Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/669

 The Kingdom of Italy and the German Empire 511 really amalgamating the heterogeneous portions of the new king- dom began. Yet the joy of the Italians over the realization of their hopes of unity and national independence was tempered by the fact that Austria still held one of the most famous of the Italian provinces, and that Rome, which typified Italy's former grandeur, was not included in the new kingdom. Within a decade, however, both these districts became a part of the kingdom of Italy owing to the policy of Prussia. William I and his adviser, Bismarck, were about to do for Germany what Victor Emmanuel and Cavour were accomplishing for Italy. II. How PRUSSIA DEFEATED AUSTRIA AND FOUNDED THE NORTH GERMAN FEDERATION 911. Prussian Ambitions. We must now follow the story of modern Prussia and see how its ruling classes, by means of three wars, made themselves masters of Germany, and then developed such strength that its military leaders ventured, in the fatal year 1914, to risk further bloodshed to make Germany a "world power" by attempting to crush England, its great naval rival. In one sense Germany is the youngest of the larger European states ; at the same time it became far the most dangerous by reason of its warlike ambitions; and nearly the whole world, including the United States, was finally forced to join in a terrific struggle with the kaiser and his armies in order to defend democratic institutions from the menace of Prussian autocracy. 912. Review of German History. The third German emperor, William II, was born in 1859, and it was during his boyhood that the empire over which he ruled as kaiser was created. All the efforts of the medieval emperors from Otto the Great to Frederick Barbarossa to unify Germany had proved vain (Chapter XVII). Under the long line of Hapsburg emperors, from Rudolph of Hapsburg to the last ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Fran- cis II, the German states became even more independent of one another than they had been in earlier centuries. Finally,