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alike. The Central Powers became united not merely by the geographical location of their territories, but also by internal spiritual kinship.
Thus we see opposing each other in the world-war puwers of the mediæval, theocratic monarchism, of undemocratic and unnational absolutism, and on the other side, constitutional, democratic, republican states recognising the right of all nations, great and small, to political independence. The war, as Emperor William stated, is the struggle between the Prussian idea and the American idea; it is the conflict of light and darkness, of justice and violence, of the Dark Ages and progress, of the past and the future; the Kaiser, with the Pangermans, proclaims that might creates right, the American nation believes with Lincoln that right creates might. America entered the war with the democratic ideal, to fight not for conquest but for the principle.
Germany in her beginning (during the times of Charlemagne) was German only up to the rivers Elbe and Saale; the rest of Eastern Germany, originally Slav, only in the course of centuries has been Germanised and colonised by force. Treitschke declares the meaning of German history to be colonisation.
The German Empire organised on its frontiers the so-called marches; in the east and south-east there were the marches of Brandenburg and Austria, the latter in the south, the former in the north.
The name Austria means Eastern Empire; the Hapsburgs were for centuries the holders of the German crown and used the Empire for their family aims.
Brandenburg was united with Prussia, and Prussia had been Germanised by the ecclesiastical orders of the knights; later Prussia accepted the Reformation and became the leader of Germany as against Austria.
The mediæval Empire in its idea leaned on the Universal Church. The Roman empire has been transferred into theocratic Catholicism, and the Hapsburgs, especially after the union with Spain, became devoted servants of the Church; the land of the Inquisition and the land of the forcible Counter-Reformation made up a realm over which the sun never set.
Austria, by its union in 1526 with non-German Bohemia and Hungary, weakened its position in the Empire; Prussia being racially more uniform grew in strength and openly aimed at primacy in Germany against Austria. These differences and antagonisms were intensified by the Reformation—Prussia became the leader of German Protestantism, Austria of German Catholicism; in spite of these differences the two rivals had much in common—both had the same origin from the church and both had the same political aims, to control and Germanise the East. So Austria and Prussia, the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, represent a peculiar division of political labour.
In spite of all antagonism the two rivals finally came to an agreement. Austria, eager to imitate Napoleon and to unify the monarchy by a forcible system of Centralization, gave up the leadership of the German Empire in 1806. After Prussia in 1866 by force of arms thrust her rival out of the Bund, which for Austria had been a substitute for the former Empire, she could without any protest from Austria in 1871 renew the Empire. Bismarck managed things so that Francis Joseph accepted with resignation the defeat of Koniggratz, and the latter pushed the frontiers of his monarchy into the Balkans; Bismarck may not have considered the entire Balkan peninsula worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, but William corrected
