“Honored Gentlemen: You will share the satisfaction with which the Confederate Governments look back on the events of the first year of the newly founded German Empire, and the joyful confidence with which they look forward to the further national and state development of our internal institutions. With equal satisfaction you will hail the assurance that the policy of his majesty, the emperor and king, has succeeded in retaining and strengthening the confidence of all foreign states; that the power acquired by Germany through becoming united in one Empire is not only a safe bulwark for the fatherland, but likewise affords a strong guarantee for the peace of Europe.”
Now, that sounds so well, at least it did in April last, that it is almost a pity to spoil it by the inevitable comments which cannot fail to present themselves to the minds of its readers in December, in the face of one or two little events which have occurred since April. But before commenting on it, we must add a further exquisite little piece of irony from the same speech of Bismarck's—we mean of the Emperor William: Prince Bismarck only read it:
“The new administration in, and the consolidation of the affairs of, Alsace and Lorraine make satisfactory progress. The damage done by the war is gradually disappearing with the aid of the subvention given in conformity with the law, dated June 15, 1871.”
As it is not the purport of this article to go extensively into the various subjects which come under our notice, we think [pg 561] that the best mode of dealing with the German question will be to read the above speech by the December light:
Honored Gentlemen: You will share the satisfaction with which the Confederate Governments look back on the events of the intervening nine months since his majesty, the emperor and king, first found reason to congratulate you on the consolidation of the newly founded empire. Those events are, in brief, as follows:
1. As we consider national education to be the first means in making good, sound, and efficient citizens of the Empire, and as we consider it, moreover, to be the great moralizer of the masses in these days, we have found it necessary to take this education from the hands in which it has rested for so long, “which the Prussia of the past encouraged, and indeed enforced; which have had the honor to receive the zealous support of two deceased monarchs, the father and brother of the present sovereign; which have received for the last two generations the approbation of all sorts of thinkers—who believed that the Prussian state could only subsist by a strict military and religious organization, that a definite church system must be chosen by the state, and the people drilled in it as they were drilled for his majesty's armies.”[210] Notwithstanding the very solid proofs which our success in the late war gave us of the efficiency of this system, when our soldiers went to battle under the double panoply of intelligence and faith in God, we have since found it fit to divorce religion from education, and place this moralizer of the masses in the hands of those to whom morality is a thing unknown, or, if it mean anything, means blind obedience to the state in all things.
2. Holding as we do that marriage is another powerful moralizer of the masses, and the strongest bond for the welfare, happiness, and power of a nation, we have thought fit to divorce it also from religion, to strip it of the sacred character with which Jesus Christ invested it, and which, even were it false, has been the chief means of restoring woman to her fitting station in life, of civilizing man, and substituting love and purity for sensuality and animal passion: being perfectly alive to all this, we have still seen fit to hand the power of the binding and the loosing of marriage into the hands of the magistracy, to be dealt with for the future as a civil contract, thus reducing it to the far more convenient form of a mere matter of buying and selling at will.
3. Having already testified in the most direct and special manner our gratitude for the great services rendered us by the Society of Jesus and kindred orders recently on the fields of France, and in the more lasting and beneficial fields of intellectual and religious culture under the educational system which obtained so long and with such profit to us, but which we have since seen fit to put an end to, we think it fit to prove their devotion still further to us by banishing them the Empire, breaking up their communities, closing their churches, appropriating their property to our own use and imprisoning them if we find them within our territory. We mercifully spare them the further trial of immediate martyrdom.
4. Having been compelled to meet the demands of two powerful bodies of our subjects whose interests on religious questions sometimes clash, we have very wisely, and very satisfactorily to both bodies, met those demands by special articles in our legislative code which have hitherto answered their purpose so well that both bodies have been enabled to work harmoniously though in friendly rivalry together as common children of fatherland. We have seen fit to erase those laws, at least in the case of the Catholics. We cannot allow their bishops to excommunicate our subjects, though we have hitherto allowed it, and though we still allow it to the Protestants.[211]
Honored Gentlemen: Having thus succeeded in creating a profound and widespread agitation by outraging the feelings and the conscience of 14,000,000 of our most faithful subjects, an agitation which has spread from these 14,000,000 to hundreds of millions of their co-religionists outside the Empire, and indeed of large bodies and powerful secular organs [pg 562] opposed to them in faith, the confederate governments, the most powerful of which is Catholic, may look forward with joyful confidence to the further national and state development of our institutions. With equal satisfaction you will hail the assurance that the policy of his majesty, the emperor and king, has succeeded in retaining and strengthening the confidence of all foreign states,[212] that the power acquired by Germany is not only a safe bulwark for the fatherland,[213] but likewise affords a strong guarantee for the peace of Europe.