that insolent air with which it has oppressed Europe for a hundred and fifty years. It is only on the other side of Paris, on the Loire, that those conditions can be obtained from it which are necessary for the peace of Europe. In this way alone the natural relation between 30 millions of men and 75 millions will quickly make itself known, but not if the country from Dunkirk to Genoa is to be surrounded in the way it has been for 150 years by a girdle of armies, whilst fifty different small objects are aimed at, not one of which is powerful enough to overcome the inertia, friction, and extraneous influences which spring up and reproduce themselves everywhere, but more especially in allied armies.
How little the provisional organisation of the German federal armies is adapted to such a disposition, will strike the reader. By that organisation the federative part of Germany forms the nucleus of the German power, and Prussia and Austria thus weakened, lose their natural influence. But a federative state is a very brittle nucleus in war. There is in it no unity, no energy, no rational choice of a commander, no authority, no responsibility.