There is surely something very strange about all this.

Why should it be necessary to retain the loyalty of nearly half Germany by what practically amounts to terrorisation?
The answer is that Germany is not a single national State but a number of _dynastic_ States, federated together under the control of one predominant partner.

In other words, the problem of Alsace-Lorraine has led us to the consideration of the second flaw in the development of the national idea in Germany.
The union of Italy meant a clean sweep of all the old dynastic frontiers and States which had strangled the country for so long; the union of Germany, on the contrary, riveted these obsolete chains still more firmly than ever on the country's limbs.

Bismarck claimed that this was necessary, inasmuch as the Germans, unlike all other nations, were more alive to dynastic than to national loyalty; that, in short, Germany was not really ready in 1870 for true unity.[1] The chief reason, however, for the retention of the old frontiers was that they suited the aims of Prussia.
The reformers of 1848, as Professor Erich Marcks somewhat naively says, "had wanted to place Prussia at the head, but only as the servant of the nation; Prussia was also to cease to be a State by itself, a power on its own account.

She was to create the nation's ideal--complete unity--and then to merge herself in the nation.