We see, then, the elements out of which Prussia grew to be a strong state, not yet large in population, but compact and carefully organized. Let us look now at Germany, of which she formed a part.
We are struck at once by the fact that until 1871 Germany had no political unity. During the centuries when France, England, and Spain were being welded into political units by their respective dynasties, the great Teutonic race in Central Europe escaped the unifying process. The Holy Roman Empire--at best a reminiscence--was too weak to prevent the rise of many petty princedoms and duchies and of a few large states, whose rulers were hereditary, whereas the emperor was elective. Thus particularism--what we might call states’ rights--flourished, to the detriment of national union. At the end of the last century, Germany had four hundred independent sovereigns: the most powerful being the King of Prussia; the weakest, some knight whose realm embraced but a few hundred acres, or some free city whose jurisdiction was bounded by its walls. When Napoleon, the great simplifier, reduced the number of little German states, he had no idea of encouraging the formation of a strong, coherent German Empire. To guard against this, which might menace the supremacy of France, he created the kingdoms of Bavaria and Westphalia, and set up the Confederation of the Rhine. After his downfall the German Confederation was organized,--a weak institution, consisting of thirty-nine members, whose common affairs were regulated by a Diet which sat at Frankfort. Representation in this Diet was so unequal that Austria and Prussia, with forty-two million inhabitants, had only one eighth of the votes, while the small states, with but twelve million inhabitants, had seven eighths. Four tiny principalities, with two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants each, could exactly offset Prussia with eight millions. By a similar anomaly, Nevada and New York have an equal representation in the United States Senate.
From 1816 to 1848 Austria ruled the Diet. Yet Austria was herself an interloper in any combination of German states, for her German subjects, through whom she gained admission to the Diet, numbered only four millions; but her prestige was augmented by the backing of her thirty million non-German subjects besides. Prussia fretted at this Austrian supremacy, fretted, and could not counteract it. Beside the Confederation, which so loosely bound the German particularists together, there was a Customs Union, which, though simply commercial, fostered among the Germans the idea of common interests. The spirit of nationality, potent everywhere, awakened also in the Germans a vision of political unity, but for the most part those who beheld the vision were unpractical; the men of action, the rulers, opposed a scheme which enfolded among its possibilities the curtailing of their autocracy through the adoption of constitutional government. No state held more rigidly than Prussia the tenets of absolutism.