Produced by Al Haines
THE
EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE
A BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH OF
GERMANY
BY
MARY PARMELE
_SECOND EDITION_
NEW YORK
WILLIAM BEVERLEY HARISON,
59 FIFTH AVENUE
1893.
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY
PARMELE & CHAFFEE.
Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place, New York
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Indo-European Migrations--Divisions of the Aryan Family into European
Races--Laying the Foundations of the German Empire
CHAPTER II.
Hermann--Subdivisions of the Teutonic Race
CHAPTER III.
Ulfila--Migrations of Teutonic Races--Fall of Rome before
Alaric--Hunnish Invasion--Modern Europe foreshadowed
CHAPTER IV.
Anglo-Saxon Occupation of Britain
CHAPTER V.
Teuton Occupation of Gaul--Final Severing of Connection with Roman
Empire--Clovis, King of France--Merovingian Kings--Pippin--Beginning of
Carlovingian Line
CHAPTER VI.
Charlemagne--Separation of France and Germany--Growth of Spiritual
Power--Conflict between Pope Gregory VII. and Henry IV.--Entire
Supremacy of the Church
CHAPTER VII.
Europe in the Hands of Three Men--Charles V., Francis I., and Henry
VIII.--Indulgences sold by Leo X.--Birth of Protestantism
CHAPTER VIII.
Thirty Years' War--Decay of the German Empire
CHAPTER IX.
Napoleon Bonaparte--German Empire Extinct--Waterloo--German States
confederated, with Austria at the Head
CHAPTER X.
Schleswig-Holstein--Bismarck--War with Austria--Koeniggraetz
CHAPTER XI.
Napoleon III.--War with France--Germans in Paris--William crowned
German Emperor at Versailles
CHAPTER XII.
Death of Emperor William--Death of Frederick--William II. Emperor--His
Policy--Situation in Europe
EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE.
CHAPTER I.
Foundation building is neither picturesque nor especially interesting,
but it is indispensable. However fair the structure is to be, one must
first lay the rough-hewn stones upon which it is to rest. It would be
much pleasanter in this sketch to display at once the minarets and
towers, and stained-glass windows; but that can only be done when one's
castle is in Spain.
Would we comprehend the Germany of to-day, we must hold firmly in our
minds an epitome of what it has been, and see vividly the devious path
of its development through the ages.
The German nation is of ancient lineage, and indeed belongs to the
royal line of human descent, the Aryan; its ancestral roots running
back until lost in the heart of Asia, in the mists of antiquity.
The home of the Aryan race is shrouded in mystery, as are the impelling
causes which sent those successive tides of humanity into Europe. But
we know with certainty that when the last great wave spread over
Eastern Europe, or Russia, about one thousand years before Christ, the
submergence of that continent was complete.
Before the coming of the Aryan, the Rhine flowed as now; the Alps
pierced the sky with their glistening peaks as they do to-day; the
Danube, the Rhone, hurried on, as now, toward the sea. Was it all a
beautiful, unpeopled solitude waiting in silence for the richly endowed
Asiatic to come and possess it? Far from it. It was teeming with
humanity--if, indeed, we may call such the race which modern research
and discovery has revealed to us. It is only within the last thirty
years that anything whatever has been known of prehistoric man; but now
we are able to reconstruct him with probable accuracy. A creature,
bestial in appearance and in life; dwelling in caves, which, however, a
dawning sense of a higher humanity led him to decorate with carvings of
birds and fishes; but, certain it is, the brain which inhabited that
skull was incapable of performing the mental processes necessary to the
simplest form of civilization; and life must have been to him simply a
thing of fierce appetites and brutal instincts. Such was the being
encountered by the Aryan, when he penetrated the mysterious land beyond
the confines of Greece and Italy.
The extermination, and perhaps, to some extent, assimilation, of this
terrible race must have required centuries of brutalizing conflict,
and, it is easy to imagine, would have produced just such men as were
the northern barbarians, who for five hundred years terrorized Europe:
men insensible to fear, terrible, fierce, but with fine instincts for
civilization--dormant Aryan germs, which quickly developed when brought
into contact with a superior race.
The earliest Indo-European migration is supposed to have been into
Greece and Italy, where was laid the basis for the civilization of the
world. The second was probably into Western Europe and the British
Isles; then, after many centuries, the central, and last, and at a time
comparatively recent, into the Eastern portion of the continent.
So by the fourth century B.C. three great divisions of the Aryan race
occupied Europe north of Greece and Italy. The Keltic, the western;
the Teutonic, the central; the Slavonic, the eastern; and these, in
turn, had ramified into new subdivisions or tribes.
To state it, as in the pedigree of the individual, the Aryan was the
founder, the father of the family; Slav, Teuton, and Kelt the three
sons. Gaul and Briton were sons of the Kelt; Saxon, Angle, Helvetian,
etc., sons of the Teuton; and all alike grandchildren of the Aryan;
whom--to carry the illustration farther--we may imagine to have had
older children, who long ago had left the paternal home and settled
about the Caspian and Mediterranean Seas. Mede, Persian, Greek, Roman,
apparently bearing few marks of kinship to these uncouth younger
brothers whom we have found in Europe in this fourth century B.C., but
with nevertheless the same cradle, and the same ancestral roots.
It is the Teutonic branch of the Aryan family with which we have to do
now. The river Rhine flowed between them and their Keltic brothers,
and it was by the Keltic Gauls on the west side of this river that they
were first called Germans, which, in the language of the Kelt, meant
simply neighbors.