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. But these two Germanies are not the great Germany, that of
the artists, the poets, the thinkers, that of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Liebig. This latter
Germany is good, generous, humane, pacific; it finds expression in the
touching phrase of Goethe, who when asked to write against us replied
that he could not find it in his heart to hate the French. If we do not
oppose the natural movement of German unity, if we allow it to complete
itself quietly by successive stages, it will not give supremacy to the
barbarous and sophistical Germany, it will assure it to the Germany of
intellect and culture. War, on the other hand, would establish, during
a time impossible to calculate, the domination of the Germany of the
squires and the pedants.[1]

The generous dream was not to be realized. French chauvinism fell into
the trap Bismarck had prepared for it. Yet even at the last moment his war
would have escaped him had he not recaptured it by fraud. The publication
of the Ems telegram made the conflict inevitable, and one of the most
hideous and sinister scenes in all history is that in which the three
conspirators, Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon, "suddenly recovered their
pleasure in eat