Prussia had roared as gently as any sucking dove the while the question was still one of enticing the smaller German States into the federated empire. But once the Emperor-King felt his footing secure upon the imperial throne, the old hungry Hohenzollern blood began stirring in his veins. His great Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, needed no prompting; every fibre of his bulky frame responded intuitively to this inborn Prussian instinct of aggrandisement. Together these two began putting the screws upon the minor States. “Solidifying the Empire” was what they called their work. The Hohenzollerns were always notable “solidifiers,” as their neighbours have had frequent occasion to observe tearfully during the last three centuries.
The humiliation and expulsion of Austria had been the pivot upon which the creation of the new Germany turned. In its most obvious aspect this had appeared to all men to be the triumph of a Protestant over a Catholic power. Later events had contributed to associate Prussia’s ascendency with the religious issue. The great OEcumenical Council at Rome had been followed by a French declaration of war, which every good Lutheran confidently ascribed to the dictation of the Jesuits.
These things grouped themselves together in the public mind just as similar arguments did in England in the days of the Armada. To be a Catholic grew to seem synonymous with being a sympathizer with Austria and France. It is an old law of human action that if you persistently impute certain views to a man, and persecute him on account of them, the effect is to reconcile his mind to those views. The melancholy history of theologico-political quarrels is peculiarly filled with examples of this. The Catholics of Germany were in the main as loyal to the idea of imperial unity as their Protestant neighbours, and they had shed their blood quite as freely to establish it as a fact. Their bishops and priests had over and over again testified by deeds their independence of Rome in matters which affected them as Germans. But when they found Bismarck ceaselessly insisting that they were hostile to Prussia, it was natural enough that they should discover that they did dislike his kind of a Prussia, and that some of the least cautious among them should say so.