It may be so; it may be that the Germany of Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven has been absorbed by the Germany of Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon; but it must not be forgotten at the same time that, since their day, yet another Germany has come into being, the Germany of Marx, Engels, and Bebel, a Germany which is represented by more than a third of the voters in the Empire. The old line of cleavage had barely closed up when a new and much more fundamental schism appeared in the State, that between imperialism and social democracy. The existence of this tremendous revolutionary force in Germany, determined to overthrow the militarist régime of Prussia and to re-establish the State on a democratic basis, is an unanswerable proof that the government of the Empire is not in any true sense representative. Prussia has in this direction also impeded the development of the national idea and given mechanical unity at the expense of spiritual unity. It has created a vast political party of irreconcilables in the country, men who have been led to feel that they have neither part nor promise in the national life, and who therefore elect to stand outside it. "Our Social Democratic party," writes von Bülow, "lacks a national basis. It will have nothing to do with German patriotic memories which bear a monarchical and military character. It is not like the French and Italian parties, a precipitate of the process of national historical development, but since its beginning it has been in determined opposition to our past history as a nation. It has placed itself outside our national life."[1] And again: "In the German Empire, Prussia is the leading State. The Social Democratic party is the antithesis of the Prussian state."[2] Nevertheless, the Imperial Government, not finding it possible to suppress the social democrats, does its best to employ them for its own ends. It uses them in fact as it uses irreconcilable France, namely, for the purpose of terrorisation, since it has discovered that the spectre of socialism is as effective to keep the middle classes loyal as the spectre of French revenge is to keep the Southern States loyal. But it also hopes in time to eradicate socialism from the State. "A vigorous national policy" Prince von Bülow declares to be "the true remedy against the Social Democratic Movement"; and though he makes no specific mention of war, it is obvious that a war like that in which Germany is at present engaged is the most vigorous form a national policy could possibly take. Was the outbreak of war last August in part occasioned by the desire on the side of the German Government to win over the workers of Germany? If so, it had yet another spectre ready to its hand for the purpose—the spectre of Russia.
[Footnote 1: Imperial Germany, p. 184.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid. p. 186.]
In any case, with Germany in this condition, Europe could hardly have avoided a great war at some time or other; and 1914 follows naturally, almost inevitably, from 1870. The unification of 1870 was far from complete. The German national idea still awaits development in the direction of racial unity, political unity, and constitutional freedom. It is Prussia that bars the way in all these directions, Prussia, which, in itself not a nation but a military bureaucracy, a survival of the old territorial dynastic principle which the world has largely outgrown, has stamped its character and system upon the German people. "Prussia," says one of its apologists, "has put an iron girdle round the whole of German life."[1] But in the end life proves itself stronger than iron bands. Germany was bound to make another attempt to reach complete nationhood. She is doing so now. Prussia fights for conquest, for world-power, and makes docile Germany imagine that she is fighting for these also; but what Germany is really fighting for, blindly and gropingly, is freedom and unity. She has indeed "to hack her way through." But it is not, as she supposes, hostile Europe which hems her in and keeps her from her "place in the sun"; it is the Prussian girdle and the Prussian chains which hamper the free movements of her limbs and hold her close prisoner in the shadow of the Hohenzollern castle. The overthrow of Prussia means the release of Germany; and France, who gave Germany greatness in 1870, may with the help of the Allies be able in the near future to give her an even greater gift, the gift of liberty.
[Footnote 1: Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century, p. 106.]
§7. The Map of Europe, 1814-1914.—We have now watched the national idea at work in the three western countries of that Central European area which the Congress of Vienna left unsettled in 1814, and in a later chapter we shall see the same principle acting in the two great divisions of South-East Europe, Austria-Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula. Let us, then, use this opportunity to pause for a moment, take a general survey of the map, and consider in broad outline what has actually been accomplished during the past century and what still remains to do.
From 1814 to 1848, exhausted by the effort of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and disillusioned by reactionary statesmanship, the larger nations slumbered: but Belgium and Greece secured their present liberties, and outside Europe the national movement spread throughout the South American Continent. Then came 1848, the "wonderful year" of modern history. "There is no more remarkable example in history of the contagious quality of ideas than the sudden spread of revolutionary excitement through Europe in 1848. In the course of a few weeks the established order seemed everywhere to be crumbling to pieces. The Revolution began in Palermo, crossed the Straits of Messina, and passed in successive waves of convulsion through Central Italy to Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Berlin. It has often been remarked that the Latin races are of all the peoples of Europe most prone to revolution; but this proposition did not hold good in 1848. The Czechs in Bohemia, the Magyars in Hungary, the Germans in Austria, rose against the paralysing encumbrance of the Hapsburg autocracy. The Southern Slavs dreamed of an Illyrian kingdom; the Germans of a united Germany; the Bohemians of a union of all the Slavonic peoples of Europe. The authority of the Austrian Empire, the pivot of the European autocracy, had never been so rudely challenged, and if the Crown succeeded in recovering its shattered authority it was due to the dumb and unintelligent loyalty of its Slavonic troops."[1]
[Footnote 1: H.A.L. Fisher, The Republican Tradition in Europe, p. 193.]
Many of these risings were doomed to failure, but between 1848 and 1871 the alien governments in the Italian peninsula were abolished, making way for a unitary government, in the form of a constitutional monarchy, which embraces with small exceptions the whole of the Italian population of Europe. In 1871, after three successful wars in seven years against Denmark, Austria, and France, a Federal Government was established in Germany, with the kingdom of Prussia as its leading State and the King of Prussia as its monarch, with the title of German Emperor. This was a step forward, though the new Germany was neither a unitary nor a constitutional State. The Austrian territories have also come in for their share of the general ferment, and Francis Joseph came to the throne in 1848 amid the uprisings of his subject peoples; but these were successfully tided over, though the Hungarian portion of the Austrian dominion achieved national recognition and institutions in 1867.
After 1871 the national movement moved farther east. In 1878 Roumania and Serbia, both national States, were declared sovereign powers independent of Turkey; Bulgaria achieved its recognition as a principality; and Montenegro, a small mountain community, which had never submitted to the Turks, increased its territory and became a recognised European State. In 1908 and 1910 Bulgaria and Montenegro became kingdoms like their neighbours; and in 1913, after the two Balkan Wars, all the five Balkan States—Roumania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro—obtained accession of territory, and the principality of Albania was constituted out of the Albanian portion of the old Turkish dominion. Finally, in quite another region of Europe, Norway, which had been joined in an anomalous union with Sweden since 1814, satisfied her national aspirations unopposed by becoming an independent Constitutional Monarchy in 1905.