Duties of the greatest importance for the whole advance of human civilization have thus been transmitted to the German nation, as heir of a great and glorious past. It is faced with problems of no less significance in the sphere of its international relations. These problems are of special importance, since they affect most deeply the intellectual development, and on their solution depends the position of Germany in the world.
The German Empire has suffered great losses of territory in the storms and struggles of the past. The Germany of to-day, considered geographically, is a mutilated torso of the old dominions of the Emperors; it comprises only a fraction of the German peoples. A large number of German fellow-countrymen have been incorporated into other States, or live in political independence, like the Dutch, who have developed into a separate nationality, but in language and national customs cannot deny their German ancestry. Germany has been robbed of her natural boundaries; even the source and mouth of the most characteristically German stream, the much lauded German Rhine, lie outside the German territory. On the eastern frontier, too, where the strength of the modern German Empire grew up in centuries of war against the Slavs, the possessions of Germany are menaced. The Slavonic waves are ever dashing more furiously against the coast of that Germanism, which seems to have lost its old victorious strength.
Signs of political weakness are visible here, while for centuries the overflow of the strength of the German nation has poured into foreign countries, and been lost to our fatherland and to our nationality; it is absorbed by foreign nations and steeped with foreign sentiments. Even to-day the German Empire possesses no colonial territories where its increasing population may find remunerative work and a German way of living.
This is obviously not a condition which can satisfy a powerful nation, or corresponds to the greatness of the German nation and its intellectual importance.
At an earlier epoch, to be sure, when Germans had in the course of centuries grown accustomed to the degradation of being robbed of all political significance, a large section of our people did not feel this insufficiency. Even during the age of our classical literature the patriotic pride of that idealistic generation "was contented with the thought that no other people could follow the bold flights of German genius or soar aloft to the freedom of our world citizenship." [B]
[Footnote B: Treitschke, "Deutsche Geschichte," i., p. 195.]
Schiller, in 1797, could write the lines:
"German majesty and honour
Fall not with the princes' crown;
When amid the flames of war
German Empire crashes down,
German greatness stands unscathed." [C]
[Footnote C: Fragment of a poem on "German Greatness," published in 1905 by Bernhard Suphan.]
The nobler and better section of our nation, at any rate, holds different sentiments to-day. We attach a higher value to the influence of the German spirit on universal culture than was then possible, since we must now take into consideration the immense development of Germany in the nineteenth century, and can thus better estimate the old importance of our classical literature. Again, we have learnt from the vicissitudes of our historical growth to recognize that the full and due measure of intellectual development can only be achieved by the political federation of our nation. The dominion of German thought can only be extended under the aegis of political power, and unless we act in conformity to this idea, we shall be untrue to our great duties towards the human race.