The Southern States threw themselves into the arms of Prussia; France was crushed, and Alsace-Lorraine annexed; the German Empire was proclaimed, and modern Germany came into being.

There had been no foreigner to expel from German soil, but Bismarck found that an attack upon France served his purpose equally well.
[Footnote 1: Perhaps it would be fairer to say that he was incapable of distinguishing between them.

See his _Reflections_, i.pp.315, 316.] Germany was made by a war of aggression, resulting in territorial expansion at the expense of another nation; Italy by a war of liberation, driving the alien from her soil.

And the subsequent history of the two nations is eloquent of this difference in their origins.

Since 1860 Italy has in the main occupied herself with domestic reforms, with the working out of the "social idea" which had had to wait upon the realisation of the "national idea." She has had, it is true, her "adventures," more especially in Africa, and her Jingoism, which has taken the natural form of Irredentism or the demand for the recovery of Italian provinces still left in Austrian hands; but she has never threatened the peace of Europe, or sought power at the expense of other nationalities.