GENTLEMEN OF THE REICHSTAG OF THE NORTH GERMAN FEDERATION:
When I welcomed you here at your last assembly, it was with joy and gratitude because God had crowned my efforts with success. I could announce to you that every disturbance of peace had been avoided, in response to the wishes of the people and the demands of civilization.
If now the allied governments have been compelled by treats of war and its danger to summon you to a special session, you will feel not less convinced than we that it was the wish of the North German Federation to develop the forces of the German people as a support of universal peace, and not as a possible source of danger to it. If we call upon these forces today for the protection of our independence, we are doing nothing but what honor and duty demand.
The candidacy of a German prince for the Spanish throne, with which the allied governments had nothing to do--neither when it was pressed nor when it was withdrawn--and which interested the North German Federation only in so far as the government of a friendly nation seemed to expect of it the assurance of a peaceful and orderly government for its much harassed land--this candidacy offered to the emperor of France the pretense of seeing in it a cause for war, contrary to the long established custom of diplomacy. When the pretense no longer existed, he kept to his views in utter disregard of the rights which our people have to the blessings of peace--views which find their analogy in the history of former rulers of France.
When in earlier centuries Germany suffered in silence such attacks on her rights and her honor, she did so because she was divided and did not know her strength. Today when the bonds of the spiritual and political union, which began with the War of Liberation, are knitting the German races more closely together as time advances, and when our armor no longer offers an opening to the enemy, Germany carries in her bosom the will and the strength to defend herself against renewed French violence.
It is not presumption which dictates these words. The allied governments and I myself--we are fully conscious of the fact that victory and defeat rest with the Lord of battles. We have measured with clear vision the responsibility which attaches, before God and men, to him who drives two peace-loving peoples in the heart of Europe to war. The German and the French people, enjoying in equal measure the blessings of Christian morals and o growing prosperity, are meant for a more wholesome contest than the bloody contest of war.