annals of the world; it
is at once a nation-State, like Italy, France, and Great Britain, and also
a military Empire, like Rome under Augustus, Europe under Napoleon, Austria
under Joseph II., _i.e._ a State in which the territory that commands the
army holds political sway over the rest of the country. It is not mere
accident of geographical proximity, or even the kinship between Austrians
and Germans, which has led to the long and unshakable alliance of Germany
with the Hapsburg dominions. They are associated by common political
interests and by similarity of political structure. Each stands for the
supremacy of one dynastic State over a number of subordinate States or
nationalities.

[Footnote 1: The chapter entitled "Dynasties and Stocks" in the
_Reflections_ should be carefully studied on this point. Bismarck was
obviously uncomfortable about the old frontiers.]

[Footnote 2: _Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century_, p. 104.]

[Footnote 3: See Chap. III. p. 95.]

Her common nationality leads us to forget that the German Empire should
more rightly be called the Prussian Empire.[1] Nor is there any reason at
all why the Empire of Prussia should stop its process of expansion at the
national boundaries; it has indeed already stepped beyond them, into Poland
in the east, into Denmark in the north, into France in the west. Why should
not the process be carried farther still and Germany become in Europe, nay,
in the world, what Prussia is in Germany? By preserving her identity as
a State, and by establishing her hegemony, Prussia, in the name of the
national idea of Germany, has been able to spread her own ideals throughout
the Empire, in other words to undertake that Prussianisation of Germany
which is the most striking fact in her history since 1870. Piedmont was
swallowed up in Italy, Germany has been swallowed up in Prussia; she has
become the sharer of her victories and the accomplice of her crimes. And so
under the tutelage of the spirit of Bismarck the docile German people have
adopted the Prussian faith; and the policy of aggression and conquest once
entered upon, there was no drawing back. Bismarck fed the youthful nation
upon a diet of blood and iron, and its appetite has grown by what it
fed on. The success of 1870 turned the nation's head; the annexation of
Alsace-Lorraine gave it the first taste of conquest. Germany began to
imagine that German character and German culture possessed some magical