ABSTRACT
The formation of the German Empire and that of the kingdom of Italy are generally placed side by side as two parallel cases of the general national movement, which with these two new states was supposed to have reached its principal aim and to have rested there. The name of Austria inspired him with no holy reverence, and he made the use of Austria that suited him according to the times and the events; now he maintained that German affairs should be regulated in constant agreement with her, and now he called her an enemy and treated her as one. The intimate impulse that Bismarck obeyed had as its instrument the force, as we have said, of the Prussian state of the Hohenzollerns, and as its immediate material the Austrian Empire, which he had to take apart and put together again in a different way, and France, against whom he had to defend his own political creation.
