PLANS AND PROJECTS-1838-1905 491 



the plan of a book bearing some such name as The Build 

 ing of the German Empire, &quot; or &quot; The Evolution of Mod 

 ern Germany. &quot; As to method, I proposed to make it al 

 most entirely biographical, and the reason for this is very 

 simple. Of all histories that I have known, those relating 

 to Germany have been the most difficult to read. Events 

 in German history are complicated and interwoven, to a 

 greater degree than those of any other nation, by strug 

 gles between races, between three great branches of the 

 Christian Church, between scores of territorial divisions, 

 between greater and lesser monarchs, between states and 

 cities, between families, between individuals. Then, to in 

 crease the complication, the center of interest is constantly 

 changing, being during one period at Vienna, during an 

 other at Frankf ort-on-the-Main, during another at Berlin, 

 and during others at other places. Therefore it is that 

 narrative histories of Germany become to most foreign 

 readers wretchedly confusing: indeed, they might well 

 be classed in Father Bouhours s famous catalogue of 

 1 i Books Impossible to be Bead. This obstacle to histori 

 cal treatment, especially as regards the needs of American 

 readers, led me to group events about the lives of various 

 German leaders in thought and action the real builders 

 of Germany ; and this plan was perhaps confirmed by Car- 

 lyle s famous dictum that the history of any nation is the 

 history of the great men who have made it. Impressed 

 by such considerations,! threw my lectures almost entirely 

 into biographical form, with here and there a few histor 

 ical lectures to bind the whole together. Beginning with 

 Erasmus, Luther, Ulrich von Hutten, and Charles V, I 

 continued with Comenius, Canisius, Grotius, Thomasius, 

 and others who, whether born on German soil or not, exer 

 cised their main influence in Germany. Then came the 

 work of the Great Elector, the administration of Fred 

 erick the Great, the moral philosophy of Kant, the influ 

 ence of the French Revolution and Napoleon in Germany, 

 the reforms of Stein, the hopeless efforts of Joseph II and 

 Metternich to win the hegemony for Austria, and the sue- 



