of Europe, or sought power at the expense of other nationalities.  Since 1870, on the other hand, Germany has had to sit armed to defend the booty taken from France.  “We have earned in the late war respect, but hardly love,” said General von Moltke soon after the conclusion of peace.  “What we have gained by arms in six months we shall have to defend by arms for fifty years.”  At the beginning of 1914 more than forty out of the fifty years named by Moltke had passed by and the situation had undergone no material change.  “The irreconcilability of France,” writes the late Imperial Chancellor of Germany, “is a factor that we must reckon with in our political calculations.  It seems to me weakness to entertain the hope of a real and sincere reconciliation with France, so long as we have no intention of giving up Alsace-Lorraine.  And there is no such intention in Germany."[1] The annexation of two small provinces has thus made a permanent breach between two great nations, a breach which has poisoned the whole of European policy during the past half century, which has widened until it has split Europe into two huge armed camps, and which has at last involved the entire world in one of the most terrible calamities that mankind has ever known.

[Footnote 1:  Imperial Germany, von Buelow, p. 69.]

Why did Bismarck annex Alsace-Lorraine?  To strengthen, he said, the German frontier against France.  But there was another reason.  Fear of France had brought the Southern States into the Empire; fear of France should keep them there.  The permanent hostility of France was necessary to assure the continuance of Prussia’s position as the supreme military power in Germany.  And so the plundered provinces became the very corner-stone of the German imperial system.  There is surely something very strange about all this.  Why should it be necessary to retain the loyalty of nearly half Germany by what practically amounts to terrorisation?  The answer is that Germany is not a single national State but a number of dynastic States, federated together under the control of one predominant partner.  In other words, the problem of Alsace-Lorraine has led us to the consideration of the second flaw in the development of the national idea in Germany.

The union of Italy meant a clean sweep of all the old dynastic frontiers and States which had strangled the country for so long; the union of Germany, on the contrary, riveted these obsolete chains still more firmly than ever on the country’s limbs.  Bismarck claimed that this was necessary, inasmuch as the Germans, unlike all other nations, were more alive to dynastic than to national loyalty; that, in short, Germany was not really ready in 1870 for true unity.[1] The chief reason, however, for the retention of the old frontiers was that they suited the aims of Prussia.  The reformers of 1848, as Professor Erich Marcks somewhat naively says, “had wanted to place Prussia at the head, but only as the