To sum up: German unity, the great German Empire, which such an extraordinary concurrence of circumstances had created, is being dissolved and ruined by Prince von Bismarck through the most inconceivable of political blunders. He throws sixteen millions of Catholics, once friendly to the Empire, into opposition to it; he gives a new food and new strength to the particularism of the Southern States, and to the Polonism of Posen; he makes twofold [pg 490] the difficulties of accomplishing the assimilation of Alsace and Lorraine; to political grievances he superadds religious grievances, far more to be dreaded than the former; he enkindles an implacable religious war upon the ruins of that denominational peace which King Frederic William III. had happily established, and by aid of which the present emperor and the empress Augusta had, in the opening period of their reign, won the hearts of the Catholics of the Rhine. To cover this blunder, M. von Bismarck enters into the Italian alliance which destroyed the second Napoleonic Empire, and will destroy the German Empire; and he abandons the historic German policy restored by Stein, to rush into the retinue of the national liberal party, into the paths of the French Revolution, into that witches' dance to which M. Renan refers; and he inoculates his own country with the poison which has killed France!
IV.
But there is one final consequence of the policy of Prince von Bismarck to which I wish to call attention, and which is not least in gravity.
Austria, after having lost Italy, had, by the treaty of Prague, been excluded from Germany. Nevertheless, the German Empire, under the hegemony of Prussia, had not been set up; there existed only a Northern Germany, having the Main as its boundary; the Southern States, and even Saxony, preserved a certain autonomy; and Austria might hope by a wise policy to draw little by little into the sphere of her influence and attraction those countries which had been accustomed to look upon Vienna as their political pole.
The war of 1871 against France, which had united all the Germans under one flag, established German unity and the German Empire. The boundaries of the Empire were moved from the Main to the Danube, and all hope for Austria to regain her old German position was gone.
Austria accepted this situation; the Emperor Francis Joseph and his two counsellors, Count von Beust and Count Andràssy, worked together to bring about a sincere reconciliation between Austria and the German Empire.
They gave up the idea of bringing back the Southern States into the circle of Austrian influence; they feared, on the contrary, lest the German provinces of Austria, detaching themselves little by little from the weakened rule of the Hapsburgs, might be irresistibly drawn towards Berlin, the powerful and glorious centre of the German Vaterland.
Those fears may at present be entirely set at rest. There has been a complete reversal in the position of things. The people, for the most part so Catholic, of the Tyrol, of Lower Austria, and of Bohemia, will lose all inclination to draw nearer to the German Empire, where a bitter persecution is being waged against their religious faith. The bonds which unite them to Austria will be drawn the tighter. On the other hand, will not the Catholics of the Rhine, of Westphalia, of Poland, of Suabia, of Franconia, of Würtemberg, of Bavaria, of Alsace, and of Lorraine, driven from the bosom of the German Empire, in which they are no longer citizens, but pariahs, be tempted to look again in the direction of Austria, the centre of their older sympathies? All Austria has to do is not to interfere; M. von Bismarck is working for her.
The prince chancellor, notwithstanding the elated confidence which he has in his strength, has understood the danger of the situation.
In order to change it, he had but one easy thing to do, and that was to modify his policy, to give up persecuting the Catholics, to admit that he had gone astray, and to return to a calmer and wiser policy; but this he would not do; he has preferred to keep on, and to try to drag Austria into the same road.