ABSTRACT
The North German Confederation was a provisional union, and everybody knew it to be such; the Main frontier was merely a stage on the way to the South, a halting-place at which to take breath before pushing forward again. The despatches and reflections of German diplomats of the period bear curious testimony to the difficulty which attended their endeavours to interest British statesmen in German affairs, or even to make the unity question intelligible and real to the British mind. The Press, too, or at least the more influential metropolitan journals, accurately voiced the prevalent antipathy against Germany, and more particularly Prussia. “The extraordinary success of the Prussians,” Lord Malmesbury wrote after the Bohemian war, “has alarmed all nations.” In the meantime acts of administrative folly had thrown a passing shadow over the domestic relations of the enlarged kingdom of Prussia.
