Fighting Fire With Fire
23
The voice in the Wilderness proclaims the God-given glory of
Kings, vicegerents of Christ on this earth.
¶ The French Revolution brought to Paris adventurers and patriots from
every part of Europe. Among these was a young Corsican who, with his
mother and sisters, had been driven out of his native island. This
man, Napoleon Bonaparte, was in the course of a few years to become
Emperor of France and Master of Europe.
¶ There is a classical picture of young Napoleon, at the time of the
early riots in Paris.
Standing on a curbstone, to one side, he watches the passing of
liberty-crazed mobs, armed with pikes--the self-same common people on
whose shoulders Napoleon himself was later to ride into amazing power.
¶ Thus, likewise, in another time of political crisis, (1847-48) men
were flocking to Berlin to debate anew the well-worn theme, "The
Rights of Man."
Quietly looking on was another man of destiny, Otto von Bismarck,
burly dyke-captain of the Elbe, up to that time a farmer on his
ancestral estates in Pomerania. What this young blond giant saw before
him was somewhat of this extraordinary order:
¶ The universal theme was once more "Liberty," and the din not only in
Berlin but throughout German states, was ear-splitting. Of course,
there were patriots who stood on broad National grounds, but the
purely personal point of view was still very much in evidence.
Every man had his say, often accompanied by brandishing of fists or
the laying on of canes; all dignified by the name "patriotism," but in
truth it exhibited the old struggle of human nature for supremacy.
The masses were fighting to unseat kings, whose dogma of
"Divine-right" had by the French Revolution been shown to be only
insidious political quackery, in the past sustained largely by the
sword. The common people were wrestling to grasp this monarchic sword
away, and here and there had already seized the hilt or the blade--it
mattered not which!--and the dynasties of Hohenzollern, Hapsburg,
Wittelsbach, and all the lesser swarm, were suddenly put on the
defensive. Hotly pursued sovereigns kept their heads only by some
concession to popular fury; again, by flight. The people were
intoxicated with the wine of their newly found power!
¶ And what would they do with their new bauble, liberty, fraternity
and equality? The centre of the stage was occupied by a struggling
mass of kings, fighting not only for their crowns but for the very
clothes on their backs! There were poets in fine frenzy declaiming;
grenadiers firing muzzle-loaders; priests invoking the wrath of God;
kings shouting out that they were the only accredited earthly
representatives of Heaven; historians hotly insisting that all were in
error, and that the scroll showed this or that; law-givers pleading
for the old forms; lunatics laughing in demoniacal glee; peasants
armed with pitchforks jabbing right and left; demagogues calling on
Heaven to witness their lofty and disinterested leadership; while
around the edges of the scene mountebanks, camp-followers, renegades,
whores and political blacklegs, were waiting for their share of the
plunder, let victory fall where it may.
¶ What a magnificent scramble for place, pelf and power! It were
blasphemy to call this riot the desire for progress for the masses. It
were equal blasphemy to call it stupidity and reaction, on the part of
the contending monarchs, as against crushing with iron heel the hopes
of the people for political and intellectual life. Either one of these
diagonally opposed interpretations of the time is too extreme. The
truth is in neither view. As a matter of fact, behind the seething
mass of human forms was the age-old motive of human selfishness; and
while here and there some lofty soul may have glimpsed in his fervid
imagination a United Germany, based on a "German national faith," in
which the rights of each citizen should be no more or no less than the
rights of all others, with each man working for all men and all men
for each man, this poetical idea was only another evidence of how the
noblest minds place the illusion and the dream before the appalling
fact of human selfishness in the universal struggle for personal
aggrandizement.
¶ The merging of the various German states, or the transference of
land from one German monarch to another, in the ensuing political
struggle for power, is, after all, as nothing compared with the change
in ideas, now close at hand; what may be called the "mind" of Germany
was about to undergo a veritable French Revolution! However, it was
not to be a French Revolution in the sense of mob-rule. We shall make
this clear as we come more especially to tell you, in details, of a
certain political millennium which Bismarck scorned, although
courageously pressed upon him by leaders of the party of the people.
¶ On the whole, however, the drift of events was toward "German
national faith," bringing in turn some form of representative
government, as against the doctrine of Divine-right of kings. The
monarchs were placed more and more on the defensive; it was to be
their last stand, not only for their crowns but for their very lives!
* * * * *
¶ And now face to face with the gigantic problem of a United Germany,
again we study our last hope of kings--our Prussian Strafford von
Bismarck. In some respects he is the historical foil of Strafford of
Charles I, whose money-needs compelled the calling of the Long
Parliament; and the help Strafford had given to the king in ruling
without a parliament had mortally offended the Commons; Strafford was
declared guilty of high treason--and despite Charles' efforts,
Strafford went to the block!
¶ Will Bismarck come to a similar end on the scaffold of the Prussian
liberals?
* * * * *
¶ We see before us a giant in form and in mental strength; a monster
of will-power, with the iron ambition to compel men to do his
individual bidding; a political superman.
¶ He had spent his time more with cattle, horses and dogs than he had
with men.
¶ His spirit was high, untrammelled, rebellious. He ironically
despised the common people; the burden-bearers in all forms of
government were in this giant's opinion not good enough to sit beside
kings.
¶ Morose, obstinate, self-opinionated, with an enormous capacity for
liquor, Bismarck was an intellectual as well as physical glutton.
¶ Most of all, this strange man, half-beast, half-seer, was to turn
out to be the very voice of the old decaying kingcraft. He had an
immovable belief in the Feudal right of royalty to rule over its
subjects as it pleased; and by his amazing power of intrigue supported
by supreme abilities exercised during the ensuing thirty years,
Bismarck at last rose to a height that overshadowed the monarchs whom
he served--and ruled!
We wish to emphasize, again, that Bismarck's conception of kingcraft
was no mere despotic thing. To him, a king was truly a man of great
practical as well as moral responsibilities, akin to father, hence
should be obeyed.
24
Our young blond giant appears at Third Estates' Assembly--The
King's predicament--Bismarck's opportunity.
¶ Behold Otto Edward Leopold von Bismarck, the country squire,
straight from his cow-sheds and his hunting dogs; a young blond German
giant, 32 years old, in the very prime of his massive strength and
endurance; plentiful hair cropped short, ruddy face, blond beard,
bright blue eyes, big fists; high, shrill voice, strangely out of
keeping with his physical bulk. For years afterward, this peculiar
voice became the stock in trade of newspaper writers. However, it was
what the giant said!
¶ Bismarck wore a broad-brimmed slouch hat, military boots and his
dykeman's overcoat. This rough, yellow-colored garment, for which he
afterwards became famous, was long, baggy and loose. He used to wear
it when floods were high along the River Elbe. In Berlin, at the time
were only three notables who wore these yellow overcoats: the first,
Bismarck; the second, the immortal Baron von Herteford, the last of
his race, hereditary grand huntsman at Cleve, and the third was worn
by Geo. Hesekiel, the German historian.
¶ Bismarck, who was now to receive his first experience in handling
men in political alignments, had inherited a country estate from the
old family domains and was living the life of a squire; hunting foxes,
with dogs and gay companions, passing nights in taverns, drinking
heavily, eating like a glutton, amusing himself as he pleased; a giant
in intellect and in stomach; turbulent, tempestuous, rough, a bad man
to cross, believe me, but among his cronies voted a prince of good
fellows. Such is our German hero as he comes upon the great stage of
affairs.
¶ When this burly Bismarck made his first entrance at the Diet, or
Assembly of the Three Estates, held in the "White Saloon" of the Royal
Palace at Coelin on the Spree, our future empire-maker and
throne-overturner knew by practical experience absolutely nothing
about the diagonal of political cross-purposes.
However, he was now taking up his great life-study, entering all
unknowingly upon a magnificent career leading in after years to his
fair renown as Father of the German Empire.
* * * * *
¶ He had, as we have seen, thus far passed the time as a practical
farmer; hale fellow well met, with upper-class leanings.
After taking his doctor's degree at Goettingen, he had made a few
journeys, one to Italy, another to the island of Heligoland, on a
shooting trip; had crossed the English Channel, and had brought back
with him a smattering of Shakespeare, which he afterwards improved by
considerable study; and by the way throughout the crises in his
career, Bismarck often found refuge in apt Shakespearian quotations.
Then he had done a little governmental clerical work in the lower
courts of his country, but his peculiar ideas of independence and his
abruptness in speaking his mind unfitted him for this work. Glad to be
rid of his job, he returned to the country. He knew nothing of
administrative or executive life, and aside from the fact that he was
a student of history, with a penchant for making historical parallels,
there was nothing to show the bent of his powerful mind.
¶ Yet, there is a great man before us! And since it is not based on
his training, then it must come inherently from his natural endowment.
His master-mind was to unseat and seat princes, kings and emperors, in
the fullness of time, rearranging the map of Germany to suit himself;
engaging in three wars of ambition, signally victorious in each; and
winning for himself imperishable fame during his active career of
forty years.
* * * * *
¶ By a singular turn, Bismarck knew or cared so little for politics,
at this time, that his very entry into the "White Saloon," in which
the Liberals decided to settle with this stubborn King Fr: Wm. IV, was
wholly by accident.
The Saxon Provincial Diet at Meresburg had chosen Dyke Captain von
Brauchitsch of Scharteuke, in the Circle of Jerichow, as Deputy at the
United Diet, and had selected Dyke Captain von Bismarck of
Schoenhausen as his proxy. As Herr von Brauchitsch was very ill, his
substitute was summoned.
¶ Bismarck appeared as representative of the Knight's Estate of
Jerichow, and vassal and chivalric servitor of the King. How go the
Fates! If the eminent von Brauchitsch had not had the toothache, that
day, there might not have been a United Germany--is it not true?
¶ In the group that gathered in the "White Saloon" at Coelin on the
Spree, Bismarck met many men whose opinions were well known to him;
his brother, the Landrath, his cousins, the Counts von Bismarck-Bohlen
and von Bismarck-Briest; his future father-in-law, Herr von
Puttkammer; von Thadden, von Wedell, and many others. Says Hesekiel:
¶ "Unfortunately these gentlemen in general, as Herr von Thadden once
bluntly said of himself, were not even bad orators, but no orators at
all. Nor could the two Freiherrs von Manteuffel contend in eloquence
with the brilliant rhetorics of the Liberals, such as Freiherr von
Vincke, Camphausen, Mevissen, Beckerath, and others.
¶ "Few persons today can read those speeches of the First United Diet,
once so celebrated, without a melancholy or satirical smile. Those
were the blossom-days of liberal phraseology, causing an enthusiasm of
which we cannot now form any adequate idea!"
* * * * *
¶ Troublous times indeed; and the King an autocrat of autocrats,
forced by the liberal ideas of the hour, breaking everywhere. We can
imagine William saying angrily:
"Confound the impudence of the Liberals with their crazy liberty,
fraternity and equality. We supposed that all this nonsense was blown
to bits by the guns at Waterloo!"
¶ The bedeviled King began to show a streak of Prussian stubbornness;
in these angry words he incautiously addressed those delegates who had
dared to ask for a Constitution:
¶ "I refuse to allow to come between Almighty God in Heaven and this
Prussian land so much as a blotted piece of parchment to rule us with
paragraphs, and to replace thereby the sacred bond of ancient
loyalty!"
¶ The widening gulf between monarchy and French constitutionalism was
now manifest to almost any thoughtful Prussian, but, like the ostrich,
our timid William continued to hide his head under the sand and
believed himself safe.
25
For one whole month, burly Bismarck sits with his mouth shut,
seemingly stricken dumb at the sacrilegious ideas of the
Democrats.
¶ Now this giant dyke-captain, this lover of dogs, horses and cattle,
sat for one whole month, stricken dumb it seemed by the political
heresies that he heard. For one solid month, he never opened his
mouth! Then he could stand it no longer. He pleaded vigorously for the
Middle Ages feudal system, and for the right of his own aristocratic
class! In truth, without knowing it, he was expressing the King's
sentiments, was a genuine King's Man.
¶ The future prince's first speech swept like a hurricane over a
garden in June--withering, blasting, uprooting. He began by denying,
absolutely, that the great victory of 1813 which expelled for Prussia
the French invaders was based on so low a consideration as the promise
of a paper Constitution. Not at all! It was an exhibition of pure
patriotism. In his historical reference, Bismarck, in this instance,
was in error. In no sense was "the people" to be credited with the
great Prussian victory of 1813; it came about largely through military
tactics, training and general preparedness, in which "the people" had
no part except to do their plain duty.
¶ For his remarkable utterance, Bismarck was promptly hissed down by
the Liberal side. Undaunted, Bismarck loaded his heaviest guns against
this thing called "Liberalism," with all its mock-heroics of liberty,
fraternity and equality. Would it not endanger our King's sacred
throne? That was enough for Herr Bismarck.
¶ Thus the doughty Dyke-captain from the Elbe endeavored to perform a
political miracle--new wine in old bottles--and as fast as the bottles
popped, he put the wine in still other old bottles. Was there ever
more folly? Did a young champion of the Crown ever make greater fool
of himself?
¶ And with all Europe bawling for liberty, fraternity and equality;
with thrones tottering in every direction; with 23 of the 39 German
states already joyously exhibiting their new Constitutions? Here was
a voice in the wilderness crying for monarchy and the Divine-right of
kings! And what's more, gentlemen, he has before him a 30-years'
fight, but in the end will ram it down your throats.
¶ His cry at this moment is that ancient Prussian slogan, "Mitt Gott
fuer Koenig und Vaterland!" The question on the proposed
Constitution--the right of petition and certain specified control over
state finance by the people--simple as all this seems today, created a
terrible storm! The nobility, led by the Dyke-captain, felt uneasy; a
parliament of the people was indeed a needless concession. And were
the people prepared by education for this great change? Was it not
hasty?
¶ Meantime, the King was in truth a sort of broken reed, stirred by
every blast that swept from the "White Saloon."
¶ Fr: Wm. IV was a "Hamlet-hesitating monarch," who had it not been
for the burly giant Bismarck would have been swept into oblivion by
the first whiff of gunpowder. A stickler for religious dogma, the
pietists adored him, but the classes despised him; he was one of those
men who discuss trifles with elegant ease, but who have no conception
of what is behind this present widespread demand for a constitution.
This King Fr.: Wm. IV lived in a mystic mediæval dreamland; he
restored the cathedral of Cologne; sent a missionary band to spread
his beloved Lutheran doctrines to the Chinese, and established a
Protestant bishop at Jerusalem. The political literature of the time
is overwhelmingly against William. He did not understand the drift of
events. Without Bismarck, the King's head would soon have rolled into
the basket!
26
Bellowing his defiance, though the Liberals bring the rope--The
new man explains his novel position, not as a politician but as
a Prussian in deadly earnest--The Jew, and time's revenge.
¶ There were three sessions of the Baby Parliament, and Bismarck was
soon looked upon as the conservative leader. Perhaps conservative is
not the word; reactionary would be closer. There was no Conservative
party, nor a Liberal party for that matter. The obstinate fight with
Bismarck was not because he wished to prevent the common people from
having a share in their Prussian government, but because the change,
if ever it came, would set up a peculiar type of Prussian government;
a state-government, as it were, as against the old-time liege-lord
master-and-servant conception of Hohenzollern "Divine-right" policy.
¶ The very word "people" threw Herr Bismarck into hysterical frenzy!
He determined upon resisting the heresy with all the virile courage of
his colossal bulk.
It had been his duty, as Elbe dyke-captain, to protect his country
against torrential waters; now he would do similar service against the
rising floods of revolution. He set up the historical agreement that
the edifice of Prussia, under an aristocratic form of rulership, was
firmer toward foreign foes, firmer than was possible under the leader
rule of the people.
¶ A conservative deputy from Pomerania, addressing the administration
member for West Havelland, said: "We have conquered!"
¶ "Not so!" replied Bismarck, coolly. "We have not conquered, but we
have made an attack, which is the principal thing. Victory is yet to
come, but it will take years!"
¶ These words accurately convey the nature of the situation. Bismarck
was master of short phrases in which complex situations are summed up.
* * * * *
¶ He had dog-like love for his master, the King: "No word," he
exclaimed, "has been more wrongly used in the past year than the word
'people.' Each man has held it to mean just what suits his individual
view."
¶ "We are Prussians," was his eternal keynote, "and Prussia is
all-sufficient. Our hosts follow the Prussian flag and not the
tricolor; under the black and white they joyfully die for their
country. The tricolor has been, since the March riots, recognized as
the color of their opponents. The accents of the Prussian National
Anthem, the strains of the Dessau and Hohenfriedberg March are well
known and beloved among them; but I have never yet heard a Prussian
soldier sing, 'What is the German Fatherland?' The nation whence this
army has sprung, and of which the army is the truest representative in
the happy and accurate words of the president of the First Chamber,
Rudolph von Auerswald, does not need to see the Prussian monarchy melt
away in the filthy ferment of South German immorality. We are
Prussians, and Prussians we desire to remain! I know that in these
words I utter the creed of the Prussian army, the creed of the
majority of my fellow-countrymen, and I hope to God that we shall
continue Prussians, when this bit of paper is forgotten like the
withered leaf of autumn!"
¶ Yes, Bismarck, any day the mob may bring the rope; but you still
bellow your defiance, your face of brass unabashed. Man among
men--wrong though you be, Bismarck, you will have your say though the
Heavens fall.
¶ "I am proud to be a Prussian Junker, and feel honored by the
appellation. Whigs and Tories were terms which once also had a very
mean signification; and be assured, gentlemen, that we shall on our
part bring Junkerdom to be regarded with honor and respect."
* * * * *
¶ Aristocrats were delighted; von Thadden exclaimed: "I am
enthusiastic over this man Bismarck!" Geo. v. Wincke, the Westphalian
high official, short, fat, red-headed, never admired the burly giant
Bismarck, smelling of the cow-sheds.
¶ For twenty years, off and on, the testy v. Wincke indulged in
invective, his theme ever being "The rule of law." This George v.
Wincke in spite of his medals and his family tree was on the liberal
side, bag and baggage.
¶ There was a strain of bitter eloquence about this red-headed
champion of the people's rights. He had read Guizot and talked much of
Hampden, the Long Parliament, and all that. George had the legal side
of the argument, especially since the French revolution had set
liberty bells a-ringing everywhere, even in solemn old Prussia; but
the doughty Bismarck would come thundering back with his "unlimited
crown" and rulership over the people "by the grace of God," royal
prerogative and general disdain for the masses;--as in the régime of
Louis the Magnificent at Versailles, when the convicts worked to build
the $200,000,000 palace to shelter art, wit and pretty women, while
the people starved. How out of tune, Bismarck; how hopelessly
reactionary!
* * * * *
¶ Bismarck voted against every new privilege. His speeches read like
reports of personal rows! He was frank, fearless and frenzied, and in
turn his volleys excited groans and hisses.
¶ Was ever mortal so utterly out of touch with the prevailing French
conception of liberty, equality and fraternity? Here is the way he
summed up political equality:
¶ "The goosequill arguments of newspaper writers!" "Relics of
pot-houses!" "The emancipation of the people does not mean progress!"
"A royal word is more than volumes of law!" "The Prussian sovereigns
are in possession of a crown by God's grace!" "The king has said he
did not wish to be coerced or driven!" "Let there be a period of four
years, at least, before another such stupid meeting as this is held."
¶ It was a curious situation. Bismarck was both rude and crude!
His style of delivery was lame, his voice improperly placed, his
mannerisms grotesque. Despite his hobbling oratory, however, Bismarck
was soon a marked man; he held his audience by his sensational ideas
and his dogged courage!
* * * * *
¶ Why did Bismarck vote against every new privilege? This may not be
decently answered in a word; you must read on in detail; there was a
great principle behind Bismarck's political attitude. True, it was
crudely conceived and expressed, at this period; but he will improve
with time.
¶ Bismarck well remembered the excesses of German Jacobins, in the
southwest, during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. Alsace
and Lorraine had welcomed massacres as signs of political equality;
mob leaders destroyed castles and monasteries; Jew-baiters went mad;
Schneider, the tyrant of Strassburg, took charge of the guillotine,
but not making enough blood flow, was soon aided by professional
executioners, straight from Paris.
¶ There was also the lunatic "Feast of Reason." Stark-mad Germans
paraded with Marat's statue, attacked churches, wrecked altars, heaped
up images of saints, crosses, pews, pulpits, and priests' garments,
touched the match, and danced around the fire;--while Schneider
harangued the mob on the joys of reason, as against revealed religion;
solemnly assuring his thousands of listeners that Christianity was now
a thing of the past.
¶ Thus the mad war of liberty burst forth, accompanied by many
extraordinary episodes. Nor were the followers confined exclusively to
the rabble; we find many noted teachers, scholars and politicians
endorsing the French guillotine as a remedy for all political
ills--men like Blau, Wedekind, Hoffmann, Foster, Stamm, Dorsch, not
overlooking the spectacular John Mueller, who in the cause of the
people committed unheard-of follies with his pen, as a necessary
support for the sword.
¶ There was also a stark-mad leader named Cloots, who usually signed
his bulletins "Cloots, Personal Enemy of Jesus of Nazareth." His
object was the union of all mankind, literally speaking; no halfway
measures for him, no long delays; he wanted his political salvation
here and now.
¶ So inflamed were the people that the discharge of a tailor's
apprentice, in Breslau, precipitated a riot and the artillery was
brought into play.
¶ In Saxony, 18,000 peasants demanded a democratic constitution; but
the authorities replied by sending the messenger to a mad-house.
¶ Thus, in various directions, the crack-brained revolutionists played
their parts; nor should history overlook the contribution of the
learned Dr. Faust, of Buckelburg, whose profound treatise, "Origin of
Trousers," was read in Paris as a sort of historical endorsement of
the great democratic party that gloried in the equality, not to say
liberty, exhibited by casting trousers aside.
* * * * *
¶ Now what do you think? This King's Man, sprung up of a sudden,
coming from his fox-hunting and his cow-sheds, hits right and left at
the Jews! Yes, as against his "beloved Christians." Here is a new note
indeed--old yet new.
We had not supposed Jew-baiting a thing of the past; but in these
tempestuous times it did seem that race-prejudice had no place in a
plain attempt to keep a king's crown.
¶ "I will pass," Bismarck thundered, "to the question itself. I am no
enemy of Jews, and if they are enemies to me, I will forgive them.
Under certain circumstances, I even love them. I would grant them
every right--save that of holding superior office posts in a Christian
country.
¶ "I admit I am full of prejudices, sucked in with my mother's milk.
If I think of a Jew, face to face with me as a representative of the
king's sacred majesty, and have to obey him, I must confess that I
should feel myself deeply broken and depressed. The sincere
self-respect with which I now attempt to fulfil my duties toward the
state would leave me! I share these feelings with the mass of large
strata of people, and I am not ashamed of their society."
* * * * *
¶ Thus, now at this supreme moment, when with voice of brass our
Bismarck is making his entry into the world of affairs with his sharp
words on Christians and Jews, and more especially with his
uncompromising conception that kings are indeed the personal
representatives of God on this earth, we do see that Bismarck stems
from a fighting race. All his years, this Bismarck was a frightful
hater.
¶ With the sorry figure of the world-oppressed Jew in our eyes and the
malignancy of this new Jew-baiter, it is well that at the very outset
this be made clear: That whatever Bismarck was or was not, at least he
was no hypocrite. His words always fall like the wrath of God.
It is a solemn fact that he changed his point of view many, many
times--even as you and I--but there is always the ring of sincerity
about it that even the acid test of long time is unable to dissolve.
* * * * *
¶ It was this tremendous earnestness--this sincerity--that made
Bismarck feared, hated and despised.
Against your will, you are forced to believe what this giant says, no
matter how mocking, how insolent, how absurd his charges!
Some tell us that Bismarck's ancestry stems from Bohemia, others trace
the Bismarcks to Russia, still others assert Jewish origin.
This much is a fact: from a geographical point, the family name comes
from the little river Biese, near Stendal.
¶ Bismarck's passion and prejudice against Jews was proverbial. It did
indeed often turn him, for the time being, into a mad dog!
Near the close of life, in retirement at Friedrichsruh, some candid
friend desecrated the great man's retirement by sending him a copy of
a book by an anonymous writer, "Bismarck, the Jew."
Ordinarily, Bismarck paid no attention to social lampoons, but on this
day as he read the book aloud to guests, his anger became black and
terrifying!
¶ "I am determined to have the law on the audacious writer!"
Bismarck's guests saw the old man in one of his moods of frightful
rage.
But next day something intervened--and Bismarck never brought suit for
damages.
* * * * *
¶ Here is one thing that you must never forget in studying great men:
That it is possible, nay inevitable, for a man to be at once very
great and very small.
At the very beginning of his career, we find Bismarck ringing the
solemn changes on "Christian," and we behold him in a characteristically
unamiable mood over "Jews." Yet all the time he was endeavoring to lay
down the dogma that the proper aim of the state is the realization of
the Christian ideal!
¶ If now you can understand this mental contradiction, you are in a
position to grasp one of the strange paradoxes with which Bismarck's
life is literally filled.
You see here, at once, why he has been so often accused of
double-dealing, of stacking the cards, of changing his mind, of going
ahead by going backwards, winning ultimately by fair means or by foul.
* * * * *
¶ And now for the sequel. Many years later, Bismarck was exceedingly
glad to be guided by the advice of Jews, more especially the Jewish
banker Bleichroder.
On one side of the table sits Bismarck, the Pomeranian Junker, and on
the other side the sallow-faced, undersized Jew, Bleichroder.
Great friends they are today, to be sure; and between them is a mound
of treasury reports, telling in minute detail the financial resources
of Louis the Little, now a helpless prisoner of war. France is at the
Prussian's mercy, and a Jew is called in--a despised Jew!
Bleichroder and Bismarck coolly examined the balance sheets of France,
the present state of her debts.
The money cost turns out to be the stupendous sum of five thousand
millions of francs.
* * * * *
¶ Literary and journalistic France, in book, editorial and oration
made a great outcry at the moment, declaring dramatically that
Prussian barbarians had decided "to bleed France white"--attributing
to Bismarck a figure of speech borrowed from the butcher's block! Well
and good, but France paid the indemnity in surprisingly short time;
and had many millions left to go on her way rejoicing, had it not been
for the miserable obsession, "Ravanche!" that kept her in hot water
for years.
¶ Bismarck was correctly quoted in this respect: That gold is as
necessary in war as gunpowder; and the best way to keep a quarrelsome
would-be Napoleon out of war is to empty his pockets.
¶ The Jewish feature, however, shows Bismarck, through and through;
and we could not present him without this surprising scene. Make the
most of it.
* * * * *
¶ "I do not much like the piety that proclaims itself," said Louis
XIII. A similar remark may be made concerning Bismarck's life-long
belief that the Lord was on Bismarck's side--Jew-baiter and all.
¶ "The longer I work in politics," he once remarked, summing up his
many political difficulties, "the smaller my belief in human
calculation. I look at the affair according to my human understanding,
but gratitude for God's assistance so far raises in me the confidence
that the Lord is able to turn our errors to our own good; that I
experience daily, to my wholesale humiliation."