half century, which has widened until it has split Europe into two huge armed camps, and which has at last involved the entire world in one of the most terrible calamities that mankind has ever known. [Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, von Bülow, p. 69.]