"During the time I was in office," he writes, "I advised three wars, the Danish, the Bohemian, and the French; but every time I have first made clear to myself whether the war, if successful, would bring a prize of victory worth the sacrifices which every war requires, and which now are so much greater than in the last century. I have never looked at international quarrels which can only be settled by a national war from the point of view of the Göttingen student code; but I have always considered simply their reaction on the claim of the German people, in equality with the other great states and powers of Europe, to lead an autonomous political life, so far as is possible on the basis of our peculiar national capacity." In 1863 he writes to von der Goltz, then German ambassador in Paris: "The question is whether we are a great power or a state in the German federation, and whether we are conformably to the former quality to be governed by a monarch, or, as in the latter case would be at any rate admissible, by professors, district judges, and the gossips of the small towns. The pursuit of the phantom of popularity in Germany which we have been carrying on for the last forty years has cost us our position in Germany and in Europe; and we shall not win this back again by allowing ourselves to be carried away by the stream in the persuasion that we are directing its course, but only by standing firmly on our legs and being, first of all, a great power and a German federal state afterward."
After Napoleon and the interminable elocutionary squabbles of the German states, first, for constitutional rights, and, second, for some basis of unity among themselves, which were the two main streams of political activity, there were three main steps in the formation of the now existing empire: first, in 1866, the North German Confederation under the presidency of Prussia and excluding Austria; second, the conclusion of treaties, 1866-1867, between the North German Confederation and the south German states; third, the formal union of the north and south German states as an empire in 1871.
Although the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist legally in 1806, it is to be remembered that as a fiction weighing still upon the imagination of German politicians, it did not wholly disappear until the war between Prussia and Austria, for then Prussia fought not only Austria but Bavaria, Würtemberg, Saxony, Hanover, Nassau, Baden, and the two Hesse states, and at Sadowa in Bohemia the war was settled by the defeat of the Austrians before they could be joined by these allies, who were disposed of in detail. Frankfort was so harshly treated that the mayor hanged himself, and the Prussianizing of Hanover has never been entirely forgiven, and the claimants to the throne in exile are still the centre of a political party antagonistic to Prussia. The taking over of north Schleswig, of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and Nassau by Prussia after the Austrian war was according to the rough arbitrament of conquest. "Our right," replied Bismarck to the just criticism of this spoliation, "is the right of the German nation to exist, to breathe, to be united; it is the right and the duty of Prussia to give the German nation the foundation necessary for its existence." In taking Alsace-Lorraine from France, Bismarck insisted that this was a necessary barrier against France and that Germany's possession of Metz and Strassburg were necessities of the situation also.