Note Return to text — THE UNITY OF GERMANY.

It is all this which is German and not Prussian. The Hohenzollerns have nothing to do with all this idealism,—and it is this which constitutes the peculiar and sovereign spirit of German unity to which the modern philosophy of Frederick II. was so long a stranger, and to which the Iron Chancellor became a hearty convert only at the close; the chivalrous element of the great elector is but a link between what had been the Holy Roman Empire and what is to be the national union after Leipsic and the War of Freedom—culminating in its supreme and inevitable consequence in 1871. The heroes (and they were heroes) of the distant North were as Brandenburgers, “electors,” component parts, be it not forgotten, of a Teutonic whole, “of one great heart,” (as Bunsen wrote long years ago to Lord Houghton),[5] “though we did not know it.”