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The establishment of the new Prusso-German empire by the crowning of Wilhelm I at Versailles, with the empire made hereditary in the Hohenzollern family, completed the work of Bismarck and the setting of the Prussian jack-boot on the necks of the German peoples.
The French could not rest with the thought that their military supremacy had been broken by the superiority of the Prusso-German arms; their defeats could have proceeded only from the treachery or incapacity of their leaders. To this national prejudice the Government decided to bow, and to offer a sacrifice to the popular passion.
The inculcation of the brutal and blatant jingoism of Von Treitschke at the universities by professors eager for approval in high places has already been sufficiently animadverted upon in more than one work on modern Germany. The defeat of Prusso-German militarism will be an even greater gain to all that is best in Germany herself than it will be to Europe as a whole.
Both these reactionary proposals, as we all know, at a later date became the corner-stones of the new Prusso-German unity of Bismark's creation. On this occasion, however, the Prussian King refused to accept the office at the hands of the impotent Frankfurt Assembly, which latter soon afterwards broke up and eventually "petered out."
This programme will prevent Lithuania and the Ukraine from becoming instruments of Prusso-German oppression and Austrian intrigue. It is only such a Poland as this which will be able to fulfil its historic mission as a rampart against the Germans.
The brutalities and crimes committed in Belgium and the North of France at the instigation of the military heads of this Prusso-German army do but indicate exaggerations of the military spirit and attitude generally. Von Hindenburg is not the first who has given utterance to the devilish excuse for military crime and brutality that it is "more humane in the end, since it shortens war."
This severe law of lèse-majesté in Bismarck's Prusso-German Empire is only an illustration of the way in which the German people have been made to grovel before the Prussian jack-boot. The Prussification of Germany in matters military and in matters bureaucratic has gone on apace since 1870.
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