The agency and will of Providence are most clearly seen in the history of the growth of species and races, of peoples and States.  “What is true,” Goethe once said in a letter to Zelter, “can but be raised and supported by its history; what is false only lowered and dissipated by its history.”

The formation of peoples and races, the rise and fall of States, the laws which govern the common life, teach us to recognize which forces have a creative, sustaining, and beneficent influence, and which work towards disintegration, and thus produce inevitable downfall.  We are here following the working of universal laws, but we must not forget that States are personalities endowed with very different human attributes, with a peculiar and often very marked character, and that these subjective qualities are distinct factors in the development of States as a whole.  Impulses and influences exercise a very different effect on the separate national individualities.  We must endeavour to grasp history in the spirit of the psychologist rather than of the naturalist.  Each nation must be judged from its own standpoint if we wish to learn the general trend of its development.  We must study the history of the German people in its connection with that of the other European States, and ask first what paths its development has hitherto followed, and what guidance the past gives for Our future policy.  From the time of their first appearance in history the Germans showed themselves a first-class civilized people.

When the Roman Empire broke up before the onslaught of the barbarians there were two main elements which shaped the future of the West, Christianity and the Germans.  The Christian teaching preached equal rights for all men and community of goods in an empire of masters and slaves, but formulated the highest moral code, and directed the attention of a race, which only aimed at luxury, to the world beyond the grave as the true goal of existence.  It made the value of man as man, and the moral development of personality according to the laws of the individual conscience, the starting-point of all development.  It thus gradually transformed the philosophy of the ancient world, whose morality rested solely on the relations with the state.  Simultaneously with this, hordes of Germans from the thickly-populated North poured victoriously in broad streams over the Roman Empire and the decaying nations of the Ancient World.  These masses could not keep their nationality pure and maintain their position as political powers.  The States which they founded were short-lived.  Even then men recognized how difficult it is for a lower civilization to hold its own against a higher.  The Germans were gradually merged in the subject nations.  The German element, however, instilled new life into these nations, and offered new opportunities for growth.  The stronger the admixture of German blood, the more vigorous and the more capable of civilization did the growing nations appear.