The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-09-10
GERMAN UNITY.
The Views Of David Strauss.
A Letter from the Eminent Ger
man to Ernest Renan-A
Philosophical Re-
view Of the
War.


ter TO Ernest Renan, the distinguished French
author
But who can take pleasure in a literary
labor, and especially labor for international
peace, as my life of Voltaire was intended to
be, at o moment when the two nations to
whose union it was meant to contribute
stand in arms against one another? Rightly
do you say that this war must cause the
deepest distress to all those who have striven
for the intellectual association of France and
Germany Rightly do you describe it as a
calamity, that now again, for long time to
come, injustice and uncharitable judgment
will be the order of the day between the two
members of the European family whose SYM
pathy is SO indispensable to the work of
moral civilization. Rightly do you declare
it to be the duty of every friend of truth and
Justice at the same time that he unreservedly
fulfls his national duty, to preserve himself
free from that patriotism which is only party
spirit, which narrows the heart and perverts
the judgment You say that you had hoped
that the war might still be exercised (besch-
woren). We Germans had the same hope in
every case since 1866 when war seemed to
threaten, yet in general we have held war
with France, as consequence of the events
of that war, to be inevltable-so inevitable
that here and there one heard the question
asked with dissatisfaction -'Why did not
Prussia declare war sooner; for instance, on
occasion of the Luxembourg affair, and
bring things to an issue 2" Not that we
wished for war but we knew the
French well enough to know that
they would wish for war. 1t is
now as it was with the Seven Years War; the
consequence of the Silesian conquests of
Frederick the Great Frederick did not
desire that war, but he knew that Maria
Theresa desired it, and would not rest till
she had found confederates. An established
asoendancy is not readily renounced either
by monarch or people. They will make
efforts to preserve it until it Is decisively
taken from them. So was it with Austria, so
it is now with France both of them against
Prussia, by whose side the whole of non
Austrian Germany, better instructed, is this
time standing. Since the epoch of Richelieu
and Louis XIV, France has been accustomed
to play the first role among European ma
tions, and in this claim she was strengthened
by Napoleon |. The claim was based on
her strong politico military organization, and
still more on the classical literature which, in
the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, had grown up in France and made
her language and her culture supreme in the
werld But the immediate condition of this
supremacy Of France was the weakness of
Germany; ever against France united, unan-
nous and quick to move, divided, discordant
and unwieldy, Germany stood. Yet every
nation has its time, and, if it is of the right
sort, not one time alone. Germany had had
its time in the sixteenth century, ia the age of
the Reformation. 1t had paid dearly for this
pre-eminence in the commissions of a thirty
years war, which threw it back not only into
political feebleness, but into intellectual
stagnation. Yet things were far from
having come to an end with it. 1t saw its
time again. 1t began its work on that side
where France had fixed the roots, not indeed
of its power, but of its true right to European
ascendancy. 1t fashioned itself in silence
1T produced literature; it gave to the world
a succession of poets and thinkers who took
their place by the side of the French classics
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
as something more than equals. If in finish
Of cosmopolitan understanding and cultiva-
tion, in clearness and eloquence, they fell
short of the French, in depth of thought as
much as in strength of feeling they surpassed
them. The idea of humanity, of the harmo-
nious cultivation of human nature in indi-
vidual as in common life, was developed in
German literature in the last 20 years of the
eighteenth, and the first % years of the
present century.
The result of this was that Germany won
the intellectual leadership of Europe, while
France still maintained its political ascen-
dancy, though latterly in hard struggle with
England. But the literary outburst of Ger
destined to be followed by political regenera-
ton. In the time of Napoleon, France had
laid Germany PROSTATE before her; the yoke
was thrown off in the War of Liberation of
lS13-'14. But the ground of our powerless-
ness, the want of political unity, was not re-
moved; on the contrary, if the German en-
pire had long been anything but shadow
now even the shadow had vanished Ger
many had become motley aggregate of
greater and smaller independent states. This
independence itself may have been mere
show, but it was yet real enough to make all
energetic action of the whole body irnpos-
tible, while, on the other hand, the Bun
destag," which had to represent the unity
made its existence discernible in nothing
but the repression of all free motion
in the individual states. If France was again
taken with the humor to aggrandize itself at
our cost, il was not Germany, but Russia
and England, that had to restrain it. That
was keenly felt in Germany; it was felt by
the men who had fought in the liberation
war; who, during the dismal years of reac-
tion, saw quite another seed spring up than
that which they were conscious of having
sown; it was felt by the young men who had
grown up in the thought and the sufferings
of these wars. Thus it was that strivings
after unity during the succeeding time had
something very youthful, immature, and
romantic about them. The German idea
haunted them as q familiar-as the shadow
of the old empire. That the Governments OF
the tiIae attached so great importance to the
students clubs and democratic machinatio ms
as they were called, only showed how ad
their conscience was.
The storm of your July revolution cleared
our atmosphere to some degree, without carry
ing us essentially forward. There was no
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