“Do you really believe,” he said, “that the great movement which last year led the peoples to battle from the Belt to the Sicilian Sea, from the Rhine to the Pruth and the Dniester, in the throw of the iron dice when we played for the crowns of kings and emperors, that the millions of German warriors who fought against one another and bled on the battle-fields from the Rhine to the Carpathians, that the thousands and ten thousands who were left dead on the battle-field and struck down by pestilence, who by their death have sealed the national decision,—­that all this can be pigeon-holed by a resolution of Parliament?  Gentlemen, in this case you really do not stand on the height of the situation....  I should like to see the gentlemen who consider this possibility answer an invalid from Koeniggraetz when he asks for the result of this mighty effort.  You would say to him:  ’Yes, indeed, for the German unity nothing is achieved, the occasion for that will probably come, that we can have easily, we can come to an understanding any day, but we have saved the Budget-right of the Chamber of Deputies, we have saved the right of the Prussian Parliament every year to put the existence of the Prussian army in question,’ ... and therewith the invalid must console himself for the loss of his limbs and the widow as she buries her husband.”

It is interesting to compare this speech with the similar speech he made after Olmuetz:  how great is the similarity in thought and expression, how changed is the position of the speaker!  He had no sympathy with these doubts and hesitations; why so much distrust of one another?  His Constitution might not be the best, it might not be perfect, but at least let it be completed.  “Gentlemen,” he said, “let us work quickly, let us put Germany in the saddle; it will soon learn to ride.”  He was annoyed and irritated by the opposition he met.

“If one has struggled hard for five years to achieve that which now lies before us, if one has spent one’s time, the best years of one’s life, and sacrificed one’s health for it, if one remembers the trouble it has cost to decide quite a small paragraph, even a question of punctuation, with two and twenty Governments, if at last we have agreed on that as it here lies before us, then gentlemen who have experienced little of all these struggles, and know nothing of the official proceedings which have gone before, come forward in a manner which I can only compare to that of a man who throws a stone at my window without knowing where I stand.  He knows not where he hits me, he knows not what business he impedes.”

He compared himself with Hotspur when after the battle he met the courtier who came to demand his prisoners, and when wounded and tired from the fight had to hear a long lecture over instruments of slaughter and internal wounds.