Here we must have recourse to history.  In Germany the dominant class is composed in part of an aristocracy by birth and of bourgeois capitalists, more or less of them ennobled.  The interior policy of Germany since 1871 and even since 1866 is explained by the relations, sometimes kindly, sometimes hostile, of these two categories of persons, by the opposition or the conjunction of these two influences, and not by a struggle of the dominant class against the socialistic mass.  That struggle, which is in France and is becoming in England a fact of essential gravity, has been in Germany only a phenomenon of secondary importance.  It has determined neither the profound evolution of the national life nor the chief decisions of the Government.

In Germany, as is known, the abolition of the ancien regime did not take place brusquely as in France.  After the revolution and the French occupation, the noble caste recovered all its privileges.  It has lost them little by little, but not yet entirely.  Even the liquidation of the property of the feudal regime was not completed until toward 1850.  Napoleon made some sad cuts in the little sovereignties, but from 1813 to 1815 the princely families did their utmost to recover their independence.  The greater part were mediatized, but their tenacity offered a serious obstacle up to 1871 to the establishment of German unity.

That unity was accomplished in despite of them, by sword and fire, as Bismarck said, that is to say, by the wars of 1866 and 1870.  Care was taken, however, not to abase them more than was strictly necessary, for it was intended to maintain the hierarchy.  What was wanted was a monarchical unity, made from above down, and not a democratic unity brought about by popular impulsion.

On the other hand, the smaller nobles formed, after 1820, a vast association for the defense of their rights, the Adelskette.  Moreover, they could not be sacrificed, in the first place, because they had rendered invaluable services in the wars of independence, they had arisen as one man, and they had ruined themselves in sacrifices for the national cause, they had organized the people and led it to victory, finally because they served to restrain the high nobility whose domination was feared.  They sustained the throne against the princes, the higher nobility against the democracy, the lesser nobility against the higher, the two forming an intermediary class between the monarch and the nation.  That was the social conception which prevailed with those who were working to realize the unity of Germany, so that the nobility, lesser or higher, in default of its privileges retained its functions.

Treitschke, in his last lessons, about 1890, called it “a political class.”  For the bourgeois, he said, wealth, instruction, letters, arts.  Their part is fine enough.  The nobility is apt at governing.  That is its special distinction.  For a long time, in fact, the nobility has filled alone or almost alone the great administrative, governmental, and military posts.