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The romanization of the Franks was accompanied by the germanization of the Walloons, who adopted the laws and customs of their conquerors. The latter became, in many instances, the great landowners of this part of the country, while the Frankish settlers, in the North, preserved the economic tradition of their native country and remained small farmers.
This "telurian germanization" was to be of immense benefit to mankind. The earth was going to be happy under the dictatorship of a people born for mastery. The German state, "tentacular potency," would eclipse with its glory the most imposing empire of the past and present. Gott mit uns!
It may be so; time is having its obliterating effects; and in externals at least the Germanization of the provinces is slowly making progress. Still the wound is deep, and there seems no prospect of its healing.
At the end of the reign of the grand master Winrich von Kniprode the Germanization of the region between the Elbe and the Niemen the Polish province of Posen perhaps excepted may be regarded, for all practical purposes, as finished. The acquisition of Brandenburg by the Hohenzollerns only solidified the conquest and guaranteed its future.
This province forms an integral part of the Habsburg monarchy, with which it was incorporated as early as 1775. The political situation of the Rumanian principalities at the time, and the absence of a national cultural movement, left the detached population exposed to Germanization, and later to the Slav influence of the rapidly expanding Ruthene element.
I do not see how this great region is to unify itself without some linguistic compromise the Germanization of the French-speaking peoples by force is too ridiculous a suggestion to entertain.
In one essential feature the Germanization of Prussia in the Middle Ages differed necessarily from any like movement now possible along the Danube. The Vends, Serbs and other Slaves were heathens, and their overthrow and extermination was a crusade as well as a conquest. The Church consecrated the sword, the monk labored side by side with the knight. Such is not the case in the Danube Valley.
All this and many minor allurements were potent enough to draw even the heretofore callous German Jews out of their isolation, and their Germanization by the middle of the nineteenth century was an established fact.
Professor Ludwig Bernhard, while regretting that this attempt at Germanization has not succeeded, admits that Prussian methods are hopeless in such matters. They have, on the contrary, awakened national feeling, encouraged the forming of agricultural societies, and strengthened the Bank of Posen, which has become the financial citadel of opposition.
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