I cannot pardon the historian Bancroft, loved and admired by all, for
having one day, blinded by the splendors of a certain illustrious
person's career, compared an institution like the new German empire
with such an institution as the secular American Republic. The
impersonal character of the latter and the personal character of the
former place the two governments in radical contrast. In America the
nation is supreme--in Germany, the emperor. In the former the saviour
of the negroes--redeemer and martyr--perished almost at the beginning
of his labors. His death did not delay for one second the emancipation
of the slave which had been decreed by the will of the nation,
immovable in its determinations, through which its forms and
personifications are moved and removed. In America the President in
the full exercise of his functions is liable to indictment in a
criminal court; he is nevertheless universally obeyed, not on account
of his personality and still less on account of his personal prestige,
but on account of his impersonal authority, which emanates from the
Constitution and the laws. It little matters whether Cleveland favors
economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its
assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States,
like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and
uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of
America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the
commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was
necessarily military since it had to defend itself against the Slavs
and Danes in the north, and against the German Catholics in the south.
Prussia was constituted in such a manner that its territory became an
intrenched camp, and its people a nation in arms. Nations, even though
they be republican, which find it necessary to organize themselves on
a military model, ultimately relinquish their parliamentary
institutions and adopt a Caesarian character and aspect. Greece
conquered the East under Alexander; Rome extended her empire
throughout the world under Caesar; France, after her victories over the
united kings, and the expedition to Egypt under Bonaparte, forfeited
her parliament and the republic to deliver herself over to the emperor
and the empire. Consequently the terms emperor and commander-in-chief
appear to be the synonyms in all languages. And by virtue of this
synonymy of words the Emperor of Germany exercises over his subjects a
power very analogous to that which a general exercises over his
soldiers. Bismarck should have known this. And knowing this
truth--intelligible to far less penetrating minds than his--Bismarck
should in his colossal enterprise have given less prominence to the
emperor and more to Germany. He did precisely the contrary of what he
should have done. The Hohenzollern dynasty has distinguished itself
beyond all other German dynasties by its moral nature and material
temperament of pure and undisguised autocracy. The Prussian dynasty
has become more absolute than the Catholic and imperial dynasties of
Germany. A Catholic king always finds his authority limited by the
Church, which depends completely on the Pope, whereas a Prussian
monarch grounds his authority on two enormous powers, the dignity of
head of the State, and that of head of the Church. The autocratic
character native to the imperial dynasties of Austria is greatly
limited by the diversity of races subjected to their dominion and to
the indispensable assemblies of the diet around his imperial majesty.
But a king of Prussia, always on horseback, leader in military times,
defender of a frontier greatly disputed by formidable enemies, whose
soil looks like a dried-up marsh from which the ancient Slav race had
been obliged to drain off the water, is required to direct his
subjects as a general does an army. The intellectual, political, and
military grandeur of Frederick the Great augmented this power and
assured it to his descendants for a long epoch. It has happened to
each king of Prussia since that time to perform some colossal task,
grounded in an irreducible antinomy. Frederick William II. devoted
himself to the reconciliation of Calvinism and Lutheranism as divided
in his days as during the thirty years war, which was maintained by
the heroism of Gustavus Adolphus, and repressed by the exterminating
sword of Wallenstein. Frederick William IV. endeavored to unite
Christianity and Pantheism in his philosophical lucubrations; the
Protestant churches were deprived of their churchyards and statues by
virtue of and in execution of Royal Lutheran mandates, as was also the
Catholic Cathedral of Cologne, restored to-day in more brilliant
liturgical splendor with the sums paid for pontifical indulgences.
Bismarck did as he liked with the empire when it was ruled by William
I., and did not foresee what would be the irremissible and natural
issue of the system to which he lent his authority and his name. When
William I. snatched his crown from the altar, as Charlemagne might
have done, and clapped it on his head, repeating formulas suited to
Philip II. and Charles V., the minister was silent and submitted to
these blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine
right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power,
exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and
honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a
man of his greatness, should have remembered what physiologists have
demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it
was his duty and that of the nation and the Germans to guard against
some atavistic caprice which would strike at his own power. The
predecessor of Frederick the Great was a monomaniac and the
predecessor of William the Strong was a madman. Could Bismarck not
foresee that by his leap backwards he ran the risk of lending himself
to the fatal reproduction of these same circumstances, of
transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole
nation? A king of Bavaria singing Wagner's operas among rocks and
lakes; a brother of the king of Bavaria resembling Sigismund de
Calderon by his epilepsy and insanity; Prince Rudolph showing that the
double infirmity inherent in the paternal lineage of Charles the Rash
and in the maternal line of Joanna the Mad continues in the Austrians;
a recent king of Prussia itself shutting himself up in his room as in
a gaol, and obliged by fatality to abdicate the throne of his
forefathers during his lifetime in favor of the next heir, must prove,
as they have done, what is the result of braving the maledictions of
the oracle of Delphi, and the catastrophes of the twins of OEdipus
with such persistency, in this age, in important and mature
communities, which cannot become diseased, much less cease to exist
when certain privileged families sicken and die. Not that I would ask
people to do what is beyond their power and prohibited by their honor.
There was no necessity, as a revolutionist might imagine, to overturn
the dynasty. A very simple solution of the problem would have been to
take against the probable extravagances of the Fredericks and Williams
of Prussia the same precautions that were taken in England against the
Georges of Hanover. These last likewise suffered from mental
disorders. And so troubled were they by their afflictions that they
were haunted by a grave inclination to prefer their native, though
unimportant hereditary throne in the Germany of their forefathers to
the far more important kingdom conferred on them by the parliamentary
decision of England. But the English, to obviate this, showed
themselves a powerful nation and respected the dynasty. Bismarck
wished to make the king absolute in Prussia; he desired that a Caesar
should reign over Germany; and to-day the king and the Caesar are
embodied in a young man who has set aside the old Chancellor, and
believes himself to have received from heaven, together with the right
to represent God on this earth, the omnipotence and omniscience of God
himself. Can it be doubted any longer that history reveals an inherent
providential justice? To-day we see it unfold itself as if to show us
that the distant perspectives of the past live in the present and
extend throughout futurity.