he was incapable of
distinguishing between them. See his _Reflections_, i. pp. 315, 316.]

Germany was made by a war of aggression, resulting in territorial expansion
at the expense of another nation; Italy by a war of liberation, driving
the alien from her soil. And the subsequent history of the two nations is
eloquent of this difference in their origins. Since 1860 Italy has in the
main occupied herself with domestic reforms, with the working out of the
"social idea" which had had to wait upon the realisation of the "national
idea." She has had, it is true, her "adventures," more especially in
Africa, and her Jingoism, which has taken the natural form of Irredentism
or the demand for the recovery of Italian provinces still left in Austrian
hands; but she has never threatened the peace of Europe, or sought power at
the expense of other nationalities. Since 1870, on the other hand, Germany
has had to sit armed to defend the booty taken from France. "We have earned
in the late war respect, but hardly love," said General von Moltke soon
after the conclusion of peace. "What we have gained by arms in six months
we shall have to defend by arms for fifty years." At the beginning of 1914
more than forty out of the fifty years named by Moltke had passed by and
the situation had undergone no material change. "The irreconcilability of
France," writes the late Imperial Chancellor of Germany, "is a factor that
we must reckon with in our political calculations. It seems to me weakness
to entertain the hope of a real and sincere reconciliation with France, so
long as we have no intention of giving up Alsace-Lorraine. And there is no
such intention in Germany."[1] The annexation of two small provinces has
thus made a permanent breach between two great nations, a breach which has
poisoned the whole of European policy during the past half century, which
has widened until it has split Europe into two huge armed camps, and
which has at last involved the entire world in one of the most terrible
calamities that mankind has ever known.

[Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, von Buelow, p. 69.]

Why did Bismarck annex Alsace-Lorraine? To strengthen, he said, the German
frontier against France. But there was another reason. Fear of France had
brought the Southern States into the Empire; fear of France should keep
them there. The permanent hostility of France was necessary to assure the
continuance of Prussia's position as the supreme military power