¶ This newly awakened German National faith was really a very old German faith that had never died, although for years forgotten; the longing for the Fatherland was always there.
¶ Through love of home, through worship of ancestry and through respect for constituted authority in church and state, that is by “German national faith,” Bismarck touched the chord that made his life-work possible. The stimulus of three great wars, presented by Bismarck as sanctified by God, finally did the business.
¶ He knew that in all Germans is a certain generosity of character which when appealed to in the right way made them eager to take the chance of death on the battlefield.
¶ Bismarck played the positive as well as the negative side of this psychological fact. On the negative side, he stirred men with the idea that social ostracism rests on the man who in times of National danger tries to avoid the draft.
¶ Bismarck’s work thus shows him to be the great constructive poet of his time. He placed war before his fellow man in such a way that it was held a sweet privilege to die for one’s land, which interpreted means Bismarck’s idea of a new territorial arrangement of the map of Europe.
¶ There was race prejudice behind his deeper plans. He made much of the fact that within a given area the German language was spoken, whereas while there were millions of German-speaking people in Austria there were also Slavs, Czechs, Bohemians and mongrel races.
¶ The idea of brotherhood based on blood and language finally prevailed over the idea of the confraternity of races. Make as much out of this as you will, but the basic fact is incontestible.
¶ Some 80,000 men perished to sustain Bismarck’s peculiar conception of United Germany. Through the turmoil and misery of these three wars he had his way, and being at last successful, he suddenly became the most popular man in Europe, idolized by the millions who a little while before had reviled his name as the enemy of the Democrats.
¶ Such is human nature.