one to expel, Germany could only hope to attain unity by fighting.  In 1848 she made an attempt to do so by peaceable means, and a national Parliament actually assembled at Frankfurt to frame a constitution for the whole country.  But the attempt, noble as it was in conception, proved a dismal failure, and it became clear that national unity in Germany was to be won “not by speeches and majority resolutions, but by blood and iron.”  The words are Bismarck’s, and the task was his also.  Set them beside the words of Cavour about Italy and liberty, quoted above, or compare the harsh unscrupulous spirit of the great German master-builder with the spirit of Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi, and you get a measure of the difference between the developments of the national idea in Germany and in Italy.  Yet Bismarck’s famous sentence expressed the truth of the matter for Germany.  Austria had been put outside the German pale, and Germany north of the Main had accepted unity under the hegemony of Prussia, but there still remained the four great States of South Germany to bring in.  They had been the allies of Austria in 1866, and Prussia, had she willed it, might have incorporated them by conquest.  But Bismarck saw that they must put themselves willingly under Prussia if the German Empire was to be a stable concern; he therefore left them alone to think it over for a while.  Sooner or later they would have to come in, since now that Austria had been excluded there remained only the choice between dependence on France and union with Prussia.  Bismarck deliberately played upon South Germany’s fear of France, and Napoleon III’s restless foreign policy admirably seconded his efforts.  But a war was necessary to bring matters to a head.  The opportunity came in 1870, and Bismarck was able to make it appear a war not of his own choosing.  The Southern States threw themselves into the arms of Prussia; France was crushed, and Alsace-Lorraine annexed; the German Empire was proclaimed, and modern Germany came into being.  There had been no foreigner to expel from German soil, but Bismarck found that an attack upon France served his purpose equally well.

[Footnote 1:  Perhaps it would be fairer to say that he was incapable of distinguishing between them.  See his Reflections, i. pp. 315, 316.]

Germany was made by a war of aggression, resulting in territorial expansion at the expense of another nation; Italy by a war of liberation, driving the alien from her soil.  And the subsequent history of the two nations is eloquent of this difference in their origins.  Since 1860 Italy has in the main occupied herself with domestic reforms, with the working out of the “social idea” which had had to wait upon the realisation of the “national idea.”  She has had, it is true, her “adventures,” more especially in Africa, and her Jingoism, which has taken the natural form of Irredentism or the demand for the recovery of Italian provinces still left in Austrian hands; but she has never threatened the peace