, should after 1870 hail
their new-created Emperor. Had he not led them united to the first
glory and conquest they had ever known? Had he not got them back
Alsace and Lorraine, which France had stolen from them two hundred
years ago? So they handed their soul to the Hohenzollern. This marks
the beginning of the end.

IX

We can hardly emphasize too much, or sufficiently underline, the moral
effect of 1870 on the German nature, the influence it had on the
German mind. It is essential to a clear understanding of the full
Prussianizing process that now set in. On the German's innate docility
and credulity many have dwelt, but few on what 1870 did to this. Only
with Bismarck's quick, tremendous victory over France as the final
explanation is the abject and servile faith that the Germans
thenceforth put in Prussia rendered conceivable to reason. They
blindly swallowed the sham that Bismarck gave them as universal
suffrage. They swallowed extreme political and military restraint.
They swallowed a rigid compulsion in schools, which led to the excess
in child suicide I have mentioned. They swallowed a state of life
where outside the indicated limits almost nothing was permitted and
almost everything was forbidden.

But all this proscription is merely material and has been attended by
great material welfare. Intellectual speculation was apparently
unfettered; but he who dared philosophize about Liberty and the Divine
right of Kings found it was not. Prussia put its uniform not only on
German bodies but on their brains. Literature and music grew
correspondingly sterilized. Drama, fiction, poetry and the comic
papers became invaded by a new violence and a new, heavy obscenity.
Impatience with the noble German classics was bred by Prussia. What
wonder, since freedom was their essence?

Beethoven, after Napoleon made himself Emperor, tore off the
dedication of his "Eroica" symphony to Napoleon. And Goethe had said:
"Napoleon affords us an example of the danger of elevating oneself to
the Absolute and sacrificing everything to the carrying out of an
idea." Goethe fell frankly out of date in Berlin. Symphony orchestras
could no longer properly interpret Mozart and Beethoven. A strange
blend of frivolity and bestiality began to pervade the whole realm of
German art. Scientific eminence degenerated _pari passu_. No
originator of the dimensions of Helmholtz was produced, but a herd of
diligent and thorough workers-out of t