Germany, France, Russia, & Islam

BERLIN, 2Oth June, 1876.

WHEN our posterity shall, sometime or other, cast their thoughts back to the present age, perhaps they may enviously inquire how we old people had deserved to live in this wonderfully fertile period. The sixteenth century has always up till now been regarded as the most intellectual and fruitful epoch of the Christian era; but the century beginning with the year 1789 is hardly inferior in creative power, and certainly far more fortunate in the moulding and completion of things. All the great ideas, which could be foreseen but not realized in Martin Luther’s age, the freedom of faith, of thought, and of economic production, have become Europe’s assured possession during the latest three generations. It is the present time which is fulfilling Columbus’s work, and may seriously speak of a world-history. The dreams of the Huttens and Machiavellis, the unity of Germany and Italy, are actually embodied before our eyes. And scarcely has Luther’s Antichrist lost the hegemony of the world than doom begins to impend over his Turkish Antichrist. There are almost too many historical changes for one single generation, and who can blame us Germans if the disorders on the Bosphorus appear to us thoroughly unwelcome? ‘We need assured peace, like bread, in order that 1 our decayed economical conditions may recover. We do not lose sight of the way in which these Eastern affairs may be used as a lever to help us in ‘ our next task in the perfecting of German unity. And although we think Turkey’s rule more than ripe for destruction, the Rayahs are by no means yet ripe for independence, and we should welcome it as a piece of luck if this most difficult of all European questions, which innumerable half-successful wars and rebellions and a deluge of dispatches and books have only rendered more obscure and enigmatic, remained unsolved for yet a few decades.