in Germany.
And so the plundered provinces became the very corner-stone of the German
imperial system. There is surely something very strange about all this. Why
should it be necessary to retain the loyalty of nearly half Germany by what
practically amounts to terrorisation? The answer is that Germany is not a
single national State but a number of _dynastic_ States, federated together
under the control of one predominant partner. In other words, the problem
of Alsace-Lorraine has led us to the consideration of the second flaw in
the development of the national idea in Germany.

The union of Italy meant a clean sweep of all the old dynastic frontiers
and States which had strangled the country for so long; the union of
Germany, on the contrary, riveted these obsolete chains still more firmly
than ever on the country's limbs. Bismarck claimed that this was necessary,
inasmuch as the Germans, unlike all other nations, were more alive to
dynastic than to national loyalty; that, in short, Germany was not really
ready in 1870 for true unity.[1] The chief reason, however, for the
retention of the old frontiers was that they suited the aims of Prussia.
The reformers of 1848, as Professor Erich Marcks somewhat naively says,
"had wanted to place Prussia at the head, but only as the servant of the
nation; Prussia was also to cease to be a State by itself, a power on its
own account. She was to create the nation's ideal--complete unity--and then
to merge herself in the nation. But Prussia would not and could not do
this. She was far too great a power herself; _she could very well rule
Germany, but not serve_."[2] Both Germany and Italy at first played with
the idea of a Confederation, but each was eventually forced to look to one
of its existing States to give it the unity it desired. There was only one
possible choice for each: for Germany, Prussia; for Italy, Piedmont; but
while Piedmont was content to serve, Prussia was too proud to do anything
but rule. The dynastic State frontiers were therefore retained because
Prussia refused to sacrifice her own State frontiers. The "unification of
Germany," in short, was an episode in the gradual expansion of the Prussian
dynastic State, which had begun far away back in the thirteenth century.[3]
It assumed the air of a national movement, because Prussia cleverly availed
herself of the prevailing nationalistic sentiment for her own ends. The
German Empire is therefore something unique in the