All nations dream—some more than others; while some are more ready than others to follow their dreams into action. Nor does the prevalence, or even the intensity, of these national dreams seem to bear any fixed relation to the strength of will which seeks to turn them into achievement.

After 1789 there was a great deal of dreaming among the nations of Europe. At the beginning of it all was revolutionary France, who dreamed of offering freedom to all mankind. A few years later, an altogether different France was dreaming furiously of glory for her own arms. In the end it was still France who dreamed; and this time she sought to impose the blessings of peace, order, and uniformity upon the whole world. Her first dream was realised in part, the second wholly; but the third ended in ruin.

Following upon this momentous failure came a short period when the exhausted nations slept much too soundly to dream dreams. During this epoch Europe was parcelled out artificially, like a patch-work quilt, by practical and unimaginative diplomatists, anxious certainly to take securities for a lasting {88} peace, but still more anxious to bolster up the ancient dynasties.

Against their arbitrary expedients there was soon a strong reaction, and dreaming began once more among the nations, as they turned in their sleep, and tried to stretch their hampered limbs. At the beginning their dreaming was of a mild and somewhat futile type. It called itself 'liberalism'—a name coined upon the continent of Europe. It aimed by methods of peaceful persuasion, at reaching the double goal of nationality as the ideal unit of the state, and popular representation as the ideal system of government. Then the seams of the patchwork, which had been put together with so much labour at Vienna[1] and Aix-la-Chapelle,[2] began to gape. Greece struggled with some success to free herself from the Turk,[3] and Belgium broke away from Holland,[4] as at a much later date Norway severed her union with Sweden.[5] In 1848 there were revolutions all over Europe, the objects of which were the setting up of parliamentary systems. In all directions it seemed as if the dynastic stitches were coming undone. Italy dreamed of union and finally achieved it,[6] expelling the Austrian encroachers—though not by peaceful persuasion—and disordering still further the neatly sewn handiwork of Talleyrand, Metternich, and Castlereagh. Finally, the Balkans began to dream of Slav destinies, unrealisable either under the auspices of the Sublime Porte or in tutelage to the Habsburgs.[7]

MAKING OF THE GERMAN union

But of all the nations which have dreamed since days long before Napoleon, none has dreamed more {89} nobly or more persistently than Germany. For the first half of the nineteenth century it seemed as if the Germans were satisfied to behold a vision without attempting to turn it into a reality. Their aspirations issued in no effective action. They dreamed of union between their many kingdoms, principalities, and duchies, and of building up a firm empire against which all enemies would beat in vain; but until 1864 they had gone but a few steps towards the achievement of this end.

Then within a period of seven years, Prussia, the most powerful of the German states, planned, provoked, and carried to a successful issue three wars of aggression. By a series of swift strokes, the genius of Bismarck snatched Schleswig-Holstein from the Danes, beat down the pretensions of Austria to the leadership of the Teutonic races, and wrested the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from France. When Denmark was invaded by Germanic armies in February 1864, the vision of unity seemed as remote as ever; by January 1871 it was fully achieved. When at Versailles, in the Hall of Mirrors, in the stately palace of the Bourbons, King William accepted from the hands of his peers—the sovereign rulers of Germany—an imperial crown, the dream of centuries was fulfilled.

Austria, indeed, stood aloof; but both by reason of her geographical situation and the heterogeneous ancestry of her people that was a matter only of small account. union was, for all practical purposes complete. And what made the achievement all the more marvellous was the fact, that the vision had been realised by methods which had no place in the gentle speculations of those, who had cherished the {90} hope of unity with the most fervent loyalty. It had been accomplished by the Prussians, who of all races between the Alps and the Baltic, between the mountain barriers of Burgundy and the Polish Marshes, are the least German in blood,[8] and who of all Germans dream the least. It had been carried through, not by peaceful persuasion, nor on any principles of Liberalism, nor in any of the ways foreseen by the philosophers and poets who had beheld visions of the millennium. union was the triumph of craft and calculation, courage and resolve, 'blood and iron.'