But political ambitions, though
they seemed almost dead, were revived by the hardy state of Prussia, and
the rest of Germany's history, down to our own time, is the history of
the welding of the Germanic peoples into a single state by Prussian
monarchs and statesmen.
This history explains many things. If a people has a corporate memory,
if it can learn from its own sufferings, Germany has reason enough to
cherish with a passionate devotion her late achieved unity. And German
brutality, which is not the less brutality because Germans regard it as
quite natural and right, has its origin in German history. The Prussian
is a Spartan, a natural brute, but brutal to himself as well as to
others, capable of extremes of self-denial and self-discipline. From the
Prussians the softer and more emotional German peoples of the South
received the gift of national unity, and they repaid the debt by
extravagant admiration for Prussian prowess and hardihood, which had
been so serviceable to their cause. The Southern Germans, the Bavarians
especially, have developed a sort of sentimentalism of brutality,
expressed in the hysterical Hymn of Hate (which hails from Munich),
expressed also in those monstrous excesses and cruelties, surpassing
anything that mere insensibility can produce, which have given the
Bavarian troops their foul reputation in the present war.
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