But the attempt, noble as it was in conception, proved a dismal failure, and it became clear that national unity in Germany was to be won "not by speeches and majority resolutions, but by blood and iron." The words are Bismarck's, and the task was his also.

Set them beside the words of Cavour about Italy and liberty, quoted above, or compare the harsh unscrupulous spirit of the great German master-builder with the spirit of Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi, and you get a measure of the difference between the developments of the national idea in Germany and in Italy.

Yet Bismarck's famous sentence expressed the truth of the matter for Germany.

Austria had been put outside the German pale, and Germany north of the Main had accepted unity under the hegemony of Prussia, but there still remained the four great States of South Germany to bring in.

They had been the allies of Austria in 1866, and Prussia, had she willed it, might have incorporated them by conquest.