National boundary and State frontier do not coincide because there are still some twelve million Germans living outside Germany, in Austria-Hungary;[1] Germany is a State, but not a unitary State, for she still retains the obsolete "particularism" of the eighteenth century, with its petty princes and dynastic frontiers; and lastly, the government of Germany cannot claim to express the general will, while more than a third of the voters in the empire are sworn to overthrow the whole system at the earliest opportunity.

The German nation, in fact, is suffering from some form of arrested development, and arrested development, as the criminologists tell us, is almost invariably accompanied by morbid psychology.

That Germany at the present moment, and for some time past, has been the victim of a morbid state of mind, few impartial observers will deny.

It has, however, not been so generally recognised that this disease--for it is nothing less--is due not to any national depravity but to constitutional and structural defects, which are themselves the result of an unfortunate series of historical accidents.

Let us look a little closer into this matter, considering the three defects in German nationalism one by one, and using the story of Italy as an aid to our investigation.
[Footnote 1: There are also Germans living in Switzerland, the Baltic Provinces of Russia, and the United States of America; but these may be regarded as lost to the German nation as the French Canadians are lost to France.] First, then, why was it that, while the unification of Italy led to the inclusion of the whole Italian nationality within the State frontiers, with the trifling exceptions above referred to, the unification of Germany was only brought about, or even made possible, by the _exclusion_ of a large section of the nationality?
Germany, like Italy, was hampered by traditions inherited from the mediaeval Roman Empire, represented by an ancient capital which stood in the path of unity.