strength of the modern German Empire grew up in centuries of war against
the Slavs, the possessions of Germany are menaced. The Slavonic waves
are ever dashing more furiously against the coast of that Germanism,
which seems to have lost its old victorious strength.

Signs of political weakness are visible here, while for centuries the
overflow of the strength of the German nation has poured into foreign
countries, and been lost to our fatherland and to our nationality; it is
absorbed by foreign nations and steeped with foreign sentiments. Even
to-day the German Empire possesses no colonial territories where its
increasing population may find remunerative work and a German way of
living.

This is obviously not a condition which can satisfy a powerful nation,
or corresponds to the greatness of the German nation and its
intellectual importance.

At an earlier epoch, to be sure, when Germans had in the course of
centuries grown accustomed to the degradation of being robbed of all
political significance, a large section of our people did not feel this
insufficiency. Even during the age of our classical literature the
patriotic pride of that idealistic generation "was contented with the
thought that no other people could follow the bold flights of German
genius or soar aloft to the freedom of our world citizenship." [B]

[Footnote B: Treitschke, "Deutsche Geschichte," i., p. 195.]

Schiller, in 1797, could write the lines:

"German majesty and honour