Prussian military and bureaucratic systems were now extended to
all Germany--in other words, the rest of the German peoples were made
virtually the vassals and slaves of the Prussian monarch. This time
the King of Prussia received the Imperial crown at the hands of the
kings, princes, and other hereditary rulers of the various German
States. Bismarck was graciously pleased to bestow unity and internal
peace--a Prussian peace--upon Germany on condition of its abasement
before the Prussian corporal's stick and police-truncheon. Such was
the united Germany of Bismarck. Germany meant for Bismarck and his
followers Prussia, and Prussia meant their own Junker and military
caste, under the titular headship of the Hohenzollern.

Yet, strange to say, the peoples of Germany willingly consented, under
the influence of the intoxication of a successful war, to have their
independence bartered away to Prussia by their rulers. In this united
Germany of Bismarck--a Germany united under Prussian despotism--they
naively saw the realization of the dream of their thinkers and poets
since the time of the Napoleonic wars--which had become more than ever
an inspiration from 1848 onwards--of an ideal unity of all
German-speaking peoples as a national whole. It is unquestionable that
many of these thinkers and poets would have been horrified at the
Prusso-Bismarckian "unity" of "blood and iron," It was not for this,
they would have said, that they had laboured and suffered.

As a conclusion to the present chapter I venture to give a short
summary of the internal, and especially of the economic, development
of Prussia since the Franco-German War from an article which appeared
in the _English Review_ for December 1914, by Mr. H.M. Hyndman and the
present writer:--

"From 1871 onwards Prussianized Germany, by far the best-educated, and
industrially and commercially the most progressive, country in Europe,
with the enormous advantage of her central position, was, consciously
and unconsciously, making ready for her next advance. The policy of a
good understanding with Russia, maintained for many years, to such an
extent that, in foreign affairs, Berlin and St. Petersburg were almost
one city, enabled Germany to feel secure against France, while she was
devoting herself to the extension of her rural and urban powers of
production. Never at any time did she neglect to keep her army in a
posture of offence. All can now see the meaning of this.

"Mi