It was, as a French secretary often said, 'a complication most complicated'; but one fact was clear—the deplorable position of a liberty-loving people, deprived of the essentials that make life worth living!
The great barrier to the entire domination of Prussian ideals in this area between the Baltic and the North Sea is the existence of the Danish national spirit in Slesvig. 'If the other nations of Europe had looked ahead, the power of Prussia might have been held within reasonable bounds; the war in 1870 would have been impossible; this last awful world-conflict would not have occurred. Germany would have been taught her place long ago.' How often was this repeated!
The relations between the Emperor William and the Emperor of Russia were supposed to be unusually friendly then, after the practical defeat of Russia by Japan. In older days, Queen Louise of Denmark thought she had laid the foundation for a certain friendliness; but, nevertheless, the Tsar, though closely related to the Kaiser and dominated largely by his very beautiful German wife, was never free to ignore the Slavic genius of his people. Kings and emperors—all royal folk—made up a family society of their own until this war. We have changed all that, as the man in Molière's comedy said; and yet, as a rule, German royal princesses remained Prussian in spite of all temptation, while other women seemed naturally to adopt the nationalities of their husbands. The princesses connected with the Prussian royal house seem immutably Prussian.
The Tsar, then, like the Kaiser, cousin of the King of England, the son of a mother who remembered Slesvig-Holstein and never liked the Prussians, had second thoughts. (They were nearly always wrong when his wife influenced them.) It was one thing to call the mighty Prussian 'Willie'—all royalties have little domestic names—another to break with France and to bow the Slavic head to German benevolent assimilation. The Tsar might call the Emperor by any endearing epithet, but that did not imply political friendship; King George of Greece and Queen Alexandra were very fond of each other, but the queen would never have attempted to give her brotherly Majesty the Island of Crete which he badly wanted. With the death of the queen of Christian IX., assemblies of royalties ceased in Denmark; the old order had changed.
There was no neutral ground where the royalties and their scions could meet and soften asperities by the simplicity of family contact.
The point of view in Europe had become more democratic and more keen.
Even if there had been a Queen Louise to try to make her family, even to the remotest grandchild, a unit, it could not have been done. Reverence for royalty had passed out with Queen Victoria; the idols were dissolving, and restless ideals became visible in their places.
Prussia had drawn her states into a united empire; tributary kings were at the chariot wheel of the Prussian Emperor, not because the kings so willed, but because the subjects of the kings—the commercial people, the landowners, the military caste, the capitalists, the increasingly prosperous farmers—discovered it to be to their advantage.
Bismarck's policy of blood and iron meant more money and more worldly success for the Germans. Although the smaller Teutonic states had lost their freedom, Bismarck began to pay each of them its price in good gold with the stamp of the empire upon it. To take and to hold was the motto of the empire:—'We take our own wherever we find it!'
The old Germans disappeared; the Germans who were frugal and philosophical, poor and poetical, were emerging from the simplicity of the past to the luxury of the present.