one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated,
if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with
our elbow-room.

We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German
people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence
of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and
miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving and turbulent
people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize
under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and
self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely
arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even
yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a
German _Irredenta_, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is
an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent
no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows
that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing
or propagandist.

From this side we are able to understand the German history of the
past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in
colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and
military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely
linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated
Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place
of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was
pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of
blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it
was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with
arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not
even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to
commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the
position externally; self-government was not granted, because the
military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the
drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of
our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the
catastrophe came.

For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is
not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it
leaves--nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by
the mediaeval title of