the spirit of the time and to inspire the movements of the world.  Hardly ever except in times of the deepest adversity has it come to the surface:  but then it has claimed its rights, or rather, discovered its duties."[1] Napoleon, by humiliating her, laid bare the soul of Germany, as Germany herself has laid bare the soul of Belgium to-day.  His arrogant pretensions roused the Germans as they had never been roused since the days of the Reformation; while at the same time his attempts to secure the support of the bigger German principalities by enlarging them at the expense of the smaller, simplified the map and laid the foundations of a United Germany.  The thinkers and dreamers of Germany, stung at last into a sense of political reality, awoke from their dreams of cosmopolitanism and devoted their powers to the needs of the German nation.

[Footnote 1:  Daab’s Preface to Paul de Lagarde, German Faith, German Fatherland, German Culture, p. vi. (Jena, 1913).]

The years between 1806 and 1813, between the disastrous battle of Jena and the overwhelming victory of Leipzig, are the greatest years in German history.  Shaking off the torpor and the prejudices of centuries the German nation arose and vanquished its oppressors.

But with the twilight of that glorious day the bats returned.  The defeat of Napoleon was not only the defeat of French domination but the defeat of the French Revolution, and of the principles of Democracy and Nationality which inspired it.  The unity of spirit which the Germans had achieved on the battlefield they were unable to transform after the victory into a unity of government or institutions.  The Congress of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe after the Revolutionary wars, did so, not in accordance with the principle of nationality or the wishes of the peoples of Europe but according to what was called “legitimacy,” that is to say, the interests of the princes.  There was only one idealist at the Conference, the Russian Emperor Alexander, and he was put off with empty phrases.

[Illustration:  Germany of 1815.]

For Germany the result of the Conference was the reestablishment, in smaller numbers and with larger units of territory, of the old undemocratic principalities, and of a Confederation embodying their dynastic interests.  Several of the larger States, such as Bavaria, Wuertemberg, Saxony, and Hanover, which Napoleon had raised to the status of kingdoms, were confirmed in their new dignities, and the kingdom of Prussia, the largest of them all, acquired, out of the debris of the old Archbishopric of Cologne and other small ecclesiastical and temporal States, the important provinces of Westphalia and the Rhineland, which have made possible for her the industrial growth of the last half century.  Cologne, Duesseldorf, Elberfeld, Essen, and other great industrial centres of Western Germany will next year be celebrating the centenary of their Prussian connection.  But the chief State in the Confederation and its undisputed head was Austria, which had for centuries enjoyed the prestige of supremacy over the German States; and it was the Austrian statesman Metternich who was mainly responsible for the Vienna settlement.