Having welded Germany by the Franco-Prussian war into a nation with unified tariffs, transportation, currency, and monetary systems, Prussia has been able to point to the war as the cause of the phenomenal prosperity of Germany.
It is a popular fallacy in Germany that militarism makes the greatness of a nation.

Germany's prosperity did not begin with the war of 1870.
This was only the beginning of German unity which made possible unified transportation and later unified finances and tariffs.

Several years after the war, France, which had paid an indemnity to Germany of a thousand million dollars, or five billion francs, was found, to the astonishment of Bismarck, more prosperous than Germany which had thus received the expenses of her military campaign and a dot of Spandau Tower war-reserve moneys.
In 1875 came the great Reichsbank Act, which consolidated all the banking power of the empire.

Then came her scientific tariffs which put up the bars here, and let them down there, according as Germany needed export or import trade in any quarter of the earth.

The German people, on a soil poorer than that of France, worked hard and long hours for small wages.