ABSTRACT
On July 7, 1807, the Treaty of Tilsit was signed between France and Russia. Prussia was forced to submit to the situation thus created, and subjection of Germany was complete. In the following winter a course of lectures was delivered in Berlin and published very soon afterwards under title of “Addresses to the German Nation,” by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On one occasion only had the people of Germany ever shown a sufficiently united front to be regarded as a nation, and that was in the period from 1520 to 1525, when a deep-seated popular movement, embracing all classes of the population, overthrew and broke for ever the domination of the Church. Music came to be regarded as pre-eminently a German art, and Italy’s supremacy was a thing of the past, a memory only. The national movement in Germany needed a state to adopt it and take over its aims, and in that event there was no limit to its potentialities.
