successful wars, accomplished at surprisingly small cost, and culminating in a grandiose and no less successful scheme of unification. Before rulers and people an imperial destiny of unlimited scope, and allowing of unbounded dreams, now inevitably opened itself up. Alone, amongst the peoples of Europe, Germany saw herself a nation with a career. No longer disunited and denationalized, she had come into her inheritance. The circumstances of her rebirth were so splendid, the moral exaltation of her new unity was so great that she could scarcely but suppose that her state was the beginning of a career of further and unimagined glories and triumphs. There were not lacking enthusiastic and prophetic voices to tell her she was right.
The decade that followed the foundation of the Empire was, perhaps, more pregnant with destiny than that which preceded it, for it saw the final determination of the path which Germany was to follow. She had made the immense stride in the biological scale of submitting herself to conscious direction; would she also follow the path which alone leads to