III.

The onus of blame devolves on Bismarck's native ideas, which persisted

in him from his cradle and resisted the revelations of his own

personal experience as well as the spirit of our progressive age. In

Bismarck there always subsisted the rural fibre of the Pomeranian

rustic, in unison with the demon of feudal superstition and

intolerance. In politics and religion he was born, like certain of the

damned in "Dante's Inferno," with his head turned backwards by

destiny. A quarrelsome student, a haughty noble, pleased only with his

lands and with the privileges ascribed to the land owner, incapable of

understanding the ideal of natural right and the contexture of

parliamentary government, a Christian of merely external routine and

formalist liturgy, he excited in the pusillanimous Frederick William,

in his earliest counsels and during his early influence in the crisis

of '48, a horror of democratic principles and progressist schools

which led him to salute the corpses of his own victims, stretched out

on the beds of his own royal palace, and to prostrate himself at the

feet of Austria in the terrible humiliation of Olmutz, that political

and moral Jena of the civil wars of the Germanic races. Very

perspicuous in discerning the slightest cloud that might endanger the

privileges of the monarchy and aristocracy, he was blind of an

incurable blindness with respect to the discernment of the breath of

life contained in the febrile agitations of new Germany, which

discharged from its revolutionary tripod sufficient magnetism and

electricity between the tempests, similar to those which flash, and

thunder, and fulminate, from the summits of all the Sinais of all

histories, to inflame a higher soul in any other more progressive

society. The world cannot understand that he should have been

perturbed by the external clamor of the revolution, when the idea of

Germanic unity had become condensed in the soul of the nation,

revealing itself by volcanic eruptions, like an incipient or radiant

star; he could not understand how the Congress of Frankfort, cursed by

him, foreshadowed the future, as though inspired by tongues of fire;

and could not avail himself of all that ether whose comet-like

violence, cooled down in the course of time, was to compose the new

German nationality, and was to give it a greater fatherland where

its inherent genial nature should glow and expand. In his

shortsightedness, in his lack of progressive spirit, in his want of

the prophetic gift, he imagined the principle of Germanic unity lost

at Olmutz, like the principle of Italian unity at Novara, and

ridiculed those who, certain of the immortality of such principles,

foretold for both a Passover of Resurrection. He never understood the

innermost essence and intrinsic substance of the principle, to which

it owes its force and glory, sufficiently to adopt it, until he had

witnessed its success in Italy, insulted in his speeches during the

tempestuous dawn of the new common idea. It is on this account that I

am rendered indignant by any comparison of Bismarck and Cavour, as I

am rendered equally indignant by a comparison of Washington and

Bonaparte. The father of the Saxon fatherland of America, and the

father of the Italian fatherland in Europe, alike rendered worship to

goodness, and never deviated from right in any degree; whereas the

founders of French imperialism and of Germanic imperialism, much

addicted to violence and very vain of their conquests, relinquished

something as great and as fragile and sinister as the works produced

by the genius of evil and outer darkness in all theogony. In the last

years of the reign of Napoleon III., during the discussion of a

message in the French Legislative Corps, Rouher extolled the public

and private virtues of the emperor. My late lamented friend, Jules

Favre, replied to him in a speech worthy of Demosthenes: "You may be

content to be the minister of such a Marcus Aurelius; to such paltry

dignities, I prefer the higher privilege of calling myself a citizen

of a free country." Bismarck preferred to maintain himself in power by

the help of his kings--quite the contrary of what Gladstone does, who

maintains his sovereign. Whom can he blame but himself? Emperors are

accustomed to be ferocious with their favorites when they are weary of

them. Just as Tiberius expelled Sejanus, just as Nero killed Seneca,

just as John II. hanged D. Alvaro de Luna, just as Philip II.

persecuted Antonio Perez till he died, just as Philip III. beheaded D.

Rodrigo Calderon, William II. has morally beheaded Bismarck, without

any other motive than his imperial caprice. _Sic volo, sic jubeo._ So

now will the Chancellor venture to present himself in parliament

because he has been dismissed from the royal palace like a lackey?

_Quae te dementia caepit?_ When, after Waterloo, Napoleon, adopting the

theatrical style of an Italian _artiste_, suitable to his tragical

disposition, and repeating a few badly learned Plutarchesque phrases,

suitable to the classical education of his age, asked the English, his

enemies, to accord him hospitality, as in ancient times Themistocles

might have petitioned his enemies the Persians, the English replied by

sending him to St. Helena. Bismarck in disfavor and disgrace solicits

an asylum from his enemies, the commons, whom he has never defeated,

yet whom he has always disdained. And as the English condemned their

troublesome guest to live on a gloomy little island, the electors

condemn their repugnant petitioner to a second ballot. But the

Chancellor will be completely undeceived; he possesses no

qualifications whatever for the position he has chosen. An orator, a

great orator, he one day failed to keep his pledged word, and the

apostate word condemns him to never regain the executive power through

its intervention. In the sessions of parliament he will resemble the

plucked and cackling hen thrown by the Sophists into Socrates'

lecture-room. The admired Heine, so fertile in genial ideas,

represented the gods of Phidias and Plato, besides being downfallen

and vagabond, selling rabbit skins on the seashore, and being forced

to light brushwood fires by which to warm their benumbed bodies during

the winter nights. To-day the writers, salaried by Bismarck, known as

reptiles, now turn on him, for a similar salary, the venomous fangs

which he formerly aimed at his innumerable enemies. And yonder, in the

parliament where formerly he strode in with sabre, and belt, and

spurred boots, a helmet under his arm, a cuirass on his breast, he

will now enter like a chicken-hearted charity-school boy, and that

assembly which he formerly whipped with a strong hand, like

school-boys, laughed at and caricatured in often brutal sarcasm,

ridiculed at every instant, ignored in the calculation of the budget

and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and

dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like

the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and

eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in

Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon.