The German national idea still awaits development in the direction of racial unity, political unity, and constitutional freedom.

It is Prussia that bars the way in all these directions, Prussia, which, in itself not a nation but a military bureaucracy, a survival of the old territorial dynastic principle which the world has largely outgrown, has stamped its character and system upon the German people.

"Prussia," says one of its apologists, "has put an iron girdle round the whole of German life."[1] But in the end life proves itself stronger than iron bands.
Germany was bound to make another attempt to reach complete nationhood.

She is doing so now.

Prussia fights for conquest, for world-power, and makes docile Germany imagine that she is fighting for these also; but what Germany is really fighting for, blindly and gropingly, is freedom and unity.