No attempt at settlement has been made in the religious domain.  The old antagonists are still bitterly hostile to each other, especially in Germany.  It will be the duty of the future to mitigate the religious and political antagonism of the denominations, under guarantees of absolute liberty of thought and all personal convictions, and to combine the conflicting views into a harmonious and higher system.  At present there appears small probability of attaining this end.  The dogmatism of Protestant orthodoxy and the Jesuitic tendencies and ultramontanism of the Catholics, must be surmounted, before any common religious movement can be contemplated.  But no German statesman can disregard this aspect of affairs, nor must he ever forget that the greatness of our nation is rooted exclusively on Protestantism.  Legally and socially all denominations enjoy equal rights, but the German State must never renounce the leadership in the domain of free spiritual development.  To do so would mean loss of prestige.

Duties of the greatest importance for the whole advance of human civilization have thus been transmitted to the German nation, as heir of a great and glorious past.  It is faced with problems of no less significance in the sphere of its international relations.  These problems are of special importance, since they affect most deeply the intellectual development, and on their solution depends the position of Germany in the world.

The German Empire has suffered great losses of territory in the storms and struggles of the past.  The Germany of to-day, considered geographically, is a mutilated torso of the old dominions of the Emperors; it comprises only a fraction of the German peoples.  A large number of German fellow-countrymen have been incorporated into other States, or live in political independence, like the Dutch, who have developed into a separate nationality, but in language and national customs cannot deny their German ancestry.  Germany has been robbed of her natural boundaries; even the source and mouth of the most characteristically German stream, the much lauded German Rhine, lie outside the German territory.  On the eastern frontier, too, where the strength of the modern German Empire grew up in centuries of war against the Slavs, the possessions of Germany are menaced.  The Slavonic waves are ever dashing more furiously against the coast of that Germanism, which seems to have lost its old victorious strength.

Signs of political weakness are visible here, while for centuries the overflow of the strength of the German nation has poured into foreign countries, and been lost to our fatherland and to our nationality; it is absorbed by foreign nations and steeped with foreign sentiments.  Even to-day the German Empire possesses no colonial territories where its increasing population may find remunerative work and a German way of living.

This is obviously not a condition which can satisfy a powerful nation, or corresponds to the greatness of the German nation and its intellectual importance.