"
Whether it could have been accomplished otherwise is matter of speculation.
That it was accomplished so is a fact, and a fact of tragic significance.
For it established among Germans the prestige of force and fraud, and gave
them as their national hero the man whose most characteristic act was the
falsification of the Ems telegram. If the unification could have been
achieved in 1848 instead of in 1870, if the free and generous idealism of
that epoch could have triumphed, as it deserved to, if Germans had not
bartered away their souls for the sake of the kingdom of this world, we
might have been spared this last and most terrible act in the bloody drama
of European history. If even, after 1866, 1870 had not been provoked, the
catastrophe that is destroying Europe before our eyes might never have
overwhelmed us. In the crisis of 1870 the French minister who fought so
long and with such tenacity, for peace saw and expressed, with the lucidity
of his nation, what the real issue was for Germany and for Europe:--
There exists, it is true, a barbarous Germany, greedy of battles and
conquest, the Germany of the country squires; there exists a Germany
pharisaic and iniquitous, the Germany of all the unintelligible pedants
whose empty lucubrations and microscopic researches have been so unduly
vaunted.
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