For these very reasons we may doubt that influential Germanstatesmen have seriously given grounds for hope to the author ofthe report, that Germany is willing to abandon her protectivepolicy for the benefit of England, in exchange for the pitifulconcession of permission to export to England a little grain andtimber.At any rate public opinion in Germany would greatlyhesitate to consider such statesmen to be thoughtful ones.In orderto merit that title in Germany in the present day, it is not enoughthat a man should have thoroughly learned superficial phrases andarguments of the cosmopolitical school.People require that astatesman should be well acquainted with the powers and therequirements of the nation, and, without troubling himself withscholastic systems, should develop the former and satisfy thelatter.But that man would betray an unfathomable ignorance ofthose powers and wants, who did not know what enormous exertionsare requisite to raise a national industry to that stage to whichthe German industry has already attained; who cannot in spiritforesee the greatness of its future; who could so grievouslydisappoint the confidence which the German industrial classes havereposed in their Governments, and so deeply wound the spirit ofenterprise in the nation; who was incapable of distinguishingbetween the lofty position which is occupied by a manufacturingnation of the first rank, and the inferior position of a countrywhich merely exports corn and timber; who is not intelligent enoughto estimate how precarious a foreign market for grain and timber iseven in ordinary times, how easily concessions of this kind can beagain revoked, and what convulsions are involved in an interruptionof such a trade, occasioned by wars or hostile commercialregulations; who, finally, has not learned from the example ofother great states how greatly the existence, the independence, andthe power of the nation depends on its possession of amanufacturing power of its own, developed in all its branches.
Truly one must greatly under-estimate the spirit of nationalityand of unity which has arisen in Germany since 1830, if onebelieved, as the author of the report does (p.26), that the policyof the Commercial Union will follow the separate interests ofPrussia, because two-thirds of the population of the Union arePrussian.But Prussia's interests demand the export of grain andtimber to England; the amount of her capital devoted tomanufactures is unimportant; Prussia will therefore oppose everysystem which impedes the import of foreign manufactures, and allthe heads of departments in Prussia are of that opinion.
Nevertheless the author of the report says at the beginning of hisreport: 'The German Customs Union is an incarnation of the idea ofnational unity which widely pervades this country.If this Union iswell led, it must bring about the fusion of all German interests inone common league.The experience of its benefits has made itpopular.It is the first step towards the nationalisation of theGerman people.By means of the common interest in commercialquestions, it has paved the way for political nationality, and inplace of narrow-minded views, prejudices, and customs, it has laiddown a broader and stronger element of German national existence.'
Now, how does the opinion agree with these perfectly true prefatoryobservations, that Prussia will sacrifice the independence and thefuture greatness of the nation to a narrow regard to her ownsupposed (but in any case only momentary) private interest -- thatPrussia will not comprehend that Germany must either rise or fallwith her national commercial policy, as Prussia herself must riseor fall with Germany? How does the assertion that the Prussianheads of departments are opposed to the protective system, agreewith the fact that the high duties on ordinary woollen and cottonfabrics emanated from Prussia herself? And must we not be compelledto conjecture from these contradictions, and from the fact that theauthor of the report paints in such glowing colours the conditionand the progress of the industry of Saxony, that he himself isdesirous of exciting the private jealousy of Prussia?