The German Empire of to-day may best be described as an enlarged and aggrandised Prussia; its people imbued with Prussian ideals and drawing their aspirations from the fountain of Prussia.
In the Confederation of the German States as constituted in 1814, Prussia, under the Hohenzollern Dynasty, was always the turbulent and disturbing element, by methods peculiarly Prussian, working towards a unity of the German states—a comity of nations welded into one under the hegemony of Prussia.
It was not long before Prussian domination became irksome, and her provocative and arrogant attitude created a war with Denmark in 1864 and with Austria in 1866—the latter, a struggle between Hohenzollern and Hapsburg, culminating in the complete discomfiture of Austria.
The war with Denmark gave Germany the harbour of Kiel, together with the million inhabitants of Schleswig-Holstein, and Prussia emerged from the struggle with Austria the leading Power in the new North German Confederation.
Since then the salt of Prussian militarism has been ploughed into the fertile German fields which produced some of the master-minds in the worlds of Thought, Philosophy and Literature.
In accord with true Prussian methods France was forced into a declaration of war in 1870, with the result that the German octopus settled its tentacles upon the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, an area of 5,605 square miles, with 1,500,000 inhabitants.
A new phase of Empire was then created, and the Germany of to-day was constituted as practically a new nation under the rule of William of Hohenzollern, who was elected the "Deutscher Kaiser," or German Emperor, at Versailles on 18th January, 1871.
Prince Otto von Bismarck became the first Chancellor of the new German Empire, and in his hands the fortunes of the House of Hohenzollern prospered, as he set himself to his fixed and single-minded purpose—that was, to elevate Prussia to the foremost place amongst the continental Powers.
Bismarck's policy was directed towards extension, but it was extension of Prussia (or Germany) in Europe and the consolidation of the portions added to the German Empire. In 1871 he declared "Germany does not want Colonies." He refused to embark upon dazzling adventures in which the risk stirred the imagination, and when an agitation arose in favour of making Germany a sea Power, he confronted it with the words of Frederick the Great: "All far-off acquisitions are a burden to the State." This view he held until the last decade of his career.