[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.]

Sec.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.