VI

Summary

In the 1830s and 1840s, however, their pseudo-revolutionism, as yet untested in any way, found widespread credence. They believed in it themselves, though they manifested it for the most part in writings of a highly abstract character, so that the Prussian government paid no attention to it. Perhaps the government understood even then that they were working in its behalf.

On the other hand, the government was striving resolutely toward its principal objective – first the establishment of Prussian hegemony in Germany, then the outright subjection of all Germany to Prussia's undivided sway – through the use of a method which it felt to be incomparably more advantageous and appropriate than liberal reforms or even the encouragement of German science. This was the economic method, which would win it the heartfelt sympathy of the rich commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the Jewish financial world of Germany, since both required extensive state centralization in order to flourish. We see a new example of this today in German Switzerland, where the big merchants, industrialists, and bankers are already beginning to voice open support for a very close political union with the vast German market – meaning the pan-German empire, which exerts the magnetic attraction (or suffocating pressure) of a boa constrictor on all the small countries around it.

The idea of a Customs Union came initially not from Prussia but from Bavaria and Wurttemberg, which formed such a union in 1828. But Prussia quickly seized upon the idea and its implementation.