for the man in business and in the street by the skilful activities of
the Government in promoting trade, industry, and social welfare; and
the wealth, which would in any case have accrued from the removal of
the tariff-walls and other barriers between the thirty-nine
independent States of Germany, was credited to the particular method
of war by which the unification had been accomplished. No State had
hitherto made such economic progress as did the German Empire in the
generation after Metz and Sedan, and the success of their rulers led
most of the German people to place implicit reliance on the testimony
those rulers bore to the virtue of their means. The means did not,
however, commend themselves to the rest of the world with equal
conviction; and an increasing aversion to the mailed fist on the part
of other countries led to what Germans called the hostile encirclement
of their Fatherland. Gradually it became clearer that Prussian
autocracy could not reproduce in the sphere of world-ambitions the
success which had attended it in Germany unless it could reduce the
world to the same submission by the use of similar arguments.

But still the Prussian Government was driven towards imperialistic
expansion by the ever-increasing force of public opinion and popular
discontent. It could only purchase renewed leases of autocratic power
at home, with its perquisites for those who wielded and supported
autocracy, by feeding the minds of the people with diplomatic triumphs
and their bodies with new markets for commercial and industrial
expansion; and the incidents of military domination grew ever more
irksome to the populace. The middle classes were fairly content, and
the parties which represented them in the Reichstag offered no real
opposition to Prussian ideas of government. But the Social Democrats
were more radical in their principles and were regarded by Prussian
statesmen as open enemies of the Prussian State. Rather than submit to