One by one the nations of the world come to their own, have free play
for their faculties, express themselves, and eventually pass onward
into silence. Our age has beheld the elevation of Prussia. Well may we
ask, “What has been her message? What the path by which she climbed
into preëminence?” That she would reach the summit, the work of
Frederick the Great in the last century, and of Stein at the beginning
of this, portended. It has been Bismarck’s mission to amplify and
complete their task. Through him Prussia has come to her own. What,
then, does she express?
The Prussians have excelled even the Romans in the art of turning men
into machines. Set a Yankee down before a heap of coal and another of
iron, and he will not rest until he has changed them into an implement
to save the labor of many hands; the Prussian takes flesh and blood,
and the will-power latent therein, and converts them into a machine.
Such soldiers, such government clerks, such administrators, have never
been manufactured elsewhere. Methodical, punctilious, thorough,
are those officers and officials. The government which makes them
relies not on sudden spurts, but on the cumulative force of habit. It
substitutes rule for whim; it suppresses individual spontaneity, unless
this can be transformed into energy for the great machine to use. That
Prussian system takes a turnip-fed peasant, and in a few months makes
of him a military weapon, the length of whose stride is prescribed in
centimetres--a machine which presents arms to a passing lieutenant with
as much gravity and precision as if the fate of Prussia hinged on that
special act. It takes the average tradesman’s son, puts him into the
educational mill, and brings him out a professor,--equipped even to the
spectacles,--a nonpareil of knowledge, who fastens on some subject,
great or small, timely or remote, with the dispassionate persistence of
a leech; and who, after many years, revolutionizes our theory of Greek
roots, or of microbes, or of religion. Patient and noiseless as the
earthworm, this scholar accomplishes a similarly incalculable work.
A spirit of obedience, which on its upper side passes into deference
not always distinguishable from servility, and on its lower side is
not always free from arrogance, lies at the bottom of the Prussian
nature. Except in India, caste has nowhere had more power. The
Prussian does not chafe at social inequality, but he cannot endure
social uncertainty; he must know where he stands, if it be only on the
bootblack’s level. The satisfaction he gets from requiring from those
below him every scrape and nod of deference proper to his position
more than compensates him for the deference he must pay to those above
him. Classification is carried to the fraction of an inch. Everybody,
be he privy councilor or chimney-sweep, is known by his office. On
a hotel register you will see such entries as “Frau X, widow of a
school-inspector,” or “Fräulein Y, niece of an apothecary.”
This excessive particularization, which amuses foreigners, enables the
Prussian to lift his hat at the height appropriate to the position
occupied by each person whom he salutes. It naturally develops
acuteness in detecting social grades, and a solicitude to show the
proper degree of respect to superiors and to expect as much from
inferiors,--a solicitude which a stranger might mistake for servility
or arrogance, according as he looked up or down. Yet, amid a punctilio
so stringent, fine-breeding--the true politeness which we associate
with the word “gentleman”--rarely exists; for a gentleman cannot be
made by the rank he holds, which is external, but only by qualities
within himself.
Nevertheless, these Prussians--so unsympathetic and rude compared with
their kinsmen in the south and along the Rhine, not to speak of races
more amiable still--kept down to our own time a strength and tenacity
of character that intercourse with Western Europeans scarcely affected.
Frederick the Great tried to graft on them the polished arts and the
grace of the French: he might as well have decorated the granite
faces of his fortresses with dainty Parisian wall-paper. But when he
touched the dominant chord of his race,--its aptitude for system,--he
had a large response. The genuine Prussian nature embodied itself
in the army, in the bureaucracy, in state education, through all of
which its astonishing talent for rules found congenial exercise. One
dissipation, indeed, the Prussians allowed themselves, earlier in
this century,--they reveled in Hegelianism. But even here they were
true to their instinct; for the philosophy of Hegel commended itself
to them because it assumed to reduce the universe to a system, and to
pigeon-hole God himself.
We see, then, the elements out of which Prussia grew to be a strong
state, not yet large in population, but compact and carefully
organized. Let us look now at Germany, of which she formed a part.
We are struck at once by the fact that until 1871 Germany had no
political unity. During the centuries when France, England, and Spain
were being welded into political units by their respective dynasties,
the great Teutonic race in Central Europe escaped the unifying process.
The Holy Roman Empire--at best a reminiscence--was too weak to prevent
the rise of many petty princedoms and duchies and of a few large
states, whose rulers were hereditary, whereas the emperor was elective.
Thus particularism--what we might call states’ rights--flourished,
to the detriment of national union. At the end of the last century,
Germany had four hundred independent sovereigns: the most powerful
being the King of Prussia; the weakest, some knight whose realm
embraced but a few hundred acres, or some free city whose jurisdiction
was bounded by its walls. When Napoleon, the great simplifier, reduced
the number of little German states, he had no idea of encouraging the
formation of a strong, coherent German Empire. To guard against this,
which might menace the supremacy of France, he created the kingdoms
of Bavaria and Westphalia, and set up the Confederation of the Rhine.
After his downfall the German Confederation was organized,--a weak
institution, consisting of thirty-nine members, whose common affairs
were regulated by a Diet which sat at Frankfort. Representation in
this Diet was so unequal that Austria and Prussia, with forty-two
million inhabitants, had only one eighth of the votes, while the small
states, with but twelve million inhabitants, had seven eighths. Four
tiny principalities, with two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants
each, could exactly offset Prussia with eight millions. By a similar
anomaly, Nevada and New York have an equal representation in the United
States Senate.
From 1816 to 1848 Austria ruled the Diet. Yet Austria was herself
an interloper in any combination of German states, for her German
subjects, through whom she gained admission to the Diet, numbered
only four millions; but her prestige was augmented by the backing of
her thirty million non-German subjects besides. Prussia fretted at
this Austrian supremacy, fretted, and could not counteract it. Beside
the Confederation, which so loosely bound the German particularists
together, there was a Customs Union, which, though simply commercial,
fostered among the Germans the idea of common interests. The spirit of
nationality, potent everywhere, awakened also in the Germans a vision
of political unity, but for the most part those who beheld the vision
were unpractical; the men of action, the rulers, opposed a scheme which
enfolded among its possibilities the curtailing of their autocracy
through the adoption of constitutional government. No state held more
rigidly than Prussia the tenets of absolutism.
Great, therefore, was the general surprise, and among Liberals the
joy, at the announcement, in February, 1847, that the King of Prussia
had consented to the creation of a Prussian Parliament. He granted
to it hardly more power than would suffice for it to assemble and
adjourn; but even this, to the Liberals thirsty for a constitution,
was as the first premonitory raindrops after a long drought. Among the
members of this Parliament, or Diet, was a tall, slim, blond-bearded,
massive-headed Brandenburger, thirty-two years old, who sat as proxy
for a country gentleman. A few of his colleagues recognized him as Otto
von Bismarck; the majority had never heard of him.
Bismarck was born at Schönhausen, Prussia, April 1, 1815. His paternal
ancestors had been soldiers back to the time when they helped to
defend the Brandenburg March against the inroads of Slav barbarians.
His mother was the daughter of an employee in Frederick the Great’s
War Office. Thus, on both sides his roots were struck in true Prussian
soil. At the age of six he was placed in a Berlin boarding-school, of
which he afterward ridiculed the “spurious Spartanism;” at twelve
he entered a gymnasium, where for five years he pursued the usual
course of studies,--an average scholar, but already noteworthy for
his fine physique; at seventeen he went up to the University at
Göttingen. In the life of a Prussian, there is but one period between
the cradle and the grave during which he escapes the restraints of
iron-grooved routine: that period comprises the years he spends at
the university. There a strange license is accorded him. By day he
swaggers through the streets, leering at the women and affronting the
men; by night he carouses. And from time to time he varies the monotony
of drinking-bouts by a duel. Such, at least, was the life of the
university student in Bismarck’s time. At Göttingen, and subsequently
at Berlin, he had the reputation of being the greatest beer-drinker
and the fiercest fighter; yet he must also have studied somewhat,
for in due time he received his degree in law, and became official
reporter in one of the Berlin courts. Then he served as referendary at
Aix-la-Chapelle, and passed a year in military service.
At twenty-four he set about recuperating the family fortunes, which
had suffered through his father’s incompetence. He took charge of the
estates, devoted himself to agriculture, and was known for many miles
round as the “mad squire.” Tales of his revels at his country house,
of his wild pranks and practical jokes, horrified the neighborhood.
Yet here, again, his recklessness did not preclude good results. He
made the lands pay, and he tamed into usefulness that restive animal,
his body, which was to serve as mount for his mighty soul. Some
biographers, referring to his bucolic apprenticeship, have compared him
to Cromwell; in his youthful roistering he reminds us of Mirabeau.
To the Diet of 1847 the mad squire came, and during several sittings
he held his peace. At last, however, when a Liberal deputy declared
that Prussia had risen in arms in 1813, in the hope of getting a
constitution quite as much as of expelling the French, the blond
Brandenburger got leave to speak. In a voice which seemed incongruously
small for his stature, but which carried far and produced the effect of
being the utterance of an inflexible will, he deprecated the assertions
just made, and declared that the desire to shake off foreign tyranny
was a sufficient motive for the uprising in 1813. These words set
the House in confusion. Liberal deputies hissed and shouted so that
Bismarck could not go on; but, nothing daunted, he took a newspaper
out of his pocket and read it, there in the tribune, till order was
restored. Then, having added that whoever deemed that motive inadequate
held Prussia’s honor cheap, he strode haughtily to his seat, amid
renewed jeers and clamor. Such was Bismarck’s parliamentary baptism of
fire.
Before the session adjourned, the deputies had come to know him well.
They discovered that the mad squire, the blunt “captain of the dikes,”
was doubly redoubtable; he had strong opinions, and utter fearlessness
in proclaiming them.
His political creed was short,--it comprised but two clauses: “I
believe in the supremacy of Prussia, and in absolute monarchy.” More
royalist than the King, he opposed every concession which might
diminish by a hair’s breadth the royal prerogative. Constitutional
government, popular representation, whatever Liberals had been
struggling and dying for since 1789, he detested. Democracy, and
especially German democracy, he scoffed at. For sixty years reformers
had been railing at the absurdities of the Old Régime; they had
denounced the injustice of the privileged classes; they had made odious
the tyranny of paternalism. Bismarck entered the lists as the champion
of “divine right,” and first proved his strength by exposing the
defects of democracy.
Those who believe most firmly in democracy acknowledge, nevertheless,
that it has many objections, both in theory and in practice. Universal
suffrage--the abandoning of the state to the caprice of millions of
voters, among whom the proportion of intelligence to ignorance is
as one to ten--seems a process worthy of Bedlam. The ballot-box is
hardly more accurate than the dice-box, as a test of the fitness of
candidates. Popular government means party government, and parties
are dogmatic, overbearing, insincere, and corrupt. The men who
legislate and administer, chosen by this method, avowedly serve their
party, and not the state; and though, by chance, they should be both
skilful and honest, they may be overturned by a sudden revulsion
of the popular will. Such a system breeds a class of professional
politicians,--men who make a business of getting into office, and
whose only recommendation is their proficiency in the art of cajoling
voters. A government should be managed as a great business corporation
is managed: it has to deal with the weightiest problems of finance,
and with delicate diplomatic questions, for which the trained efforts
of judicious experts are needed; but instead of being intrusted to
them, it is given over to politicians elected by multitudes who cannot
even conduct their private business successfully, much less entertain
large and patriotic views of the common welfare. To decide an election
by a show of hands seems not a whit less absurd than to decide it
by the aggregate weight or the color of the hair of the voters. We
speak of the will of the majority as if it were infallibly right. The
vast majority of men to-day would vote that the sun revolves round
the earth: should this belief of a million ignoramuses countervail
the knowledge of one astronomer? Shall knowledge be the test of
fitness in all concerns except government, the most critical, the
most far-reaching and responsible of all? Majority rule substitutes
mere numbers, bulk, and quantity for quality. Putting a saddle on
Intelligence, it bids Ignorance mount and ride whither it will,--even
to the devil. It is the dupe of its own folly; for the politicians whom
it chooses turn out to be, not the representatives of the people, but
the attorneys of some mill or mine or railway.
These and similar objections to democracy Bismarck urged with a sarcasm
and directness hitherto unknown in German politics. When half the world
was repeating the words “Liberalism,” “Constitution,” “Equality,”--as
if the words themselves possessed magic to regenerate society,--he
insisted that firm nations must be based upon facts, not phrases. He
had the twofold advantage of invariably separating the actual from
the apparent, and of being opposed by the most incompetent Liberals
in Europe. However noble the ideals of the German reformers, the men
themselves were singularly incapable of dealing with realities. Nor
should this surprise us; for they had but recently broken away from
the machine we have described, and as they had not yet a new machine
to work in, they whirled to and fro in vehement confusion, the very
rigidity of their previous restraint increasing their dogmatism and
their discord.
The revolution of 1848 soon put them to the ordeal. The German Liberals
aimed at national unity under a constitution. Like their brothers in
Austria and Italy, they enjoyed a temporary triumph; but they could not
construct. Their Parliament became a cave of the winds. Their schemes
clashed. By the beginning of 1850 the old order was restored.
During this stormy crisis, Bismarck, as deputy in two successive
Diets, had resolutely withstood the popular tide. He regarded the
revolutionists as men in whom the qualities of knave, fool, and
maniac alternately ruled; the revolution itself, he said, had no
other motive than “a lust of theft.” One of its leaders he dismissed
as a “phrase-watering-pot.” The right of assemblages he ridiculed as
furnishing democracy with bellows; a free press he stigmatized as a
blood-poisoner. When the imperial crown was offered to the King of
Prussia, Bismarck argued against accepting it; he would not see his
King degraded to the level of a mere “paper president.”
Such opposition would have made the speaker conspicuous, if only for
its audacity. His enemies had learned, however, that it required a
strong character to support that audacity continuously. They tried
to silence him with abuse; but their abuse, like tar, added fuel to
his fire. They tried ridicule; but their ridicule had too much of
the German dulness to wound him. They called him a bigoted Junker,
or squire. “Remember,” he retorted, “that the names Whig and Tory
were first used opprobriously, and be assured that we will yet bring
the name Junker into respect and honor.” Many anecdotes are told
illustrating his quick repulse of intended insult or his disregard of
formality. He was not unwilling that his enemies should remember that
he held his superior physical strength in reserve, if his arguments
failed. Yet on a hunting-party, or at a dinner, or in familiar
conversation, he was the best of companions. Germany has not produced
another, unless it were Goethe, so variedly entertaining; and Goethe
had no trace of one of Bismarck’s characteristics,--humor. He possessed
also tact and a sort of Homeric geniality which, coupled with unbending
tenacity, fitted him to succeed as a diplomatist.
In 1851 the King appointed him to represent Prussia at the German Diet,
which sat at Frankfort. The outlook was gloomy. Prussia had quelled
the revolution, but she had lost prestige. Unable to break asunder the
German Confederation or to dominate it, she had signed, at Olmütz, in
the previous autumn, a compact which acknowledged the supremacy of
her old rival, Austria. While the humiliation still rankled, Bismarck
entered upon his career. Hitherto not unfriendly to Austria, because
he had looked upon her as the extinguisher of the revolution, which he
hated most of all, he began, now that the danger was over, to give a
free rein to his jealousy of his country’s hereditary competitor. In
the Diet, the Austrian representative presided, the rulings were always
in Austria’s favor, the majority of the smaller states allowed Austria
to guide them. Bismarck at once showed his colleagues that humility
was not his rôle. Finding that the Austrian president alone smoked at
the sittings, he took out his own cigar and lighted it,--a trifle, but
significant. He resisted every encroachment, and demanded the strictest
observance of the letter of the law. Gradually he extended Prussia’s
influence among the confederates. He unmasked Austria’s insincerity; he
showed how honestly Prussia walked in the path of legality; until he
slowly created the impression that wickedness was to be expected from
one, and virtue from the other.
During seven years Bismarck held this outpost, winning no outward
victory, but storing a vast amount of knowledge about all the states of
the Confederation, their rulers and public men, which was subsequently
invaluable to him. His dispatches to the Prussian Secretary of State,
his reports to the King, form a body of diplomatic correspondence
unmatched in fulness, vigor, directness, and insight. With him, there
was no ambiguity, no diplomatic circumlocution, no German prolixity. He
sketched in indelible outlines the portraits, corporal or mental, of
his colleagues. He criticised the policy of Prussia with a brusqueness
which must have startled his superior. He reviewed at longer range the
political tendencies of Europe. Officially, he kept strictly within the
limits of his instructions; but his own personality represented more
than he could yet officially declare,--Prussia’s ambition to become
the leader of Germany. In all his dispatches, and in all places where
caution did not prescribe silence, he reiterated his Cato warning,
“Austria must be ousted from Germany.”
Do not suppose, however, that Bismarck’s political greatness was then
discerned. Probably, had you inquired of Germans forty years ago,
“Who among you is the coming statesman?” not one would have replied,
“Bismarck.” At the opera, we cannot mistake the hero, because the
moonlight obligingly follows him over the stage; in real life, the
hero passes for the most part unrecognized, until his appointed hour;
but the historian’s duty is to show how the heroic qualities were
indubitably latent in him long before the world perceived them.
In 1859 Bismarck was appointed ambassador at St. Petersburg, where he
stayed three years, when he was transferred to Paris. This completed
his apprenticeship, for in September, 1862, he was recalled to Berlin
to be minister-president.
His promotion had long been mooted. The new King William--a
practical, rigid monarch, with no Liberal visions, no desire to
please everybody--had been for eighteen months in conflict with
his Parliament. He had determined to reorganize the Prussian army;
the Liberals insisted that, as Parliament was expected to vote
appropriations, it should know how they were spent. William at last
turned to Bismarck to help him subjugate the unruly deputies, and
Bismarck, with a true vassal’s loyalty, declared his readiness to
serve as “lid to the saucepan.” Very soon the Liberals began to
compare him with Strafford, and the King with Charles I, but neither
of them quailed. “Death on the scaffold, under certain circumstances,
is as honorable,” Bismarck said, “as death on the battlefield. I can
imagine worse modes of death than the axe.” Hitherto he had strenuously
maintained the first article of his creed,--“I believe in the supremacy
of Prussia;” henceforth he upheld with equal vigor the second,--“I
believe in the autocracy of the King.”
The narrow Constitution limited the King’s authority, making it coequal
with that of the Upper and Lower Chambers, but Bismarck quickly taught
the deputies that he would not allow “a sheet of paper” to intervene
between the royal will and its fulfilment. Year after year the Lower
House refused to vote the army budget; year after year Bismarck and
his master pushed forward the military organization, in spite of the
deputies. Noah was not more unmoved by those who came and scoffed at
his huge, expensive, apparently useless ark than were the Prussian
minister and his King by their critics, who did not see the purpose of
the ark the two were building. Bismarck merely insisted that the army,
on which depended the integrity of the nation, could not be subjected
to the caprice of parties; it was an institution above parties, above
politics, he said, which the King alone must control.
At the same time, the Minister-President actively pursued his other
project,--the expulsion of Austria from Germany. When the King of
Denmark died, in December, 1863, the succession to the duchies of
Schleswig and Holstein was disputed. Bismarck seized the occasion for
occupying the disputed territory, in partnership with Austria. England
protested, France muttered, but neither cared to risk a war with the
allied robbers. When it came to dividing the spoils, Bismarck, who
had recently gauged Austria’s strength, struck for the lion’s share.
Austria resisted. Bismarck then approved himself a master of diplomacy.
Never was he more clever or more unscrupulous, shifting from argument
to argument, delaying the open rupture till Prussia was quite ready,
feigning willingness to submit the dispute to European arbitration
while secretly stipulating conditions which foredoomed arbitration to
failure, and invariably giving the impression that Austria refused to
be conciliated. As the juggler lets you see the card he wishes you to
see, and no other, so Bismarck always kept in full view, amid whatever
shuffling of the pack, the apparent legality of Prussia. In the end he
drove Austria to desperation.
In June, 1866, war came, with fury. One Prussian army crushed with a
single blow the German states which had promised to support Austria;
another marched into Bohemia, and, in seven days, confronted the
imperial forces at Sadowa. There was fought a great battle, in which
the Prussian crown prince repeated the master stroke of Blücher at
Waterloo, and then Austria, hopelessly beaten, sued for peace.
Bismarck now showed himself astute in victory. Having ousted Austria
from Germany, he had no wish to wreak a vengeance that she could
not forgive. Taking none of her provinces, he exacted only a small
indemnity. With the German states he was equally discriminating: those
which had been inveterately hostile he annexed to Prussia; the others
he let off with a fine. He set up the North German Confederation,
embracing all the states north of the river Main, in place of the old
German Confederation; and thus Prussia, which had now two thirds of the
population of Germany, was undisputed master. The four South German
states, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Hesse, and Baden, signed a secret treaty,
by which they gave the Prussian King the command of their troops in
case of war.
Europe, which had witnessed with astonishment these swift proceedings,
understood now that a great reality had arisen, and that Bismarck was
its heart. In France, surprise gave way to indignation. Were not the
French the arbiters of Europe? How had it happened that their Emperor
had permitted a first-rate power to organize without their consent?
Napoleon III, who knew that his sham empire could last only so long
as he furnished his restless subjects food for their vanity, strove
to convince them that he had not been outwitted; that he still could
dictate terms. He demanded a share of Rhineland to offset Prussia’s
aggrandizement; Bismarck refused to cede a single inch. Napoleon
bullied; Bismarck published the secret compact with the South Germans.
Napoleon forthwith decided that it was not worth while to go to war.
We have all heard of the sportsman who boasted of always catching
big strings of fish. But one day, after whipping every pool and
getting never a trout, he was fain, on his way home, to stop at the
fishmonger’s and buy a salt herring for supper. Not otherwise did
Napoleon, who had been very forward in announcing that he would
_take_ land wherever he chose, now stoop to offer to _buy_ enough to
appease his greedy countrymen. He would pay ninety million francs for
Luxemburg, and the King of Holland, to whom it belonged, was willing
to sell at that price; but Bismarck would consent only to withdraw
the Prussian garrison from the grand duchy, after destroying the
fortifications, and to its conversion into a neutral state. That was
the sum of the satisfaction Napoleon and his presumptuous Frenchmen got
from their first encounter. A few years before, Napoleon, who had had
frequent interviews with Bismarck and liked his joviality, set him down
as “a not serious man;” whence we infer that the Emperor was a dull
reader of character.
Although, by this arrangement, the Luxemburg affair blew over, neither
France nor Prussia believed that their quarrel was settled. Deep in the
heart of each, instinct whispered that a life-and-death struggle was
inevitable. Bismarck, amid vast labor on the internal organization of
the kingdom, held Prussia ready for war. He would not be the aggressor,
but he would decline no challenge.
In July, 1870, France threw down the glove. When the Spaniards elected
Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern to their vacant throne, France demanded
that King William should compel Leopold to resign. William replied
that, as he had not influenced his kinsman’s acceptance, he should
not interfere. The prince, who was not a Prussian, withdrew of his
own accord. But the French Secretary of State, the Duc de Gramont,
had blustered too loudly to let the matter end without achieving his
purpose of humbling the Prussian King. He therefore telegraphed
Benedetti, the French Ambassador, to force King William to promise that
at no future time should Leopold be a candidate for the Spanish crown.
Benedetti delivered his message to William in the public garden at Ems;
and William, naturally refusing to bind himself, announced that further
negotiations on the subject would be referred to the Foreign Minister.
The following morning Bismarck published a dispatch containing a brief
report of the interview; adding, however, that the King “declined to
receive the French Ambassador again, and had him told by the adjutant
in attendance that his Majesty had nothing further to communicate
to the Ambassador.” This deceitful addition produced exactly the
effect which Bismarck intended: every German, whether Prussian or
not, was incensed to learn that the representative German King had
been hectored by the French emissary, and every Frenchman was enraged
that the Prussian King had insulted the envoy of the “grand nation.”
Bismarck, who had feared that another favorable moment for war was
passing, now exulted, and Moltke, who had for years been carrying the
future campaign in his head, and whose face grew sombre when peace
seemed probable, now smiled a grim, contented smile. In Paris, the
ministers, the deputies, the newspapers, and the populace clamored for
war. Apparently, Napoleon alone felt a slight hesitation; but he could
hesitate no longer when the popular demand became overwhelming. On July
19 France made a formal declaration of war, and the Parisians laid bets
that their victorious troops would celebrate the Fête Napoléon--August
15--in Berlin. Had not their War Minister, Lebœuf, assured them that
everything was ready, down to the last button on the last gaiter of the
last soldier?
We cannot describe here the terrible campaign which followed. In
numbers, in equipment, in discipline, in generalship, in everything but
bravery, the French were quickly outmatched. When Napoleon groped madly
for some friendly hand to stay his fall, he found that Bismarck had
cut off succor from him. The South Germans, whom the French had hoped
to win over, fought loyally under the command of Prussia; Austria, who
might have been persuaded to strike back at her late conqueror, dared
not move for fear of Russia, whose friendship Bismarck had secured; and
Italy, instead of aiding France, lost no time in completing her own
unification by entering Rome when the French garrison was withdrawn.
Forsaken and outwitted, the French Empire sank without even an expiring
flash of that tinsel glory which had so long bedizened its corruption.
And when the French people, lashed to desperation, continued the war
which the Empire had brought upon them, they but suffered a long agony
of losses before accepting the inevitable defeat. They paid the penalty
of their former arrogance in every coin known to the vanquished,--in
military ruin, in an enormous indemnity, in the occupation of their
land by the victorious Prussians, and in the cession of two rich
provinces. Nor was that enough: they had to submit to a humiliation
which, to the imagination at least, seems the worst of all,--the
proclamation of the Prussian King William as German Emperor in their
palace at Versailles, the shrine of French pomp, where two centuries
before Louis XIV had embodied the ambition, the glory, and the pride of
France. The German cannon bombarding beleaguered Paris paused, while
the sovereigns of the German states hailed William as their Emperor.
This consummation of German unity was the logical outcome of an
international war, in which all the Germans had been impelled, by
mutual interests quite as much as by kinship, to join forces against
an alien foe. Twenty years before, Bismarck had opposed German
unity, because it would then have made Prussia the plaything of her
confederates; in this later scheme he was the chief agent, if not the
originator, for he knew that the primacy of Prussia ran no more risk.
Let us pause a moment and look back. Only a decade earlier, in 1861,
when Bismarck became minister, Prussia was but a second-rate power,
Germany was a medley of miscellaneous states, Austria still held her
traditional supremacy, the French Emperor seemed firmly established.
Now, in 1871, Austria has been humbled, France crushed, Napoleon
whiffed off into outer darkness, and Prussia stands unchallenged at
the head of United Germany. Many men--the narrow, patient King, the
taciturn Moltke, the energetic Von Roon--have contributed to this
result; but to Bismarck rightly belongs the highest credit. Slow to
prepare and swift to strike, he it was who measured the full capacity
of that great machine, the Prussian army, and let it do its work the
moment Fortune signaled; he it was who knew that needle guns and
discipline would overcome in the end the long prestige of Austria and
the wordy insolence of France. Looking back, we are amazed at his
achievements,--many a step seems audacious; but if we investigate,
we find that Bismarck had never threatened, never dared, more than
his strength at the time warranted. The gods love men of the positive
degree, and reward them by converting their words into facts.
Of the German Empire thus formed Bismarck was Chancellor for twenty
years. His foreign policy hinged on one necessity,--the isolation of
France. To that end he made a Triple Alliance, in which Russia and
Austria were his partners first, and afterward Italy took Russia’s
place. He prevented the Franco-Russian coalition, which would place
Germany between the hammer and the anvil. From 1871 to 1890 he was not
less the arbiter of Europe than the autocrat of Germany.
Nevertheless, although in the management of home affairs Bismarck
usually prevailed, he prevailed to the detriment of Germany’s progress
in self-government. The Empire, like Prussia herself, is based on
constitutionalism: what hope is there for constitutionalism, when at
any moment the vote of a majority of the people’s representatives can
be nullified by an arbitrary prime minister? Bismarck carried his
measures in one of two ways: he either formed a temporary combination
with mutually discordant parliamentary groups and thereby secured a
majority vote, or, when unable to do this, by threatening to resign he
gave the Emperor an excuse for vetoing an objectionable bill. Despising
representative government, with its interminable chatter, its red tape,
its indiscreet meddling, and its whimsical revulsions, Bismarck never
concealed his scorn. If he believed a measure to be needed, he went
down into the parliamentary market-place, and by inducements, not of
money, but of concessions, he won over votes. At one time or another,
every group has voted against him and every group has voted for him.
When he was fighting the Vatican, for instance, he conciliated the
Jews; when Jew-baiting was his purpose, he promised the Catholics favor
in return for their support. Being amenable to the Emperor alone, and
not, like the British premier, the head of a party, he dwelt above the
caprice of parties. Men thought, at first, to stagger him by charges
of inconsistency, and quoted his past utterances against his present
policy. He laughed at them. Consistency, he held, is the clog of men
who do not advance; for himself, he had no hesitation in altering
his policy as fast as circumstances required. With characteristic
bluntness, he did not disguise his intentions. “I need your support,”
he would say to a hostile group, “and I will stand by your bill if you
will vote for mine.” “_Do ut des_” was his motto; “an honest broker”
his self-given nickname.
Such a government cannot properly be called representative; it dangles
between the two incompatibles, constitutionalism and autocracy.
Doubtless Bismarck knew better than the herd of deputies what would
best serve at a given moment the interests of Germany; but his methods
were demoralizing, and so personal that they made no provision for the
future. His system could not be permanent unless in every generation an
autocrat as powerful and disinterested as himself should arise to wield
it; but nature does not repeat her Bismarcks and her Cromwells. At the
end of his career, Germany has still to undergo her apprenticeship in
self-government.
Two important struggles, in which he engaged with all his might, call
for especial mention.
The first is the _Culturkampf_, or contest with the Pope over the
appointment of Catholic bishops and clergy in Prussia. Bismarck
insisted that the Pope should submit his nominations to the approval
of the King; Pius IX maintained that in spiritual matters he could be
bound by no temporal lord. Bismarck passed stern laws; he withheld
the stipend paid to the Catholic clergy; he imprisoned some of them;
he broke up the parishes of others. It was the mediæval war of
investitures over again, and again the Pope won. Bismarck discovered
that against the intangible resistance of Rome his Krupp guns were
powerless. After fifteen years of ineffectual battling, the Chancellor
surrendered.
Similar discomfiture came to him from the Socialists. When he entered
upon his ministerial career, they were but a gang of noisy fanatics;
when he quitted it, they were a great political party, holding the
balance of power in the Reichstag, and infecting Germany with their
doctrines. At first he thought to extirpate them by violence, but
they throve under persecution; then he propitiated them, and even
strove to forestall them by adopting Socialistic measures in advance
of their demands. If the next epoch is to witness the triumph of
Socialism, as some predict, then Bismarck will surely merit a place in
the Socialists’ Saints’ Calendar; but if, as some of us hope, society
revolts from Socialism before experience teaches how much insanity
underlies this seductive theory, then Bismarck will scarcely be praised
for coquetting with it. For Socialism is but despotism turned upside
down; it would substitute the tyranny of an abstraction--the state--for
the tyranny of a personal autocrat. It rests on the fallacy that though
in every individual citizen there is more or less imperfection,--one
dishonest, another untruthful, another unjust, another greedy, another
licentious, another willing to grasp money or power at the expense
of his neighbor,--yet by adding up all these units, so imperfect,
so selfish, and calling the sum “the state,” you get a perfect and
unselfish organism, which will manage without flaw or favor the whole
business, public, private, and mixed, of mankind. By what miracle a
coil of links, separately weak, can be converted into an unbreakable
chain is a secret which the prophets of this Utopia have never
condescended to reveal. Not more state interference, but less, is the
warning of history.
The fact which is significant for us here is that Socialism has best
thriven in Germany, where, through the innate tendency of the Germans
to a rigid system, the machinery of despotism has been most carefully
elaborated, and where the interference of the state in the most trivial
affairs of life has bred in the masses the notion that the state can
do everything,--even make the poor rich, if they can only control the
lever of the huge machine.
Nevertheless, though Bismarck has been worsted in his contest with
religious and social ideas, his great achievement remains. He has
placed Germany at the head of Europe, and Prussia at the head of
Germany. Will the German Empire created by him last? Who can say? The
historian has no business with prophecy, but he may point out the
existence in the German Empire to-day of conditions that have hitherto
menaced the safety of nations. The common danger seems the strongest
bond of union among the German states. Defeat by Russia on the east
or by France on the west would mean disaster for the South Germans
not less than for the Prussians; and this peril is formidable enough
to cause the Bavarians, for instance, to fight side by side with the
Prussians. But there can be no homogeneous internal government, no
compact nation, so long as twenty or more dynasties, coequal in dignity
though not in power, flourish simultaneously. Historically speaking,
Germany has never passed through that stage of development in which one
dynasty swallows up its rivals,--the experience of England, France, and
Spain, and even of polyglot Austria.
Again, Germany embraces three unwilling members,--Alsace-Lorraine,
Schleswig, and Prussian Poland,--any of which may serve as a
provocation for war, and must remain a constant source of racial
antipathy. How grievous such political thorns may be, though small in
bulk compared to the body they worry, England has learned from Ireland.
Finally, if popular government--the ideal of our century--is to prevail
in Germany, the despotism extended and solidified by Bismarck will
be swept away. Possibly, Germany could not have been united, could
not have humbled Austria and crushed France, under a Liberal system;
but will the Germans forever submit to the direction of an iron
chancellor, or glow with exultation at the truculence of a strutting
autocrat who flourishes his sword and proclaims, “My will is law”? No
other modern despotism has been so patriotic, honest, and successful
as that of Bismarck; but will the Germans never awake to the truth
that even the best despotism convicts those who bow to it of a certain
ignoble servility? Or will they, as we have suggested, transform the
tyranny of an autocrat into the tyranny of Socialism? We will not
predict, but we can plainly see that Germany, whether in her national
or in her constitutional condition, has reached no stable plane of
development.
And now what shall we conclude as to Bismarck himself? The magnitude
of his work no man can dispute. For centuries Europe awaited the
unification of Germany, as a necessary step in the organic growth of
both. Feudalism was the principle which bound Christendom together
during the Middle Age; afterward, the dynastic principle operated to
blend peoples into nations; finally, in our time, the principle of
nationality has accomplished what neither feudalism nor dynasties could
accomplish, the attainment of German unity. In type, Bismarck belongs
with the Charlemagnes, the Cromwells, the Napoleons; but, unlike them,
he wrought to found no kingdom for himself; from first to last he was
content to be the servant of the monarch whom he ruled. As a statesman,
he possessed in equal mixture the qualities of lion and of fox, which
Machiavelli long ago declared indispensable to a prince. He had no
scruples. What benefited Prussia and his King was to him moral, lawful,
desirable; to them he was inflexibly loyal; for them he would suffer
popular odium or incur personal danger. But whoever opposed them was to
him an enemy, to be overcome by persuasion, craft, or force. We discern
in his conduct toward enemies no more regard for morality than in that
of a Mohawk sachem toward his Huron foe. He might spare them, but from
motives of policy; he might persecute them, not to gratify a thirst for
cruelty, but because he deemed persecution the proper instrument in
that case. His justification would be that it was right that Prussia
and Germany should hold the first rank in Europe. The world, as he saw
it, was a field in which nations maintained a pitiless struggle for
existence, and the strongest survived; to make his nation the strongest
was, he conceived, his highest duty. An army of puny-bodied saints
might be beautiful to a pious imagination, but they would fare ill in
an actual conflict with Pomeranian grenadiers.
_Dynamic_, therefore, and not _moral_, were Bismarck’s ideals and
methods. To make every citizen a soldier, and to make every soldier
a most effective fighting machine by the scientific application of
diet, drill, discipline, and leadership, was Prussia’s achievement,
whereby she prepared for Bismarck an irresistible weapon. In this
application of science to control with greater exactness than ever
before the movements of large masses of men in war, and to regulate
their actions in peace, consists Prussia’s contribution to government;
in knowing how to use the engine thus constructed lies Bismarck’s
fame. When Germans were building air-castles, and, conscious of their
irresolution, were asking themselves, “Is Germany Hamlet?” Bismarck saw
both a definite goal and the road that led to it. The sentimentalism
which has characterized so much of the action of our time never diluted
his tremendous will. He held that by blood and iron empires are welded,
and that this stern means causes in the end less suffering than the
indecisive compromises of the sentimentalists. Better, he would say,
for ninety-nine men to be directed by the hundredth man who knows
than for them to be left a prey to their own chaotic, ignorant, and
internecine passions. Thus he is the latest representative of a type
which flourished in the age when the modern ideal of popular government
had not yet risen. How much of his power was due to his unerring
perception of the defects in popular government as it has thus far been
exploited, we have already remarked.
The Germans have not yet perceived that one, perhaps the chief source
of his success was his un-German characteristics. He would have
all Germany bound by rigid laws, but he would not be bound by them
himself. He encouraged his countrymen’s passion for conventionality and
tradition, but remained the most unconventional of men. Whatever might
complete the conversion of Germany into a vast machine he fostered by
every art; but he, the engineer who held the throttle, was no machine.
In a land where everything was done by prescription, the spectacle of
one man doing whatever his will prompted produced an effect not easily
computed. Such characteristics are un-German, we repeat, and Bismarck
displayed them at all times and in all places. His smoking a cigar in
the Frankfort Diet; his opposition to democracy, when democracy was the
fashion; his resistance to the Prussian Landtag; his arbitrary methods
in the German Parliament,--these are but instances, great or small, of
his un-German nature. And his relations for thirty years with the King
and Emperor whom he seemed to serve show a similar masterfulness. A
single anecdote, told by himself, gives the key to that service.
At the battle of Sadowa King William persisted in exposing himself at
short range to the enemy’s fire. Bismarck urged him back, but William
was obstinate. “If not for yourself, at least for the sake of your
minister, whom the nation will hold responsible, retire,” pleaded
Bismarck. “Well, then, Bismarck, let us ride on a little,” the King
at last replied. But he rode very slowly. Edging his horse alongside
of the King’s mare, Bismarck gave her a stout kick in the haunch. She
bounded forward, and the King looked round in astonishment. “I think
he saw what I had done,” Bismarck added, in telling the story, “but he
said nothing.”
On Bismarck’s private character I find no imputed stain. He did not
enrich himself by his office, that hideous vice of our time. He did
not, like both Napoleons, convert his palace into a harem; neither
did he tolerate nepotism, nor the putting of incompetent parasites
into responsible positions as a reward for party service. That he
remorselessly crushed his rivals let his obliteration of Count von
Arnim witness. That he subsidized a “reptile press,” or employed spies,
or hounded his assailants, came from his belief that a statesman too
squeamish to fight fire with fire would deserve to be burnt. Many
orators have excelled him in grace, few in effectiveness. Regarding
public speaking as one of the chief perils of the modern state, because
it enables demagogues to dupe the easily swayed masses, he despised
rhetorical artifice. His own speech was un-German in its directness,
un-German in its humor, and it clove to the heart of a question with
the might of a battle-axe,--as, indeed, he would have used a battle-axe
itself to persuade his opponents, five hundred years ago. Since
Napoleon, no other European statesman has coined so many political
proverbs and apt phrases. His letters to his family are delightfully
natural, and reveal a man of keen observation, capable of enjoying the
wholesome pleasures of life, and brimful of common sense, which a rich
gift of humor keeps from the dulness of Philistines and the pedantry of
doctrinaires. His intercourse with friends seems to have been in a high
degree jovial.
Not least interesting to a biographer are those last years of
Bismarck’s life, between March, 1890, and his death, on July 30, 1898,
which he passed in eclipse. To be dismissed by a young sovereign who,
but for him, might have been merely a petty German prince,--to be
told that he, the master throne-maker, was unnecessary to the callow
apprentice,--galled the Titan’s heart. Eight years he was destined
to endure this mortification; and although his countrymen everywhere
hailed him as their hero, the fact of dismissal gave him no repose.
Europe has seen no similar spectacle since she bound Napoleon,
Prometheus-like, on St. Helena. But Napoleon, chafing his life away
there, had at least the satisfaction of reflecting that it took all
Europe, allied with Russia’s blizzards and Spain’s heats, to conquer
him. Bismarck, storming in his exile from power, felt now scorn, now
hate, for the “young fellow” (as he called him) who had turned him
out. Here, if ever, Nemesis showed her work. Bismarck’s whole energy
had been bent for fifty years on fortifying the autocracy of the
Prussian monarchs; and now a young autocrat run from this mould bade
him go--and he went. We may believe that it did not solace Bismarck to
find that the “young fellow” could get on without him; or to see that
in England Gladstone, six years his elder, led his nation till long
past eighty; Gladstone,--whom he had so often jeered at as an empty
rhetorician,--England, which he despised as the home of representative
government. Could it be that constitutionalism was kinder than
despotism to master statesmen?
A great man we may surely pronounce him, long to be the wonder of a
world in which greatness of any kind is rare. If you ask, “How does
he stand beside Washington and Lincoln?” it must be admitted that his
methods would have made them blush, but that his patriotism was not
less enduring than theirs. With the materials at hand he fashioned an
empire; it is futile to speculate whether another, by using different
tools, could have achieved the same result. Bismarck knew that though
his countrymen might talk eloquently about liberty, they loved to be
governed; he knew that their genius was mechanical, and he triumphed by
directing them along the line of their genius. He would have failed had
he appealed to the love of liberty, by appealing to which Cavour freed
Italy; or to the love of glory, by appealing to which Napoleon was able
to convert half of Europe into a French province. Bismarck knew that
his Prussians must be roused in a different way.
It may be that the empire he created will not last; it is certain that
it cannot escape modifications which will change the aspect he stamped
upon it; but we may be sure that, whatever happens, the recollection
of his Titanic personality will remain. He belongs among the giants,
among the few in whom has been stored for a lifetime a stupendous
energy,--kinsmen of the whirlwind and the volcano,--whose purpose seems
to be to amaze us that the limits of the human include such as they.
At the thought of him, there rises the vision of mythic Thor with his
hammer, and of Odin with his spear; the legend of Zeus, who at pleasure
held or hurled the thunderbolt, becomes credible.