Blood and Iron / Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its Founder, Bismarck

¶ After reading five hundred pamphlets on the Revolution (as she testified at her trial) Charlotte Corday struck down Marat with a dagger; and her act has been generally condoned by men with a sense of fair-play. It was indeed a bloody murder; but when a mad-dog is running wild, a beast fattening on human blood, one passion feeds on another—and Corday is no exception. (Henderson, Symbol and Satire of the French Revolution).

Heroine or monster, take your choice; at least in her time such was the frenzy of the alleged political Millennium that Marat was soon worshipped as a martyr. This atrocious political quack, with all his daggers and his blackjacks, was likened to Jesus Christ; and among the sentiments of the hour we read, “A perfidious hand has snatched him away from his beloved people”; “To the immortal glory of Marat, the people’s friend”; “Unable to corrupt me, they have assassinated me!” “Marat, rare and sublime soul, we will imitate thee; we swear it on thy bloody corpse.”

Such are some of the expressions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that followers of French Constitutionalism had years later decreed to re-enact in Germany; but Bismarck stood as a master with a rod of iron to lay over the backs of fanatical German Radicals, who would come on with their drunken calls of “Liberty!”

¶ All this, however, is only the mild opening chapter of this much glorified French Constitutionalism. The French prisons soon held about all there was of French intelligence and moderation; the brains, the blood and the beauty. It is not necessary to mention names.

If you wish to become hysterical, read your fill of this drunken era of French Constitutionalism.

At the height of the Terror, there were 8,000 political prisoners in French dungeons; and the mobs still came on with their cries for fresh blood. One day, this expression was made: “The town of Lyons shall be destroyed; the name Lyons shall be effaced,” etc. All this meant that Lyons, weary of blood, had decided on raising an army to beat back the sons of spurious liberty.

¶ Any man who, in the Terror, dared disagree with the mob-rulers was called a “conspirator.” In a letter from Herbois, we find this plain evidence of political lunacy masquerading as inspiration: “There are 60,000 individuals here who will never make good republicans; we must have them sent away. I have new measures in mind, weighty and effectual,*  *  * Heads, more heads, heads every day! *  *  * How you would have enjoyed seeing National justice meted out to two hundred and nine rogues. What cement for the Republic! I say fete, yes, citizen president, fete is the right word. The guillotining and fusillading are not going badly!”

¶ The Queen, now in her dungeon, was treated with wretched dishonor. Even the petty expenses of bread and salt were begrudged: 15 francs a day for food; three francs and 18 sous for trimming a skirt, 18 sous for a ribbon and shoe-strings; three francs for a tooth wash;—all this was kept track of. Yet in years gone by France had allowed her four million francs of pin money, and the royal allowance was twenty-five millions of francs per annum.

¶ “Through a small window in her cell comes the light of day. *  *  * She is accused of being a leech, a scourge, a harpy and a free-lover; she is condemned to death.”

¶ The political assassins, known as the Mountain, and that known as the Girondists, now began destroying each other; every patriotic action of the Girondists was set forth as having been instigated by love of vulgar applause. After some days, the Jacobin Club petitioned for freer trials, less hindered by legal formalities.

¶ “Long live the Republic!” was the cry. “Perish all traitors!” Executions continued, day by day.

¶ The poor king was long since dead and gone, yet his memory was detested.

On a certain day of horrors, the tombs of his ancestors were broken open by the mob, and the bones scattered. One corpse (or what remained of it) was stood up against a wall and the beard hacked off by a patriot of the new Regime.

¶ All authority was now overthrown; and as one writer adds, “the most daring enterprise of the Revolution remains to be chronicled: the storming of Heaven!” (Henderson.)

¶ The leaders decided next to attack God on His throne; God was officially declared a superstitious myth.

The altars of France were hurled over; the Christian era was abolished by political decree; the Sabbath day was officially proclaimed done away with; Christ was to be henceforth banished, officially; churches closed, pagan rites substituted.

¶ Bismarck, the thinker, Bismarck, the builder, with his dream of political responsibility, of vested Authority, stood for no such facts in his protests against the rising tide of Radicalism, in the German states.

He knew his history too well; he knew the satire of the French Revolution, the folly of meeting it in any way except by the sword.

¶ Yes, Bismarck believed strongly in what has since been called Militarism; but his idea was that power was needed for the liberation and the unification of his country; and he hated French Constitutionalism and fought by fair means and by foul all efforts to warp upon Germans the political ideals of the French Revolution. So you must here and now make up your mind whether or not Bismarck was a great statesman or a great fool.

¶ The French Convention, weary of blood-letting, began maundering in the psychology of religion.

It was officially set forth by one of the Deputies that, after all, the idea was to invent some new form of religion, without which the proposed political Millennium had fallen short.

Marat was turned to, that choice spirit of the height of the era; though in his tomb, he was called upon in this strange language, despite his bringing in the Terror:

¶ “O, heart of Jesus, O heart of Marat, you have an equal right to our homage!”

¶ A New Era was now decreed, taken in the main from the paganism of early France. The four seasons were symbolized by the hunt of the man for his mate: he is afield in Autumn, on horseback; in Winter, he first finds his new mate; in the Spring, the maid watches her sheep feeding on the hills; and in Summertime, the man is seen leading his mate to a couch, his arms already around her waist.

¶ One of the leading symbols was Reason, presented as a lady petting a lion; saints’ days were replaced by days for animals, one for the cat, the dog, the sheep, and what you will; but no longer St. John’s, St. James, St. Louis.

Certain other days, dedicated to the “Spirit of the Revolution,” were termed “Sans culotte,” or without trousers, to wit, the French version of that great idol of the American yellow editor, who cries for justice in behalf of the man with the seat out of his trousers.

¶ On a certain day, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was used as a background for the great French political drama; a mountain was erected, a figure known as Truth was present. The Goddess Reason was also carried to the Tuileries; and later as a report written at the time says, “The President of the Convention gave the Goddess a fraternal kiss, whereupon his secretaries asked and obtained a similar privilege.”

¶ At Rochefort the orator of the hour began, “Citizens, there is no future life!”

¶ The images of saints were replaced by men of the stripe of Marat, Brutus and other tyrants.

¶Also, an ass was dressed in pontifical robes at a sort of National fete, and a few days later at a public masquerade, the President replying to praises of the New Era explained himself as follows: “In one single instant you make vanish into nothingness the errors of eighteen centuries”; by which he meant to honor the paganism of the new French political Millennium.

¶ Now comes that dangerous man, king of political charlatans, Robespierre, who offers a private religion of his own.

¶ The queer thing about this Robespierre, the new dictator, is his belief that he and he alone is the fountain of all political virtues. One must be willing to sacrifice brothers, mother, sister, father to the guillotine—for the good of one’s country.

The Robespierre idea is that the supreme duty of a Nation is to repress “crime,” as well as to uphold “virtue” and “crime” consists largely in not agreeing with the great central authority. He has had many followers since that day.

¶ Robespierre was really a great man gone wrong; he had in many respects a brilliant mind; he was a profound orator; a born leader; but he was unsound at the core, like a rotten apple; taught bloodshed and violence, as expressions of National honor.

¶ In one picture of the hour, he is represented as the Sun, rising over the Mountain, and Giving Light to the Universe.

¶ The day dawns when Robespierre has his old friend and rival Danton on the scaffold. This was to be expected. Then followed many executions of Dantonists.

¶ Robespierre now came on with his “new” religion; he boldly announced a Supreme Being and belief in immortality!

¶ He applied the torch to the wooden images set up by his political predecessors. He made a speech that is unintelligible, all wind, sound and bombast, but was cheered to the echo.

¶ Are you not growing weary of all these absurdities? Perhaps you think the details taken from the records of Bloomingdale Asylum?

No; French Constitutionalism of 1789-93, the sort that the Radicals of Germany had in mind, (with some variations), and often extolled in fiery speeches of the German Liberal party that Bismarck decided to crush down, with a rod of iron. True, the old offensive historical details were kept out of sight and were not fresh in men’s minds;—except reading men and thinking men, like Bismarck; men bold enough to stand out against mob-violence, called by whatever soft name you please.

¶ A French cartoon of the Robespierre Regime made at the time by an admirer shows the earth around the guillotine heaped with heads, and at last the over-weary executioner, failing to find further victims, decides to execute himself! He is therefore seen lying under the axe, his head rolling on the floor.

¶ Robespierre in the end went the way of all the other political fanatics; the day came when he was spat upon, struck, beaten by mobs, pricked with knives.

According to his own theory, he needed no trial (said his new rivals and enemies in their lust for power), for he has by his acts shown himself to be an enemy of his country.

They carried him down the great staircase; he fought back savagely, like the frightful animal that he was.

¶ Eighty-two of his followers died that day, on the guillotine.

¶ “Long live the Republic! Long live Liberty!” was the loud cry of the rabble.

¶ Such is some of the work of the great legislators of the Republic of Equality as set forth by the various authors of the new French “political Millennium,” during those terrible years 1789-93; we have seen their ideas on a grand scale; and it is for you to judge whether in setting himself squarely in favor of Discipline and respect for constituted Authority, as exemplified by the line of Prussian kings, and the Prussian system of education, Bismarck was to show himself a man or a mouse.

¶ Bismarck, who was a deep reader on politics, knew well the frightful excesses of French mob-rule. He may also have recognized certain general excellent principles, but he would have nothing to do with the fungous growth. And as we follow his career, we see the virtue in his strong reliance on Militarism, as an arm to keep in check the turbulent German masses, also, later, this same Militarism to be used to do battle for the German Empire.

¶ For many years, all manner of rosy democratic plans had been voiced by the Liberals.

The thing had been done to death. Every manner of political Utopia had been planned by theorists, but Bismarck met them all with his ironical speeches, and bided his time.

¶ Bismarck’s idea was that the only hope for German unity came through accepting the King of Prussia as ordained of heaven.

In his arguments, he ignored the masses, the villagers, the workers, the busy-bees, the regard for individual rights.

His whole programme seemed to the masses to be anti-Christ in conception, that is to say, it harked back to political paganism.

¶ It is very difficult for an American to comprehend this Prussian conception of Divine-right, as a political principle—but it should not be difficult from the point of human experience. Bismarck had no illusions concerning the power of the average man, and he held that the phrase “the people” was used by every political quack in Europe for any one of a thousand selfish motives.

Bismarck had absolutely no faith in the power of the average man to govern himself—much less to govern others!—or faith in the average man doing anything above the average, outside his own small trade or craft.

¶ Americans are accustomed to make much of an alleged saying of Lincoln: “No man is good enough to govern another without that man’s consent.” It is all a beautiful dream, false in theory and false in fact, belied by every record since the Lord drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.

Beginning with that stupendous episode, certain it is that this act of government was not carried out with, but against the will of the ruled; and the point at issue was not the supreme goodness of the ruler, but the power to station an angel with a flaming sword at the gates, toward which Adam ever after looked backward with longing eyes—but looked in vain!

¶ In the innumerable dynasties of Babylon, Nineveh, Egypt, Greece, Arabia, Armenia, what man ruled who did not force his leadership?

It is not in the nature of human beings to accept new ideas without hostile objection.

This holds true also in the evolution of governments, for all life is founded on struggle, and the man who would rule must force his leadership or remain unknown.

¶ Lincoln is absolutely in error, and his much-quoted words are folly. It is not a question of goodness, or badness, or fitness, on part of the man who has the ambition to rule, but it is very much a question of his courage, his craft or his cunning in compelling others to do his bidding.

Julius Cæsar was not selected to rule, but he selected himself; and so did Charlemagne, and Bismarck—and so Lincoln, himself.

¶ If some concession to the democratic system is sought on the ground that the voice of the people loudly “called” Lincoln, then it is to be set up that Lincoln on his part was one of the shrewdest political log-rollers this nation has ever seen; and if he did not originate the canvass that busies itself kissing the babies, congratulating the wives and shaking hands with the farmers, then at least Lincoln was an apt pupil.

It is inconceivable that, without his own high ambition, his long and painstaking endeavors to trim sail to every favoring gale (for example his shifting positions on the slavery question), he would have been nominated for President of these United States.

¶ It is an amiable conceit of human nature, looking backward, to profess to see what it blindly ignored, looking forward; and go to any penitentiary in America, ask the convicts, and you will find that, according to the stories, there are no guilty men behind the bars; invariably a peculiar complication of circumstances enabled the guilty man to escape, and justice was thereupon avenged by a human sacrifice; likewise in the United States Senate or in the House of Representatives, ask whom you please, “How came you to hold your seat?” and you will find no ambitious man. Some were forced to stand against their protests; others were away traveling when word was received, by telegraph, “You have been elected!” Still others appealed to the nominating committee, “For the love of God desist!”—but in vain.

Thus, without raising a finger to direct the movement of events, our leaders were selected by an omnipotent democracy to occupy the seats of the mighty.

¶ Truly, no man is good enough to rule another without that other man’s consent! Recast in terms of human experience, it would mean that we would go unruled; for no man yet has willingly selected his ruler, but has had dominion over him thrust upon him—even as Bismarck expressed his right to rule, backed by blood and iron.

Such is human nature since the world began; otherwise why was Christ, the gentlest ruler of all time, brought to the tree; Socrates forced to drink the hemlock by the very wise justice of his day; and Columbus called a madman because he wished to rule men’s minds with a new truth, showing clearly that the world is not square or flat, but round like a ball?

¶ Bismarck had the real clue—and forced his purpose through the power of his commanding personality.

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¶ The uprising of ’48 was primarily a students’ demonstration; the hot-bloods of the universities, aided by various political enthusiasts, were intent on doing something—and doing it right away. There had been a preliminary meeting at Heidelberg, and this led to the Frankfort Convention; 600 disputatious delegates were going to build a liberal German constitution—at last!

¶ Thus, between 1815 and 1848 German Unity had been stimulated by a dozen causes, religious, commercial, literary, social—but the political lagged, for the fact is that about the last thing a man learns is to govern himself.

There was a rising sense of National faith, as predicted by Arndt, the poet of German brotherhood; also the call of blood, based on language; likewise a deep yearning, as yet unsatisfied, for a constitutional form of government, as against the warring, insolent 39 states.

¶ By 1848 there were Constitutions in 23 of the states; many of these documents illiberal to be sure; but nevertheless a step in representative government.

¶ But the Germans are a peculiar people. They wish to refer everything to ultimate philosophical causes; hence the fruitless debates of the Frankfort Convention, in which all manner of prospective Constitutions were tried by the formal rules of philosophy and ethics. Such questions as “What is a Federal state?” were angrily debated, and the changes rung on “federation of states.”

¶ After worlds of talking, unseen hands decided to offer to some powerful prince the German crown. How is that for democrats? William IV was the man selected.

¶ Prodded by Bismarck, who was always explosive and satirical about democratic crowns, William spunkily refused to “pick a crown out of the gutter!” His dignity, as a Hohenzollern was offended; but Bismarck was playing for larger stakes. William now went about canvassing the German princes for a crown; twenty-eight replied, one way or another; others, sticking to selfish interests, made no acknowledgment.

¶ Now Bismarck, bellowing like a mastiff, set up the cry that if William accepted that democratic crown out of the Frankfort gutter, Prussia would become involved in civil war. And it was a fact! The old-line Prussian military aristocracy wanted no “democratic gold, from the gutter, melted down with their old aristocratic gold of Frederick the Great”—and as a matter of fact, could you blame them? Were you there, at the time, and of the land-holding privileged class, you too would have been up in arms.

¶ Get this straight: William’s idea of “United Germany” simply meant that there should be a United Germany compounded of the thirty-nine clashing states, provided William’s beloved Prussia and not the detested Austria could front the movement.

¶ Despite all the noble souls who write poetry on brotherhood (and Germany has her patriots, God knows!), the irony of fate is such that all human alignments of a political nature must at some stage be spattered with mud.

¶ You see, henceforth for a quarter of a century, the realization of this much-prized but elusive and seemingly impossible Unity was to become more and more a game of politics in which the stakes were kingdoms, principalities, riches and honors unnumbered. In all card-games the result is not known till the last card is played; and in the present case the game was to be protracted twenty-four years. Chips were flung about in huge stacks, now piled on the Austrian side, now on the Prussian; and finally, it was to break up in a fight, in which Prussia had to tip over the table, violently seize the spoils, batter heads right and left, and beat off rival players with needle-guns.

¶ Come, come, there is no need of claiming too much for human nature. The grand prize was to be gained, ultimately, by seizure! Even the sober, common-sense William I, to whom it finally fell to be crowned German Emperor, saw the true situation early, after the church-building William IV had been gathered to his fathers. You will hear more of that as we go along.

When all intriguing, all card-stacking, all smiling, all smooth speeches no longer serve to conceal the real end of this amazing game of international politics, as between Prussia and Austria, then the thing to do is to bring on “blood and iron.” The very human end that Bismarck always had in mind was German liberation and Unity, by driving the Nation’s enemies beyond the borders.

¶ The best title to lands, the surest, the most incontrovertible—let purists and pietists rage as they may—is the sharp edge of the sword.

We shall see all that more clearly as the bloody years go by.

¶ In the critical year ’48, democratic mobs chased that old aristocrat and king-maker Metternich out of Vienna. Hungary, Bohemia and other intervening principalities went mad with excitement about “Liberty!” South Germany was in a turmoil.

William IV had again practically promised a Constitution, and had ordered the troops from Berlin; he placed a sign on his castle “National Property.” At this time the king let slip these fateful words, “Prussia is to be dissolved in Germany!” Bismarck, pained beyond expression, sent a letter to the King, full of expressions of loyalty. The King kept the letter on his desk all summer.

¶ The giant continued to protest. He now first used a subsidized press, called well-known men to write for the “North Prussian Gazette.”

For all this, he was dubbed “Junker,” “Hot Head,” “Reactionary,” but he thundered away like a battleship in action.

¶ The King was in the hands of the Liberals. Bismarck regarded this as a frightful situation. Bismarck, of the Old Regime, stood by the landlords and the titled folk. He had prodigious pride of station, hated to see the King make a fool of himself about paper Constitutions.

¶ In Berlin, along in March, there were amazing scenes. The democrats were crazy for blood; William shrank with horror against fighting his beloved Berliners. But this son, the future William I, who twenty-four years later was to gain the imperial German crown, was not so squeamish. The young prince gained the popular title “Cartridge-box prince,” equivalent to saying that he was willing to blaze away at “beloved Berliners,” or at any other citizens insane with political excitements hazardous to “Divine-right.”

¶ It is true that on March 18th this romantic William IV did indeed enter into negotiations with the insurgents; and—think of the mortification to one of Bismarck’s upper-class leanings!—did indeed do no less than wrap the German tricolor around his body and heading a democratic procession march around the streets, even going so far as to make a foolish speech in which he extolled the glories of the German democratic revolution.

¶ Here we might as well close the book, were it not for Bismarck. The surly dog of a king’s man flatly refused to vote “Aye!” in the Diet, where the hot-heads were intent on passing resolutions “commending the King for his loyalty to democratic principles,” in marching ’round town with the mob. Bismarck for the time being stood like a great mastiff at bay before wolves.

His terrific speech upholding royal prerogative made his early and sudden fame.

¶ It is a fact that with all their political ambitions, and their solemn belief that Germany’s political future was an open book, the Radicals in Prussia never guessed the way events were to turn out; nor for that matter the Radicals never desired the conquest of Germany by Prussia; therefore the subsequent astonishing rise of German Imperialism through Prussian domination, would have proved a most surprising revelation had the patriots of 1806 to 1848 returned from the other world, say in 1870, to view Prussia’s rise to glory.

¶ The political uprisings of 1848 had parallels in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany; and the excesses cleared the way for wiser action, in years to come.

¶ “The frenzy was a sort of tottering bridge between the French 1789-93 idea of democracy (that has to do with bloodshed and violence) and the purified conception expressed in modern constitutional democracy.”

¶ The German democratic uprisings of 1820, ’30 and ’48 were planned to win a certain type of civil liberty. They failed. The question was “equality,” as well as popular “machinery” of representation. How was it to be brought about? Modern “parliamentarism” had not as yet been involved.

¶ The patriots of ’48 had their Jacobin clubs in mild imitation of the French Revolution. Baden alone had 400, with a membership of 20,000. “Every tavern and brewery, (Dahlinger, German Revolution of ’49, p. 33), became a seat of democratic propaganda.”

¶ Copied from French models was the word “Citizen.” We hear of Citizen Brentano, Citizen Franz Sigel, Citizen Ostenhaus, Citizen Schimmelpfennig; some of these leaders were extremely radical; but Brentano endeavored to keep the Revolution from becoming a record of lawlessness after the French Revolution type. (Dahlinger, p. 100).

We cannot go into the various battles fought and lost. Many of the leaders were exiled, others shot. The patriots were as a rule young collegians, ambitious to rise in life, but sincerely holding to modified conceptions of French Constitutionalism. There were a large number of journalists in the thick of the struggle, also professors in high schools. These chosen leaders, by various oratorical tricks, drew political and social malcontents from every walk of life.

¶ In the end, Prussian troops put down the patriots.

¶ In ’48, all kings were under suspicion; it made no difference whether the king was a good king or a bad king; a king was a king, and all kings were bad.

The younger generation, especially became morbid over the word “Liberty!” What it really meant, in ’48, was that human nature should restrain itself, in order that all men might, immediately, enter into so-called God-given political rights.

The situation was somewhat analogous to that created after the Civil War, in the United States. Certain political fanatics, weeping over the Negroes, now demanded universal suffrage, literally, for the slaves, and in secret saw that by controlling the South, a “Black Republic” might be set up, side by side with our “White Republic.”

¶ Fraternity and equality—that was the cry in ’48—glossed over by politico-religious glamour, expressed in the idea that men “ought” do thus and so, and therefore “a people’s king” was in order. The people were to crown themselves.

For a thousand years the accepted political doctrine had been that kings held office by Divine-right, but now orators of the day harangued mobs proclaiming the literal belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God.

While, thus, the new apostles ridiculed the old idea of Divine-right, as attached to the acts of monarch, leaders of the people saw no inconsistency in asserting attributes of political divinity in the doings of the common people. Thus, a species of nebulous politico-religious humanism was pictured as the highest expression of political philosophy.

The individual wished to come into his own and the quicker the better. Reformers shocked landed proprietors, titled folk and office-holders under kings, by demanding unconditional surrender of the machinery of government; zealots urged revolts against all manner of constituted authority. The point was to gain for the barber, the tailor, the shoemaker and the blacksmith more life, more political experience, more freedom of choice—and right on the next tick of the clock!

¶ There is this about it: that the Frankfort Convention offered to William IV the “People’s Crown” as a direct symbol of belief in political idealism, not necessarily, however, the political idealism that tolerates a king but instead uses him as a popular signboard.

The Convention held that German unity “ought by right” to be established; therefore “once the grand Idea was set afloat” the cause “must by moral right come to pass.”

¶ Probably never before in the world was there formulated an outright, widespread expression of greater political idealism by men who called themselves patriots. There is a noble side to the sentiment, heightened the more as we realize the inevitable delusion of it all, translated into terms of human selfishness.

Germany, so the zealots proclaimed, should by blood and language be united; and in this respect orators of the hour were correct.

Germany had a manifest destiny, the speakers continued, but in this respect they were guided by faith rather than by experience. At least, the momentary end of “manifest destiny” was clearly the political function; to be one and united.

¶ So far good.

¶ Then why “should not” this noble German Idea be “accepted”? The word Idea was usually presented with a capital letter, in form of personification, so real had the thing become to German political orators.

Certainly every German was ready to testify that National Unity had been the one political dream of generations past and gone.

Had not the old wandering minstrels sung of the Fatherland, alas, too long delayed by miserable human selfishness! German bull-headedness insisted on insularity, on individualism, on particularism, on standing each petty monarch in his corner, with farce-comedy courtiers bowing and scraping while the rights of the peasant were forgotten. Assuredly, the day had come for this folly to cease. Then in Heaven’s name, why not a United Germany—here and now?

¶ The petty passions of rival princes acted as a bar to the acceptance of the glorious National Idea, spelled with the big “I.”

Intense particularisms preferred loyalty to local princes, fashions, customs, dialects rather than to lose the old ways in the larger life of the German Nation.

¶ But Bismarck did not lose heart.

CHAPTER IX

So Much the Worse for Zeitgeist

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¶ “There is not enough practical sense behind all,” says Bismarck, “to build a political chicken-coop, to say nothing of an empire.” Then, the patriots, so-called, leave for America, worn out with waiting for some new freedom set down on paper; and of the motley crew, not one is sufficiently wise, or strong enough to make head or tail of the complex situation. Barricades are thrown up, artillery plays upon the mobs, and general blood-letting follows; thousands of lives are snuffed out, to be charged up as advance sacrifices for political cohesion. Hapsburger against Hohenzollern, Protestant against Catholic, Ultramontanes beholding the reign of Anti-Christ; Guelphs and Wittelsbachs, protesting their own peculiar and ancient lineage against self-seeking latter-day upstart aristocrats!

¶ And the problem grew darker as the months went by.

¶ You may read till you are dizzy and then stand back and try to get a bird’s-eye view of the complicated quarrels of the Diet; the vagaries of Frankfort or Berlin; the brawls of this poet, that student, editor, publicist, or princeling; with soldiers of fortune hovering around waiting, like vultures that have already a whiff of the carrion, from afar. Instead of a bird’s-eye, the incoherent mass of details comes piecemeal, and you get the toad’s-eye view;—till we apply the simple idea that behind it all is elemental human nature, with politics as a mere frame to the picture.

¶ Look on Bismarck at this moment as one dealing with forces of human nature, the clash of many minds, ending by dominating over one and all, years hence, through his own inherent sagacity as a human being against other and weaker members of his kind—and we get at once a significant conception of the greatness of Bismarck’s mentality, also of his innate craft, enabling him to triumph over a thousand oblique forces, many of them firmly entrenched, and from a logical point fully as defensible as were his own peculiar conceptions.

¶ It was not, after all, what this man or that prince or some other ruler thought, but what Bismarck thought, that turned the balance.

A hundred instances could be offered to show that the men Bismarck was fighting had the better part of the argument, as mere argument; but between opinion and making that opinion stick is a wide gulf—however logical may be the argument.

¶ Bismarck was for the ensuing twenty years pictured as a noisy disturber, but he was shrewd, very shrewd. He could call a man “liar,” “thief,” “scoundrel,” “impostor,” in virile speechmaking, or could pass him up with a shrug, all the while keeping a cold eye on the main chance, and in the end getting his own way because he was strong enough to get his way—and that is all the logic there is in the situation.

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¶ At last, our stubborn man with the idea is believed! He now has his long-awaited day to prove the force of his contribution to human welfare.

¶ There is a species of religious glamour over the old man’s basic conception of respect for kings. The word king, for Bismarck, spells faith in discipline, obedience, loyalty to chosen leader—as against excesses sure to follow in turning over the Government to the rabble, according to the idea of the French Revolution. There is this condition to be made here: that Bismarck undoubtedly leaned as far in one direction as the old-line French Revolutionists did in another; Bismarck was an extremist no less than Danton, Marat, Robespierre. But there is also this distinction, in Bismarck’s favor: He was a great constructive statesman and the French agitators turned out to be but assassins and political fools.

¶ We spare no one in this analysis, neither Bismarck nor Robespierre. Therefore, we boldly, here and now, call your attention to a certain strange fallacy in all political ideals.

¶ The people expect some new form, or change of government, to make them happy and free. The machinery of legislation is the thing. It is proclaimed the great leveler.

¶ Thus men eagerly try all manner of political enterprises, believing that ultimately in some plan of government, social equality will result. In the light of the anomaly that in spite of our efforts, we persist in reverence for “the good old” days, as against the iniquities of the moment, it is clear that either we deceive ourselves, or are forever wandering about in a fool’s paradise.

¶ Bismarck at least does not justify cynical damnation. He was intensely human, and so was the King of Prussia. It is playing with race prejudice to call Prussia, after the French fashion, “That robber Prussia.”

¶ Nations act as do men individually, are swayed by forms of pride, passion and prejudice. If every nation that robbed or stole should return its loot of land, to whom would it ultimately go?

¶ The United States would not, at least, now be in possession of California. But for that matter, the Spaniards stole her from the Indians, and the Indians from the Aztecs, and the Aztecs from we know not whom. Always then, history justifies herself with the will to power—as manifested by the strongest!

¶ Take it by and large, this miracle he did indeed perform: He turned back the political clock of Time to Feudal days, and gloriously set up “Divine-right,” in the face of the intensely modern cry, “Let the people rule!”

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¶ Get clearly in mind, then, this giant’s political attitudes of gross contradiction, as between promise and performance—otherwise we will miss the essence of Bismarck’s genius as a statesman and his peculiar glory as a man large enough to stand beside Cæsar.

¶ Now here is the master-key, unlocking every door in the secret chambers of his heart: Bismarck, all his long life, kept himself in power by his consummate knowledge of human nature.

Shakespeare dealt with men, on paper, making them march this way or that at the behest of his immortal genius.

Bismarck dealt with men in the open arena of life, had no way of controlling their actions except by the inspiration of his own practical, constructive genius.

It is one thing to control a man’s actions, on paper; wholly another—and a greater triumph, is it not?—to master man’s ways in the market place, making those around you do not necessarily what they think they ought, but do what you wish.

Thus in some senses Bismarck appears in the figure of the superman; for there is absolutely no question that on many occasions he forced strong men to do his bidding, squarely against their individual preferences!

¶ This huge bulk, this deep-drinking, gluttonous Bismarck, this world-defying voice, raged and stormed through his eighty-three years of life—making little men’s souls shrink in fear—and ever the essence of his genius was for alignments with men, or against them, using this human clay ultimately for his own peculiar ends, as the potter molds the mud. He knew too that despite the old German family and tribal feuds, the Germans are brothers; standing apart it is true at this hour, fighting each other; yet the day is to come when Bismarck will triumph in his Germany, one and united. It mattered not, he would make friends with his deadly enemy, if such a step seemed advisable to carry out that cherished plan for a free and united Germany.

If he could not bend men to his will by logic, he tried flattery, and if that failed he threatened war, and the war came, too, but not till Bismarck was good and ready. He took his own time, made preparations that defied disaster, then moved forward and swept his enemies off the face of the earth.

¶ Thus, there was always evidences of peculiar precaution, even in Bismarck’s boldest strokes. He never forgot himself, never did things by halves. It might take a week or a year, or ten years, that mattered not to Bismarck; in the end, he would bring his wishes to pass. He never courted failure by hastening with some incomplete plan; but with the certainty of Fate, Bismarck abided his time. Obliged to surmount tremendous obstacles, often set back, in the end he carried everything by force before him.

¶ We are here reminded of those vast fields of snow seemingly in a state of dead rest, in the higher Alps, through many winters still secretly gaining bulk and encroaching inch by inch all unobserved upon the doomed valley below; then, at the dropping of a mere pebble, the ice begins to slide, nor does the dread avalanche pause for the sobs of the dying. So behind Bismarck’s amazing preparedness his ofttimes long deferred but inevitable destruction of his enemies seems to be something that he borrows from the avalanche. It is at once massive and inexorable, the power given to but few master-spirits in the history of the world.

¶ In political acumen, in administrative and executive capacity Bismarck measures up with Cæsar. The smallest facts about such as Bismarck are of more than ordinary interest. Too much time cannot be spent on this great character, in an endeavor to understand the secret springs of his mighty powers.

Aside from the mere biographic outlines of his career, the man presents, in himself, a study that deserves all the thought that can be put on it—in an effort to set forth the realism of his mighty life.

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