tion of some three hundred independent political units,
duchies, principalities, bishoprics, free cities, and what not, among
electorates and kingdoms of a larger sort, but still minute. It
seemed like a pathological chart presenting a face broken out with an
unseemly tetter. The land indeed, in those days, was afflicted by a
sad political disease. The Germans call it "_Particularismus_" or
"_Vielstaaterei_," the breaking up of a nationality into a mass
of fragments. Some on the map were scarcely larger than pinheads, and
in actual area hardly exceeded a fair-sized farm. In that time Heine
laughed at one of them after this fashion, while describing a journey
over it in bad weather:

"Of Bueckeburg's principality
Full half on my boots I carried.
Such muddy roads I've never beheld
Since here in the world I've tarried."

The consequences of this disintegration were disastrous to the dignity
of Germany and the character of her people. She had no place among
the real powers of the world politically, and her masses, lacking the
stimulus of a noble national atmosphere, were dwarfed and shrivelled
into narrow and timid provincialism, split as they were into their
little segregations. Patriotism languished in dot-like States
oppressively administered, without associations to awaken pride, or
generous interests to evoke devotion. Spirits like Leasing and Goethe,
all but derided patriotism. It scarcely held a place among the proper
virtues. The small units were forever unsympathetic and inharmonious,
jealous over a petty "balance of power" and always liable to war. The
disease which the face of the map suggested to the boy's imagination
was indeed a real one, inveterate, deep-seated, and prostrating to all
that is best in human nature. For a few years, before the adoption of
the Constitution, America seemed likely to fall a prey to it, each of
the thirteen States standing aloof on its own little dignity in a bond
scarcely more than nominal, of the weakest and coolest. In 1787
came the beneficent change. The thirteen and those that followed the
thirteen were made one, and it was the beginning of a grand unifying
in many lands. Following an instinct at first only faintly manifest
but which soon gathered strength, disintegrated Germany became one.
Italy, too, became one, and in our old home the "Little Englanders,"
once a noteworthy company, succumbed to a conquering sentiment that
England should become a "great world-Veni