But yet another dark hour was in store for Germany, as she once more slowly struggled upwards.  In France the Monarchy has exhausted the resources of the nation for its own selfish ends.  The motto of the monarchy, L’etat c’est moi, carried to an extreme, provoked a tremendous revulsion of ideas, which culminated in the stupendous revolution of 1789, and everywhere in Europe, and more specially in Germany, shattered and swept away the obsolete remnants of medievalism.  The German Empire as such disappeared; only fragmentary States survived, among which Prussia alone showed any real power.  France once again under Napoleon was fired with the conception of the universal imperium, and bore her victorious eagles to Italy, Egypt, Syria, Germany, and Spain, and even to the inhospitable plains of Russia, which by a gradual political absorption of the Slavonic East, and a slow expansion of power in wars with Poland, Sweden, Turkey, and Prussia, had risen to an important place among the European nations.  Austria, which had become more and more a congeries of different nationalities, fell before the mighty Corsican.  Prussia, which seemed to have lost all vigour in her dream of peace, collapsed before his onslaught.

But the German spirit emerged with fresh strength from the deepest humiliation.  The purest and mightiest storm of fury against the yoke of the oppressor that ever honoured an enslaved nation burst out in the Protestant North.  The wars of liberation, with their glowing enthusiasm, won back the possibilities of political existence for Prussia and for Germany, and paved the way for further world-wide historical developments.

While the French people in savage revolt against spiritual and secular despotism had broken their chains and proclaimed their rights, another quite different revolution was working in Prussia—­the revolution of duty.  The assertion of the rights of the individual leads ultimately to individual irresponsibility and to a repudiation of the State.  Immanuel Kant, the founder of critical philosophy, taught, in opposition to this view, the gospel of moral duty, and Scharnhorst grasped the idea of universal military service.  By calling upon each individual to sacrifice property and life for the good of the community, he gave the clearest expression to the idea of the State, and created a sound basis on which the claim to individual rights might rest at the same time Stein laid the foundations of self-employed-government in Prussia.

While measures of the most far-reaching historical importance were thus being adopted in the State on which the future fate of Germany was to depend, and while revolution was being superseded by healthy progress, a German Empire of the first rank, the Empire of intellect, grew up in the domain of art and science, where German character and endeavour found the deepest and fullest expression.  A great change had been effected in this land of political narrowness and social sterility