Bismarck,' the social reformer,' acquired a prestige devoid
of the dubious elements that discounted the fame of his
other political achievements.
of the dubious elements that discounted the fame of his
other political achievements.
Robertson - Bismarck
org/access_use#pd-us-google
? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
As an account of Bismarck's conversion the speech was
as remarkable for its omissions as for its assertions, ignor-
ing as it did the powerful pressure exerted by the agri-
cultural and manufacturing interests. The passage on
science must have highly diverted Virchow, and had
Pasteur read it, would have caused him to raise his eye-
brows in amused contempt. Still more naive was the
assertion that Free Trade was a cause of decadence, when
it was precisely a Free Trade Great Britain whose com-
petition was so distressing to German manufacturers.
Windthorst, too, must have enjoyed the passionate protest
that party considerations never entered into the Chan-
cellor's calculations, for the night before he had been
haggling with Bismarck over the price for the Clerical vote.
The Chancellor struck the note of irresistible appeal when
he invited the Reichstag to save agriculture and preserve
the German market for German industry at all costs, and
by a large addition to the revenue release the Federated
States from the burden of the increasing matricular con-
stitutions. He bid for the material interests, and they
responded manfully to the invitation. 1
The division was a personal triumph, and the aged
Field-Marshal Moltke could be seen stumbling over his
sword, caught in the rails, as he mounted the steps to the
Chancellor's seat to congratulate him. Yet the triumph
was not unalloyed. Bismarck had been compelled to
accept the Franckenstein amendment by which all revenue,
above one hundred and thirty million marks, derived from
the new tariff was to be appropriated to the relief of the
Federated States. His desire to obtain the sole use of the
new revenue for imperial purposes was thereby frustrated,
and this damaging amendment was the beginning of a
series of disappointments and rebuffs.
For eighteen months the economic battle between Free
Trade and Protection had been squarely fought out in
Germany in the press, on public platforms, and in academic
controversy. The vote of July 1879 decided the issue,
1 'The political constitution of the Empire, the highest personal influences,
the most powerful industrial and commercial forces, some of the principal
press energies, all are on the side of the (Protectionist) system. '--Report already
cited, p. 75.
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BISMARCK
and the Centre gave the victory to Bismarck. The
National Liberals broke over the controversy; sixteen
voted with, but the majority against, the government.
Free Trade and a Free Parliament in a united and cen-
tralised Empire had been their programme since their
formation in 1867, and in the attack on Free Trade the
majority recognised a general assault on the whole Liberal
creed. The suspicion was confirmed by the revision of
the May Laws next year, and the party broke up. The
Secession, which included the ablest and most vigorous
members--Lasker, Forckenbeck, Bamberger, and Bunsen
--endeavoured to establish, like the Peelites in England,
an independent existence between the Conservatives, with
whom the right of the party now acted, and the Pro-
gressives under Richter. But the general election of 1881
was a further blow. True, it went badly for Bismarck
and the government, for the Conservatives lost a great
many seats, but it made clear that there was no room for
a divided National Liberalism, and it gave the gains to the
Centre, the Socialists, and the Radicals. Bennigsen, worn
out and disillusioned, retired from public life in 1883, and
the Secession was driven to unite with the Progressives, and
found under Richter's leadership a new party, the Deutsch
Freisinnige--the German Free Thinkers. The remnant
of the old party continued to exist under the old name,
and to support the government, because it was national
rather than Liberal. But between 1881 and 1883 the old
National Liberalism really ceased to exist. It became
under a misleading label a party moderately Conservative
at home, and fiercely Nationalist in foreign politics.
The old National Liberalism had been the most powerful
intellectual, educative, and political force in forming a
united Germany; but when in 1867 it subordinated free
institutions to unity, when in 1870 it accepted without a
struggle the system of 1867 as the basis of the Empire,
when it persistently helped the government by the Sep-
tennates to ruin the Budget control of Parliament, and
when in 1878 it consented to pass the law apainst the
Social Democrats, it destroyed itself.
Bismarck treated the party as he treated Napoleon 111. ;
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
and he used the support it gave him to be the engine of its
downfall. The middle class from which it drew its
strength turned either to Protection, from which it could
gain wealth, or to the Progressives who fought a hopeless
battle with the entrenched governing class. Richter's
party had at least an intelligible creed and an avowed aim
--that of destroying the Bismarckian system and of substi-
tuting for it responsible parliamentary government at
home, an economic regime not founded on prosperity for
the landowner and manufacturer and State doles to the
proletariat, and a foreign policy that did not rest on a
continuous expenditure on armaments and the Prussian
sword as the ultima ratio in international relations. After
1878 National Liberalism, as such, had no constructive
policy to offer Germany. It resisted the conversion of
Bismarck, but it had no practical alternative to meet the
needs of the Empire it had largely created. It criticised
with acerbity, and voted with docility in the government
lobby, and its dissolution was a confession of bankruptcy.
Bismarck and the Radicals acted as joint-receivers, liqui-
dated the account, and distributed the business of a once-
flourishing and powerful House into various and hostile
hands. It was, indeed, the end of an old song.
The year 1880 was mainly occupied in opening the road
to Canossa, but from 1881 to 1889 Bismarck laid down the
main framework of the economic legislation that earned
him the title of the Great State Socialist of the nineteenth
century--the measure which provided for Employers'
Liability in accidents, for insurance against sickness, and
for the provision of Old Age Pensions. The feverish
energy--alles ging in galopp, as he said--with which these
measures were pressed is very remarkable, and still more
remarkable is the Chancellor's personal share in their con-
struction and in the task of carrying them in the teeth of
bitter opposition in the Reichstag. In the autumn of 1880
he took over the Ministry of Commerce, adding it to the
duties of Minister-President and Chancellor; he was then
in his sixty-fifth year, and during all this period he carried
alone the burden of foreign policy, in itself a tremendous
task, and was also engaged in the complicated negotiations
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? 38o
BISMARCK
with the Vatican and the Centre which ended the Kultur-
kampf. The expression that Bismarck was the govern-
ment and the government was Bismarck conveys a very
faint conception of the responsibility and labours that he
shouldered. The Prime Minister of a modern Parlia-
mentary State, such as Great Britain, carries no doubt an
onerous burden, but he shares his responsibility with
colleagues, while the party system relieves him of the duty
of creating a majority that will loyally vote as required;
because if the country refuses him the majority the burden
of office is transferred across the table to a rival party
leader. But Bismarck had to steer through the rocks,
shallows, and eddies of the parliamentary seas, finding
'allies where he could get them,' and uncertain whether in a
critical turn if the ministerial ship ' hung in stays' the crew
might not take to the boats. He had, moreover, as Chair-
man of the Federal Council to keep that essential organ
united and compliant, and the Federal Council was not a
Cabinet cemented by the ethos of collective responsibility
and composed of members in broad agreement on the
current questions of public policy. Mr. Gladstone or Lord
Salisbury would not have relished working the Parlia-
mentary System through a Cabinet of fifty-six members,
only seventeen of which could be implicitly trusted to vote
straight. It is not surprising therefore that Bismarck's
performance from 1879 to 1888, in the autumn of a life,
which had never spared itself from youth to old age, made
an indelible impression on Germany. Compared with the
'Iron Chancellor ' the other public figures seemed indeed
bloodless and fleeting shades. Every quality in the
Chancellor's person was titanic--the physical frame, the
head carved and moulded by a Berserker's hammer and
chisel, the will, the temper, the appetites, the ambitions.
The Empire that was Power was incarnated in that
hypnotic personality.
In 1881, 1884, and 1886, the Trade Law (Gewerbe-
ordnung) was substantially amended and extended; the
structure and scope of Trade Guilds were reorganised with
a view to strengthening artisans against the capitalist and
the factory (and incidentally to minimise the power of
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 381
Trade Unions), and ' in diametrical opposition to the prin-
ciple of laissez-faire, the abandonment of the weak to their
own resources and to private help. ' The measure pro-
viding for compulsory insurance against sickness was
destroyed by criticism in 1881, was reintroduced in 1882,
and carried against the Radicals and Socialists in 1883;
it was subsequently extended in 1885 and in 1886. A
bill for insurance against accidents was introduced in
1882 and became law in 1884 (July 6); it, too, was
amended and extended in 1885, 1886, and 1887. The
system was completed by the Old Age Insurance Law
of June 1889.
Concurrently with these measures of vast scope Bis-
marck was engaged in an effort to recast the whole
system of taxation, and to create an imperial revenue
that would provide the funds for 'the socialism of the
State. ' But he met in this sphere with more defeats
than successes.
The Stamp Tax of 1881 imposed a duty on Stock Ex-
change transactions, and the Usury Law of 1880 intro-
duced legal rates of interest. But the proposal to tax all
exemptions from military service was rejected in 1881,
Moltke ostentatiously leaving the Reichstag before the
division. The attempt to establish in 1882 a tobacco
monopoly which was to provide the funds for Old Age
Pensions broke down completely; and though an income
tax was introduced for Prussia, the idea of imposing a
separate Imperial Income Tax was dropped. The sug-
- gested monopoly in brandy was introduced in 1886 and
decisively defeated, and the failure destroyed the idea of
establishing a monopoly in sugar. The principles and
aims of this programme were fully set out in the Royal
Speech of November 17, 1881:--
'We express our conviction that the cure of social ills must be
sought, not exclusively in the repression of Social-Democratic ex-
cesses, but simultaneously in the positive advancement of the wel-
fare of the working classes. . . . The finding of the proper ways
and means is a difficult task, yet it is one of the highest of every
Commonwealth which is based on the ethical foundations of a
Christian national life. '
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BISMARCK
Bismarck's own views can be summarised by a few
quotations from his speeches :--
'In my opinion we are behind all great European States in regard
'to the development of our system of Taxation, especially with re-
spect to its reaction upon our economic conditions, and we have
much ground to recover in this domain' (February 22, 1878).
'In regard to exemption from taxation, I hold in general the
principle that the man who has nothing but his two hands, that is
untrained hands that have learned no industry, should be quite
exempted from both state taxes and imperial contributions, and
that the taxation should begin when a further capital exists'
(February 4, 1881).
'You know that I am an opponent of direct and a friend of in-
direct taxes . . . my ideal is not an Empire which must collect its
matricular contributions at the door of the individual states, but
an Empire which, having in its hands the principal source of good
finance--indirect taxes--would be in a position to pay contributions
to all the individual states' (February 26, 1878).
'I regard it as one of the greatest superiorities of our life in
Germany that a large part of our well-to-do classes live all the year
round in the country, carrying on agriculture themselves . . . if
you succeeded in destroying this race you would see the result in
the palsying of our entire economic and political life' (February 14,
i885)-.
'Give the working man the right to work as long as he is healthy,
assure him care when he is sick, assure him maintenance when he
is old. If you do that and do not fear the sacrifice, or cry out at
State Socialism--if the State will show a little more Christian
solicitude for the working man, then I believe that the gentlemen
of the Social-Democratic programme will sound their bird calls in
vain . . . yes, I acknowledge unconditionally a right to work, and
I will stand up for it as long as I am in this place' (May 9,1884).
'I should like to see the State which for the most part consists of
Christians--although you reject the name Christian State--pene-
trated to some extent by the principles of the religion it professes
. . . I, the Minister of the State, am a Christian, and as such I am
determined to act as I believe I am justified before God' (April 2,
1881 and Januarys 1882).
'It is a tradition for the dynasty which I serve that it takes the
side of the weak in the economic struggle. Frederick the Great
said Je serai le roi its gueux, and in his own way he carried out this
precept with strict justice . . . my present master is animated
by the lofty ambition to secure to the weakest class of our fellow-
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 383
citizens . . . confidence with which they can contemplate the
future of the State to which they belong' (January 9, 1882).
'If you believe that you can frighten any one or call up spectres
with the word " Socialism," you take a standpoint which I abandoned
long ago, and the abandonment of which is absolutely necessary for
our Imperial legislation' (March 1882).
'The popularity of a thing makes me rather suspicious about it
than otherwise, and I am induced to ask myself, if it is also sensible'
(June 12, 1882).
AU these measures were not carried without bitter
controversy, and the most strenuous pressure from the
government. They were attacked from three different
standpoints--individualistic Liberalism which feared the
extension of State functions, and on principle opposed
Protection as an economic system and for its ulterior
political results; the political school that feared, and
rightly, the immense accession of power to the centralised
imperial executive, vested in irresponsible hands, and the
Socialists who called the whole code 'bastard Socialism. '
The latter were savagely attacked because of their oppo-
sition. But their answer was effective. Every effort that
they made was futile to amend the legislation so as to
deprive it of its character of being a material sop to the
industrial working classes, and an instrument for diminish-
ing the political power of labour by making it dependent
on a State over which they could exercise no control.
To Bebel and his party Bismarck's ' socialistic ' policy was
the minimum of blackmail that the ruling classes would
pay in order to strengthen their own political power.
Again and again they pressed (with some help from the
Clerical Centre) for essential and complementary reforms
--the regulation of wages and of the hours and conditions
of labour, the amelioration of the status of the children,
the lads, the girls, and the women in the factories and work-
shops of the New Germany, and for an extension of the
powers of Trades Unions which would enable the worker
to confront capital on equal terms. Without legislative
regulation of these matters the State Socialism of the
Chancellor was, they contended, simply a tax on labour
aggravated by the effect of the Protectionist tariff. But
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? 3<<4
BISMARCK
they pleaded in vain. The principles of the Christian State
which Bismarck set in the forefront of his programme did
not apparently require that women and children should
not be sweated, or that wages should be raised above the
barest minimum of subsistence,1 or that employers and the
State should see that their employees should live under con-
ditions which would ensure decency, health, and morality;
it did not even require that there should be one day of
rest for the workers toiling in the factory. The worker
was assumed to be a Christian and to belong to a Christian
State, but he was not to be assured of the leisure to
worship. The factory was to be his Heaven and his Hell.
The most damning criticism of the blots and defects--
the most effective exposition of the purely political char-
acter--of Bismarck's policy was set out in the resolutions of
the International Labour Conference of 1890, the meeting
of which Bismarck did his best to prevent.
The plain truth is that Bismarck's programme was in-
spired by the same fear and distrust that underlay his theory
of international relations; and much of his legislation was
(apart from its money-producing effectiveness) a reinsurance
scheme against the results of the manhood suffrage which
made the electoral law of the Empire. In 1867, when he
said that democracy would be more monarchical than
middle-class Liberalism, he did not foresee the industrial
revolution. He had in his mind an agricultural Germany,
and above all an agricultural Prussia, where the peasant
had been trained in a position of dependence on the land-
owner, with whose interests as a tiller of the soil his own in
many respects coincided. But he never understood the
industrial proletariat, the numbers of which increased by
leaps and bounds after 1871; he disliked towns and town-
dwellers; to the end he regarded industrialism as a
gigantic excrescence to be exploited and emasculated of
its strength, rather than assimilated, and his economics at
bottom were saturated with the postulates of the eigh-
teenth-century physiocrats j while he forgot that the new
1 <<One of the principal secrets of the expansion of the German export trade
is the prevalence of wages, which, in some branches, are hardly two-thirds or half
the British rates. '--Report already cited, p. 75.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 385
and toiling Germany had no traditions, and no social mould
ready-made and tempered by generations of development,
into which it would steadily flow and be reshaped. On
the contrary, it had its traditions and outlook on life to
make in all the roar, dust, and fog of a vast economic
revolution. Taking experience and facts alone as his
guide Bismarck probed his way as best he could in the
teeth of opponents who, Kke himself, thought more of ends
than of means. There was no conservative Shaftesbury
to strop a dulled moral conscience; the bureaucracy at
his disposal smothered him with figures and facts compiled
in their offices; he was in the hands of the political
majority on which he relied, which resented the demands
of labour as subversive of their own power, and his own
system cut him off from utilising the help he might have
got from those who really knew. A close study of his
speeches reveals from time to time the note of despair--
the complexity and ramifications of the problem were so
great and so baffling--and his contempt for economic
science led him into avoidable blunders and many political
rebuffs. The repercussion and incidence of taxation, for
example--subjects engaging some of the best economic
minds in Europe--he more than once angrily brushed
aside as the pastime of professors. The realist had
neither time nor patience for such abstractions. If a tax
would bring in money here and now, it had fulfilled its
purpose, and the consequences could be dealt with later.
Volumes--a whole library indeed--have grown up round
the economic problems with which Bismarck wrestled,
and it is not possible to discuss issues which require
a separate monograph for adequate treatment. It must
suffice briefly to observe three or four outstanding features.
In two of his main objects Bismarck unquestionably
succeeded--the provision of money, and the preservation
of his political system. Whether the great expansion of
German industry was largely due to the adoption of Pro-
tection need not be argued here, for it opens issues too
large and controversial to be summarily decided;1 but,
1 See the report, already cited, where much material is statistically examined
and summed up.
B. IB
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? 386
BISMARCK
unquestionably, the remarkable industrial expansion pro-
vided in the Chancellor's political lifetime an expanding
revenue from indirect taxation, which met the exigent
needs of Bismarck's policy. Secondly, the ten years of
social legislation deeply impressed Europe, and in this, as
in other developments of German policy, the great ex-
periment was studied, praised, and copied. Germany
flattered itself that it was the pioneer as well as the model
of constructive statecraft, and Bismarck's legislation pro-
foundly stimulated economic thought and political
practice far outside the limits of the German Empire.
Bismarck,' the social reformer,' acquired a prestige devoid
of the dubious elements that discounted the fame of his
other political achievements. A later generation either
in or outside Germany, more accurately acquainted with
the motives, aims, and effects of the 'new era,' has not
been able to accept without serious qualifications the
eulogies so noticeable in the early nineties.
But in two notable respects the failure even in Bismarck's
lifetime was as conspicuous as the success. The spectre of
Social Democracy was not laid. Bebel, who had a good
right to know, told the Reichstag and the Chancellor that
the effort to put Social Democracy into a siding would
fail, and that the social legislation would be one of the
main causes of the failure. 'The bird call' became more,
not less, potent in its appeal just because the Christian
State did so little, when it could do so much; and
he warned the Chancellor that if you could not kill the
Socialist party by the law of 1878 you would not kill it
by compelling the artisan, with some help from the
State, to insure against accidents, sickness, and old age.
A compulsory and dilatory distribution of doles could
not extirpate a movement which had its roots deep in a
determination to secure political and social ends--political
and social power--through the economic status of the
worker: and the more the State compelled the workers
to organise, the more certainly they would use the organi-
sation for their own purposes. Bismarck recognised the
failure. But, unlike the Kulturkampf, he could not break
off the action when victory was no longer within his grasp.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 387
He had committed the Empire to a course from which it
was impossible to recede.
Nor did his fiscal experiments succeed in solving the
problem of imperial finance. Within ten years of 1890
the problem of the matricular contributions and the de-
ficits in the Imperial Budget threatened to be no less
serious than in 1878-9. Bismarck could fairly say that
had the Empire become the monopolist that he desired
it to be in tobacco, brandy, sugar, and other articles of
general consumption; had it nationalised all the railways
and absorbed all the profits, even the great increase in
imperial expenditure might have been met. But he never
explained how in that case the Federated States were to
balance their several budgets, or how a large increase in
direct taxation, which he regarded as politically inexpedient
and economically indefensible, was to be avoided. Arma-
ments and State Socialism were the main causes of the
steady increase in expenditure. Bismarck's system placed
armaments outside the arena of discussion. The policy
and principles were imposed on the nation--whose duty
it then was obediently to pay the bill--and if the nation
resisted, a general election with the main issue of 'The
Empire and Army in danger and War in sight' invariably
proved decisive.
These ten years from 1879 to 1889 made a decade of
embittered home politics. The reactionary character of
the Chancellor's system was revealed in many ways.
Bismarck seriously suggested, for example, that biennial
budgets and biennial meetings of the . Reichstag would be
a desirable reform; the prosecutions for Bismarck Be-
leidigung steadily increased, and when men like Bunsen and
Mommsen were prosecuted (and happily acquitted) for
indicting the government measures as 'immoral,' every
one who cared for freedom of opinion and freedom of
criticism had just cause for deep misgiving. Bismarck
increasingly regarded opposition as a personal affair; to
complaints of bribery and intimidation by officials at
elections he invariably retorted by emphasising the char-
acter of the Prussian monarchy and the disloyalty of the
Progressives to the Throne. 'I do not believe,' he said,
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? 388
BISMARCK
'in electro-plated royalism. ' In 1886 he concluded one
of his speeches with unmistakable threats: 'We must aim
at becoming stronger; we must show that we stand not
on feet of clay, but of iron. We must find a means of
becoming independent of the obstruction of the majority
of the Reichstag. I do not advocate such a step, but if
the Fatherland should be endangered I should not hesitate
to propose to the Emperor the necessary measures. The
Minister who will not risk his head to save the Fatherland,
even against the will of the majority, is a coward. I will
not allow the achievements of our army to perish by
internal discord, which I will find the means of counter-
acting. ' (January 28, 1886, in the Prussian Landtag. )
Prussian Poland and Alsace-Lorraine were essentially
problems of home policy which illustrate the close con-
nection between the internal system and the principles of
Bismarck's foreign policy. The failure of Prussia to
Germanise her Polish provinces inspired the Prussian
government to drastic action. Puttkamer, the Minister
of the Interior, in 1885 pointed out that, whereas the
German element had increased from one to five per cent. ,
the Polish element had increased from eight to eleven per
cent. An Edict of May 5, 1885, expelled all Poles not
Prussian subjects, and no less than thirty-four thousand
were so expelled, bag and baggage, on the ground of State
necessity. Next year Bismarck brought in an Expro-
priation Bill. He told the Landtag that the incorporation
of the Polish provinces in 1815 was a strategical necessity,
but that the pledges then given were a blunder, which it
was against Prussia's interest in 1886 to fulfil. The bill
authorised the government to spend five million pounds
in acquiring Polish estates to be leased to German farmers,
bound to marry German wives; it also transferred the
supervision of all popular education in the district to the
central executive. The necessity for this colonisation
was due, in addition, to the gradual submerging of the
Germanic element in the Near East, in Bohemia, Hungary,
and elsewhere, and also--a very remarkable statement--
to the 'extraordinary tendency of the Germans to sym-
pathise with everything that was not German. ' Bismarck's
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 389
speech, breathing fire and fury, and the rapid acceptance
of the bill, were the most conclusive refutation of this
alleged German sympathy. 'You,' he said to the Poles,
'will never realise your ambitions except as the result of
a war, disastrous to Germany, when Prussia has been
smashed to pieces. '
To Bismarck the international aspect of the Polish
question was as dangerous as the existence within the
Prussian kingdom of an 'alien' element that, despite all
persecution, resolutely refused to abandon either its lan-
guage, its religion, or its culture. With 1863 in his mind
he told the Reichstag that it could not interfere in a
matter, reserved solely for the prerogative of the Prussian
King; and, followed by all the Prussian members of the
Bundesrat, he pointedly walked out of the House when
an attempt was made to interpellate him. The reference
to Prussian sovereignty was intended for Vienna and
Petersburg quite as much as for the South German Liberals
or the Catholic centre. Poland and the Poles were a con-
clusive reason, even if there had not been others equally
exigent, why Berlin should have a control of the vassal
State of Austria, and maintain a close understanding with
Russia. But Bismarck's policy of voluntary, and then of
forcible, expropriation was a failure. It rested on three
false assumptions: first, that racialism and nationalism
can be extinguished by administrative action, aided by a
culture the superiority of which is not evident except to
those who administer it; secondly, that the Poles would
not combine to defeat the policy; and thirdly, that the
government could control completely the economic
situation. Neither Bismarck nor any one else could
obliterate the previous history of Poland. The Germani-
sation of Prussian Poland pursued by the government
virtually required that all Poles should become Protes-
tants and German-speaking or remain celibate, and that
those who refused the Germanisation or the celibacy must
be evicted. So long as Polish men and women produced
more children than the Germans and brought them up to
be Poles in religion, speech, and ideas, there was no prac-
tical alternative between extermination and conciliation.
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BISMARCK
The futility of the law of 1886 was proved in 1906 when
the government confessed that, while ninety thousand
German colonists had been brought into the Polish pro-
vinces, the Poles had increased by two hundred thousand,
and that the increase of economic prosperity produced
by the State grants had only strengthened the economic
capacity of the Poles to buy out the German faster than
the State planted him in. Coercion, also, had made the
whole Polish population far more 'disaffected' than in
1885.
Bismarck's nationalism simply came to this: if the
German Empire required for political, strategic, or
economic reasons that certain areas should belong to
Germany, no claim based on previous history, tradition,
race, or religion could countervail the right. Necessity
of State prescribed the end, that power enabled the State
to realise. Condemnation of the iniquity and futility of
Prussian policy in West Prussia and the province of Posen
ought not, however, to blind the student of statecraft to
the problem with which Bismarck was confronted, and the
serious menace that the Slav race imposed on the German
nation. For there was a measurable risk that in a large
area the German race and language would become the
distinguishing attributes of a dwindling minority. 1 The
problem of government by a dominant minority raises
one of the most formidable difficulties that modern states-
manship is called on to solve. It is immensely intensified
when the minority deals with a majority whose civilisation
is not qualitatively but only quantitatively inferior in
consequence of previous historic injustice, an undeveloped
economic environment, and the complications arising from
the competition of other and more congenial civilisations
across the frontiers. The true indictment of Bismarck's
attempted solution of the Prussian problem of Poland is
concentrated in the assumption that German civilisation
1 In October 1914. it was authoritatively asserted on behalf of Germany that
but for German 'militarism' German culture would have perished in Europe.
Whether this means that all national civilisations depend on force for their
existence, or that German 'culture' can only compete with other 'cultures'
when it is enforced by the sword, does not call for decision here. Nor is it
necessary to decide the validity of either or both meanings.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 391
was superior, while it practically admitted that, unless it
were imposed and maintained by force of the most drastic
character, it could not hold its own. Every decade after
1886 clinched the conclusion that the Pole was successfully
competing with the Teuton in all the qualities that makes
a civilisation worth preserving. So far then from solving
the problem, Bismarck's policy made it more formidable;
worse still, it carried within itself a Nemesis the beginning,
but not the end, of which he witnessed. It made all
Poles, not merely Prussian Poles, the enemies of the
German Empire. In his determination to localise the
purely Prussian problem Bismarck internationalised the
whole Polish question, since the principles on which he
worked were no less-disastrous to other races in a similar
position both within and without the Empire. It was
not only the Poles in whom the conviction deepened that
the destruction of the Bismarckian Empire and its recon-
struction on different principles might be essential in the
interests of a true nationalism, of the European system,
and of the whole world: and that without such a recon-
struction progress in civilisation and an international
system were impossible. When Bismarck deliberately
pinned the maintenance of Germanism to the brute
capacity of a German State to enforce it, he imperilled as
well as degraded the claims of that civilisation whose
champion he was. Nor did he ever seriously- attempt
conciliation of the Polish subjects of Prussia, based on an
equality of rights and opportunity. There was a golden
chance for such a policy in 1871. The Poles had fought
bravely for Germany in 1866 and in 1870. Their reward
was the Kulturkampf, a coercive bureaucracy, and the law
of 1886, leading inevitably to the doubled coercion of 1906,
a fresh crop of legislation, the flogging of school-children, and
similar proofs of the proud claim that German civilisation
aimed at 'freedom for all in thought and activity. ' A
policy of conciliation could not have been more unsuc-
cessful than the policy of coercion; conciliation, indeed,
might have led to detaching to Prussia, ' the Liberator,'
the whole of Poland. The Russian danger, which was a
perpetual nightmare to Bismarck, Moltke, the National
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? 392
BISMARCK
Liberals, and the Radicals, might then have been thrust
back behind the Dwina and the Dnieper, instead of which
it was thrust forward from the Vistula to the Warta and
the Netze. Bismarck's system, which identified the in-
terest of Germany with the interest of the Russian auto-
cracy, made all conciliation impossible, and for this the
intensity of his own Prussian Nationalism, with its tradi-
tions and interpretation of life, was more responsible than
his conception of the State as Power.
The limitations and dangers of that Nationalism were
no less patent in Alsace-Lorraine than in Prussian Poland.
It is true that in 1874 the military government of the
Reichsland was theoretically ended and Alsace and Lorraine
were represented by fifteen members in the Reichstag.
These fifteen were simply an addition to the opposition;
and they might have stayed at home for all the practical
influence that they exerted, while their united hostility
to the government, a continuous protest against the
annexation and the policy of internal coercion, provided
a fresh argument for drastic repression. Edwin von
Manteuffel's appointment as Statthalter in 1879 was a
concession to the demand for autonomy, but Bismarck's
jealousy of Manteuffel marred the use that might have been
made of the Statthalter's great personal gifts. Hohenlohe,
who was transferred from Paris in 1884 to succeed Man-
teuffel, had a doubly difficult task; as a civilian he incurred
the enmity of the governing chiefs of the soldier-caste, as
governor he was continuously overruled by Bismarck.
His Diary, carefully edited as it clearly is, shows that the
Chancellor accepted the militarist view that the object
of the annexations was not to make a contented Alsace-
Lorraine, but to hold the Reichsland as a strategic glacis
of the Empire. There can be little question that Bismarck
had hoped in ten years or so to extort from France a re-
nunciation of the idea of recovering the provinces lost in
1871, and the temptation to make such a renunciation had
its part in the bewildering history of French internal
politics and foreign policy from the fall of Thiers to the
presidency of Carnot; but he failed to secure it, and
Alsace-Lorraine more than ever was employed to coerce
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 393
Germany by a great fear and provoke France by a per-
petual humiliation. The German effort to assimilate the
Reichsland broke on two unsurmountable obstacles--the
refusal of France permanently to accept the position de-
fined in the Treaty of Frankfurt; the claim of German
Nationalism to hold by force what it could not hold by any
other means. By 1890 Bismarck's system was steadily
making the problem of Alsace-Lorraine of international
importance. The Europe that had debarred itself in 1871
from intervening in the terms of peace, had begun to realise
that the principles involved cut down to the root of the
whole European system and raised the most fundamental
problems of international relations.
At home after 1884 there was one compensation--the
parliamentary situation became much easier for the
Chancellor. The general election of that year resulted
in a severe defeat for the new and reunited Radicals
(Deutsche Freisinnige), and for the first time Bismarck had
at his disposal a governmental bloc composed of Conser-
vatives, the Centre, and the Conservative rump of National
Liberals, which gave him a comfortable majority over all
the other groups combined. This was even more marked
in the Prussian Landtag, where the narrow franchise,' the
worst in the world,' Bismarck once said, left Progressives,
Radicals, Poles, or Guelphs in an impotent minority.
There was indeed but one shadow. The union of Crown
and Minister-President, of Emperor and Chancellor, was
the corner-stone of the Bismarckian system. In 1884 the
Emperor was eighty-seven years old. Would his suc-
cessor, whose accession could not be long delayed, accept
the position developed between 1862 and 1884? In 1884
Germany speculated on the consequences of a trial of
strength between the Crown and the Man. The trial
indeed came very shortly, but neither in the form, nor
with the results, anticipated by Germany and Bismarck.
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? 394
BLSMARCK
? 5. Foreign Policy--The Trifle Alliance--The Colonial
Problem--France and Russia, 1879-1888.
'For thirty years,' writes Naumann in his Central Europe,
'politics for us meant Bismarck. ' He could have said, with
equal truth, that for twenty years at least politics for the
whole continent meant Bismarck. After 1878 Bismarck's
personal position was unique. The Chancellor achieved
the aim of the French king who desired that not a cannon-
shot should be fired in Europe without the consent and
knowledge of France and himself. The German hege-
mony of the European State system rested on the power
and prestige of Prussia, but it was a power and prestige
interpreted by, and reflected in, the personality of a single
man; and if the revolving years strengthened the political
ascendency consummated by the Treaty of Frankfurt, the
Congress of Berlin, and the Dual Alliance--the main terms
of which were known before the ink was dry on the signa-
tures--they also emphasised the egoism and vanity of the
ministerial autocrat. Bismarck demanded homage, and
he expected incense, from all the statesmen and all the
courts. Ambassadors at Berlin informed their govern-
ments that they would do well always to consult Bismarck
on every step, for if they acted without asking his advice,
even in matters in which Germany could not be regarded
as directly interested, they would soon discover that the
jealous, suspicious, and vain Chancellor intended to make
them pay for the neglect and the implied personal insult.
'His excessive sensitiveness,' wrote Lord Ampthill, 'is
incomprehensible in so great a statesman. ' He pointed
out what a mistake ' Goschen had made ' in daring to go
on a mission to the Near East without travelling via Berlin
and seeking wisdom at Friedrichsruhe. Goschen rectified
the error by returning via Berlin. 'Prince Bismarck,'
Lord Ampthill wrote in 1882, 'has never got over or for-
given Goschen's departure from the advice he was asked
to give in the Greek question. ' Gambetta therefore, in
1879, was right when he contemplated a secret visit to
'the monster. ' The meeting, despite M. Lair's beliefs,
did not take place, but an hour between Gambetta and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
Bismarck might have made a world of difference to the
French statesman. The greatness of great men is indeed
a mysterious paradox. Bismarck's vanity had its paternal
weaknesses. If ' a pleasant truth, a well-deserved compli-
ment, publicly uttered by an English statesman had a
magic effect,' still more magic was the effect of flattery or
kindness to a son. In Herbert Bismarck the Chancellor
was training up his successor, and the generous hospitality
offered to the son when he came on special missions to
London deeply touched the father's heart. It probably
smoothed away the friction far more effectively than a
dozen dispatches. Personal kindness to the limited few
for whom he cared--and guns--these were the two argu-
ments that Bismarck understood. And those who had
not got the guns, or were afraid to use them, were well
advised to go confidentially to the Chancellor, place their
case in his hands, and ask for his disinterested offices and
advice.
An element of grandeur sublimated this vanity. More
and more the Chancellor absented himself from Berlin
and conducted the foreign affairs of Europe from Fried-
richsruhe or Varzin, and the men who combined business
and homage in a visit to Bismarck enjoyed a patrician
hospitality from the hands of a great patrician, who tried
to forget on his own hearth or in the glades of the avenues
he had planted, the methods so congenial in the Wilhelm-
strasse. If, in addition, the visitor could prove that in his
arteries ran the red blood of a fierce virility--that rich
meat and drink, physical exuberance, and joy in the carnal
framework of life and the passions of nature, appealed as
much as the conclusion of a hard bargain--Bismarck was
ready to make concessions that were not for the anaemic
and the bookworms of the Chancery. The statesmen,
such as Favre and Pouyer-Quertier, who could drain not
their glass but their flagon, earned a personal respect as
strong as the contempt meted out to his jackals such as
Busch, or the spectacled pedant whose amusements were
centred in a Kaffee-Klatsch and the gossip of women.
Statecraft was an excrescence on the natural life of the
healthy man, but as it was inevitable, let men bring into
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
As an account of Bismarck's conversion the speech was
as remarkable for its omissions as for its assertions, ignor-
ing as it did the powerful pressure exerted by the agri-
cultural and manufacturing interests. The passage on
science must have highly diverted Virchow, and had
Pasteur read it, would have caused him to raise his eye-
brows in amused contempt. Still more naive was the
assertion that Free Trade was a cause of decadence, when
it was precisely a Free Trade Great Britain whose com-
petition was so distressing to German manufacturers.
Windthorst, too, must have enjoyed the passionate protest
that party considerations never entered into the Chan-
cellor's calculations, for the night before he had been
haggling with Bismarck over the price for the Clerical vote.
The Chancellor struck the note of irresistible appeal when
he invited the Reichstag to save agriculture and preserve
the German market for German industry at all costs, and
by a large addition to the revenue release the Federated
States from the burden of the increasing matricular con-
stitutions. He bid for the material interests, and they
responded manfully to the invitation. 1
The division was a personal triumph, and the aged
Field-Marshal Moltke could be seen stumbling over his
sword, caught in the rails, as he mounted the steps to the
Chancellor's seat to congratulate him. Yet the triumph
was not unalloyed. Bismarck had been compelled to
accept the Franckenstein amendment by which all revenue,
above one hundred and thirty million marks, derived from
the new tariff was to be appropriated to the relief of the
Federated States. His desire to obtain the sole use of the
new revenue for imperial purposes was thereby frustrated,
and this damaging amendment was the beginning of a
series of disappointments and rebuffs.
For eighteen months the economic battle between Free
Trade and Protection had been squarely fought out in
Germany in the press, on public platforms, and in academic
controversy. The vote of July 1879 decided the issue,
1 'The political constitution of the Empire, the highest personal influences,
the most powerful industrial and commercial forces, some of the principal
press energies, all are on the side of the (Protectionist) system. '--Report already
cited, p. 75.
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? 378
BISMARCK
and the Centre gave the victory to Bismarck. The
National Liberals broke over the controversy; sixteen
voted with, but the majority against, the government.
Free Trade and a Free Parliament in a united and cen-
tralised Empire had been their programme since their
formation in 1867, and in the attack on Free Trade the
majority recognised a general assault on the whole Liberal
creed. The suspicion was confirmed by the revision of
the May Laws next year, and the party broke up. The
Secession, which included the ablest and most vigorous
members--Lasker, Forckenbeck, Bamberger, and Bunsen
--endeavoured to establish, like the Peelites in England,
an independent existence between the Conservatives, with
whom the right of the party now acted, and the Pro-
gressives under Richter. But the general election of 1881
was a further blow. True, it went badly for Bismarck
and the government, for the Conservatives lost a great
many seats, but it made clear that there was no room for
a divided National Liberalism, and it gave the gains to the
Centre, the Socialists, and the Radicals. Bennigsen, worn
out and disillusioned, retired from public life in 1883, and
the Secession was driven to unite with the Progressives, and
found under Richter's leadership a new party, the Deutsch
Freisinnige--the German Free Thinkers. The remnant
of the old party continued to exist under the old name,
and to support the government, because it was national
rather than Liberal. But between 1881 and 1883 the old
National Liberalism really ceased to exist. It became
under a misleading label a party moderately Conservative
at home, and fiercely Nationalist in foreign politics.
The old National Liberalism had been the most powerful
intellectual, educative, and political force in forming a
united Germany; but when in 1867 it subordinated free
institutions to unity, when in 1870 it accepted without a
struggle the system of 1867 as the basis of the Empire,
when it persistently helped the government by the Sep-
tennates to ruin the Budget control of Parliament, and
when in 1878 it consented to pass the law apainst the
Social Democrats, it destroyed itself.
Bismarck treated the party as he treated Napoleon 111. ;
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
and he used the support it gave him to be the engine of its
downfall. The middle class from which it drew its
strength turned either to Protection, from which it could
gain wealth, or to the Progressives who fought a hopeless
battle with the entrenched governing class. Richter's
party had at least an intelligible creed and an avowed aim
--that of destroying the Bismarckian system and of substi-
tuting for it responsible parliamentary government at
home, an economic regime not founded on prosperity for
the landowner and manufacturer and State doles to the
proletariat, and a foreign policy that did not rest on a
continuous expenditure on armaments and the Prussian
sword as the ultima ratio in international relations. After
1878 National Liberalism, as such, had no constructive
policy to offer Germany. It resisted the conversion of
Bismarck, but it had no practical alternative to meet the
needs of the Empire it had largely created. It criticised
with acerbity, and voted with docility in the government
lobby, and its dissolution was a confession of bankruptcy.
Bismarck and the Radicals acted as joint-receivers, liqui-
dated the account, and distributed the business of a once-
flourishing and powerful House into various and hostile
hands. It was, indeed, the end of an old song.
The year 1880 was mainly occupied in opening the road
to Canossa, but from 1881 to 1889 Bismarck laid down the
main framework of the economic legislation that earned
him the title of the Great State Socialist of the nineteenth
century--the measure which provided for Employers'
Liability in accidents, for insurance against sickness, and
for the provision of Old Age Pensions. The feverish
energy--alles ging in galopp, as he said--with which these
measures were pressed is very remarkable, and still more
remarkable is the Chancellor's personal share in their con-
struction and in the task of carrying them in the teeth of
bitter opposition in the Reichstag. In the autumn of 1880
he took over the Ministry of Commerce, adding it to the
duties of Minister-President and Chancellor; he was then
in his sixty-fifth year, and during all this period he carried
alone the burden of foreign policy, in itself a tremendous
task, and was also engaged in the complicated negotiations
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? 38o
BISMARCK
with the Vatican and the Centre which ended the Kultur-
kampf. The expression that Bismarck was the govern-
ment and the government was Bismarck conveys a very
faint conception of the responsibility and labours that he
shouldered. The Prime Minister of a modern Parlia-
mentary State, such as Great Britain, carries no doubt an
onerous burden, but he shares his responsibility with
colleagues, while the party system relieves him of the duty
of creating a majority that will loyally vote as required;
because if the country refuses him the majority the burden
of office is transferred across the table to a rival party
leader. But Bismarck had to steer through the rocks,
shallows, and eddies of the parliamentary seas, finding
'allies where he could get them,' and uncertain whether in a
critical turn if the ministerial ship ' hung in stays' the crew
might not take to the boats. He had, moreover, as Chair-
man of the Federal Council to keep that essential organ
united and compliant, and the Federal Council was not a
Cabinet cemented by the ethos of collective responsibility
and composed of members in broad agreement on the
current questions of public policy. Mr. Gladstone or Lord
Salisbury would not have relished working the Parlia-
mentary System through a Cabinet of fifty-six members,
only seventeen of which could be implicitly trusted to vote
straight. It is not surprising therefore that Bismarck's
performance from 1879 to 1888, in the autumn of a life,
which had never spared itself from youth to old age, made
an indelible impression on Germany. Compared with the
'Iron Chancellor ' the other public figures seemed indeed
bloodless and fleeting shades. Every quality in the
Chancellor's person was titanic--the physical frame, the
head carved and moulded by a Berserker's hammer and
chisel, the will, the temper, the appetites, the ambitions.
The Empire that was Power was incarnated in that
hypnotic personality.
In 1881, 1884, and 1886, the Trade Law (Gewerbe-
ordnung) was substantially amended and extended; the
structure and scope of Trade Guilds were reorganised with
a view to strengthening artisans against the capitalist and
the factory (and incidentally to minimise the power of
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 381
Trade Unions), and ' in diametrical opposition to the prin-
ciple of laissez-faire, the abandonment of the weak to their
own resources and to private help. ' The measure pro-
viding for compulsory insurance against sickness was
destroyed by criticism in 1881, was reintroduced in 1882,
and carried against the Radicals and Socialists in 1883;
it was subsequently extended in 1885 and in 1886. A
bill for insurance against accidents was introduced in
1882 and became law in 1884 (July 6); it, too, was
amended and extended in 1885, 1886, and 1887. The
system was completed by the Old Age Insurance Law
of June 1889.
Concurrently with these measures of vast scope Bis-
marck was engaged in an effort to recast the whole
system of taxation, and to create an imperial revenue
that would provide the funds for 'the socialism of the
State. ' But he met in this sphere with more defeats
than successes.
The Stamp Tax of 1881 imposed a duty on Stock Ex-
change transactions, and the Usury Law of 1880 intro-
duced legal rates of interest. But the proposal to tax all
exemptions from military service was rejected in 1881,
Moltke ostentatiously leaving the Reichstag before the
division. The attempt to establish in 1882 a tobacco
monopoly which was to provide the funds for Old Age
Pensions broke down completely; and though an income
tax was introduced for Prussia, the idea of imposing a
separate Imperial Income Tax was dropped. The sug-
- gested monopoly in brandy was introduced in 1886 and
decisively defeated, and the failure destroyed the idea of
establishing a monopoly in sugar. The principles and
aims of this programme were fully set out in the Royal
Speech of November 17, 1881:--
'We express our conviction that the cure of social ills must be
sought, not exclusively in the repression of Social-Democratic ex-
cesses, but simultaneously in the positive advancement of the wel-
fare of the working classes. . . . The finding of the proper ways
and means is a difficult task, yet it is one of the highest of every
Commonwealth which is based on the ethical foundations of a
Christian national life. '
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? 382
BISMARCK
Bismarck's own views can be summarised by a few
quotations from his speeches :--
'In my opinion we are behind all great European States in regard
'to the development of our system of Taxation, especially with re-
spect to its reaction upon our economic conditions, and we have
much ground to recover in this domain' (February 22, 1878).
'In regard to exemption from taxation, I hold in general the
principle that the man who has nothing but his two hands, that is
untrained hands that have learned no industry, should be quite
exempted from both state taxes and imperial contributions, and
that the taxation should begin when a further capital exists'
(February 4, 1881).
'You know that I am an opponent of direct and a friend of in-
direct taxes . . . my ideal is not an Empire which must collect its
matricular contributions at the door of the individual states, but
an Empire which, having in its hands the principal source of good
finance--indirect taxes--would be in a position to pay contributions
to all the individual states' (February 26, 1878).
'I regard it as one of the greatest superiorities of our life in
Germany that a large part of our well-to-do classes live all the year
round in the country, carrying on agriculture themselves . . . if
you succeeded in destroying this race you would see the result in
the palsying of our entire economic and political life' (February 14,
i885)-.
'Give the working man the right to work as long as he is healthy,
assure him care when he is sick, assure him maintenance when he
is old. If you do that and do not fear the sacrifice, or cry out at
State Socialism--if the State will show a little more Christian
solicitude for the working man, then I believe that the gentlemen
of the Social-Democratic programme will sound their bird calls in
vain . . . yes, I acknowledge unconditionally a right to work, and
I will stand up for it as long as I am in this place' (May 9,1884).
'I should like to see the State which for the most part consists of
Christians--although you reject the name Christian State--pene-
trated to some extent by the principles of the religion it professes
. . . I, the Minister of the State, am a Christian, and as such I am
determined to act as I believe I am justified before God' (April 2,
1881 and Januarys 1882).
'It is a tradition for the dynasty which I serve that it takes the
side of the weak in the economic struggle. Frederick the Great
said Je serai le roi its gueux, and in his own way he carried out this
precept with strict justice . . . my present master is animated
by the lofty ambition to secure to the weakest class of our fellow-
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 383
citizens . . . confidence with which they can contemplate the
future of the State to which they belong' (January 9, 1882).
'If you believe that you can frighten any one or call up spectres
with the word " Socialism," you take a standpoint which I abandoned
long ago, and the abandonment of which is absolutely necessary for
our Imperial legislation' (March 1882).
'The popularity of a thing makes me rather suspicious about it
than otherwise, and I am induced to ask myself, if it is also sensible'
(June 12, 1882).
AU these measures were not carried without bitter
controversy, and the most strenuous pressure from the
government. They were attacked from three different
standpoints--individualistic Liberalism which feared the
extension of State functions, and on principle opposed
Protection as an economic system and for its ulterior
political results; the political school that feared, and
rightly, the immense accession of power to the centralised
imperial executive, vested in irresponsible hands, and the
Socialists who called the whole code 'bastard Socialism. '
The latter were savagely attacked because of their oppo-
sition. But their answer was effective. Every effort that
they made was futile to amend the legislation so as to
deprive it of its character of being a material sop to the
industrial working classes, and an instrument for diminish-
ing the political power of labour by making it dependent
on a State over which they could exercise no control.
To Bebel and his party Bismarck's ' socialistic ' policy was
the minimum of blackmail that the ruling classes would
pay in order to strengthen their own political power.
Again and again they pressed (with some help from the
Clerical Centre) for essential and complementary reforms
--the regulation of wages and of the hours and conditions
of labour, the amelioration of the status of the children,
the lads, the girls, and the women in the factories and work-
shops of the New Germany, and for an extension of the
powers of Trades Unions which would enable the worker
to confront capital on equal terms. Without legislative
regulation of these matters the State Socialism of the
Chancellor was, they contended, simply a tax on labour
aggravated by the effect of the Protectionist tariff. But
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? 3<<4
BISMARCK
they pleaded in vain. The principles of the Christian State
which Bismarck set in the forefront of his programme did
not apparently require that women and children should
not be sweated, or that wages should be raised above the
barest minimum of subsistence,1 or that employers and the
State should see that their employees should live under con-
ditions which would ensure decency, health, and morality;
it did not even require that there should be one day of
rest for the workers toiling in the factory. The worker
was assumed to be a Christian and to belong to a Christian
State, but he was not to be assured of the leisure to
worship. The factory was to be his Heaven and his Hell.
The most damning criticism of the blots and defects--
the most effective exposition of the purely political char-
acter--of Bismarck's policy was set out in the resolutions of
the International Labour Conference of 1890, the meeting
of which Bismarck did his best to prevent.
The plain truth is that Bismarck's programme was in-
spired by the same fear and distrust that underlay his theory
of international relations; and much of his legislation was
(apart from its money-producing effectiveness) a reinsurance
scheme against the results of the manhood suffrage which
made the electoral law of the Empire. In 1867, when he
said that democracy would be more monarchical than
middle-class Liberalism, he did not foresee the industrial
revolution. He had in his mind an agricultural Germany,
and above all an agricultural Prussia, where the peasant
had been trained in a position of dependence on the land-
owner, with whose interests as a tiller of the soil his own in
many respects coincided. But he never understood the
industrial proletariat, the numbers of which increased by
leaps and bounds after 1871; he disliked towns and town-
dwellers; to the end he regarded industrialism as a
gigantic excrescence to be exploited and emasculated of
its strength, rather than assimilated, and his economics at
bottom were saturated with the postulates of the eigh-
teenth-century physiocrats j while he forgot that the new
1 <<One of the principal secrets of the expansion of the German export trade
is the prevalence of wages, which, in some branches, are hardly two-thirds or half
the British rates. '--Report already cited, p. 75.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 385
and toiling Germany had no traditions, and no social mould
ready-made and tempered by generations of development,
into which it would steadily flow and be reshaped. On
the contrary, it had its traditions and outlook on life to
make in all the roar, dust, and fog of a vast economic
revolution. Taking experience and facts alone as his
guide Bismarck probed his way as best he could in the
teeth of opponents who, Kke himself, thought more of ends
than of means. There was no conservative Shaftesbury
to strop a dulled moral conscience; the bureaucracy at
his disposal smothered him with figures and facts compiled
in their offices; he was in the hands of the political
majority on which he relied, which resented the demands
of labour as subversive of their own power, and his own
system cut him off from utilising the help he might have
got from those who really knew. A close study of his
speeches reveals from time to time the note of despair--
the complexity and ramifications of the problem were so
great and so baffling--and his contempt for economic
science led him into avoidable blunders and many political
rebuffs. The repercussion and incidence of taxation, for
example--subjects engaging some of the best economic
minds in Europe--he more than once angrily brushed
aside as the pastime of professors. The realist had
neither time nor patience for such abstractions. If a tax
would bring in money here and now, it had fulfilled its
purpose, and the consequences could be dealt with later.
Volumes--a whole library indeed--have grown up round
the economic problems with which Bismarck wrestled,
and it is not possible to discuss issues which require
a separate monograph for adequate treatment. It must
suffice briefly to observe three or four outstanding features.
In two of his main objects Bismarck unquestionably
succeeded--the provision of money, and the preservation
of his political system. Whether the great expansion of
German industry was largely due to the adoption of Pro-
tection need not be argued here, for it opens issues too
large and controversial to be summarily decided;1 but,
1 See the report, already cited, where much material is statistically examined
and summed up.
B. IB
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? 386
BISMARCK
unquestionably, the remarkable industrial expansion pro-
vided in the Chancellor's political lifetime an expanding
revenue from indirect taxation, which met the exigent
needs of Bismarck's policy. Secondly, the ten years of
social legislation deeply impressed Europe, and in this, as
in other developments of German policy, the great ex-
periment was studied, praised, and copied. Germany
flattered itself that it was the pioneer as well as the model
of constructive statecraft, and Bismarck's legislation pro-
foundly stimulated economic thought and political
practice far outside the limits of the German Empire.
Bismarck,' the social reformer,' acquired a prestige devoid
of the dubious elements that discounted the fame of his
other political achievements. A later generation either
in or outside Germany, more accurately acquainted with
the motives, aims, and effects of the 'new era,' has not
been able to accept without serious qualifications the
eulogies so noticeable in the early nineties.
But in two notable respects the failure even in Bismarck's
lifetime was as conspicuous as the success. The spectre of
Social Democracy was not laid. Bebel, who had a good
right to know, told the Reichstag and the Chancellor that
the effort to put Social Democracy into a siding would
fail, and that the social legislation would be one of the
main causes of the failure. 'The bird call' became more,
not less, potent in its appeal just because the Christian
State did so little, when it could do so much; and
he warned the Chancellor that if you could not kill the
Socialist party by the law of 1878 you would not kill it
by compelling the artisan, with some help from the
State, to insure against accidents, sickness, and old age.
A compulsory and dilatory distribution of doles could
not extirpate a movement which had its roots deep in a
determination to secure political and social ends--political
and social power--through the economic status of the
worker: and the more the State compelled the workers
to organise, the more certainly they would use the organi-
sation for their own purposes. Bismarck recognised the
failure. But, unlike the Kulturkampf, he could not break
off the action when victory was no longer within his grasp.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 387
He had committed the Empire to a course from which it
was impossible to recede.
Nor did his fiscal experiments succeed in solving the
problem of imperial finance. Within ten years of 1890
the problem of the matricular contributions and the de-
ficits in the Imperial Budget threatened to be no less
serious than in 1878-9. Bismarck could fairly say that
had the Empire become the monopolist that he desired
it to be in tobacco, brandy, sugar, and other articles of
general consumption; had it nationalised all the railways
and absorbed all the profits, even the great increase in
imperial expenditure might have been met. But he never
explained how in that case the Federated States were to
balance their several budgets, or how a large increase in
direct taxation, which he regarded as politically inexpedient
and economically indefensible, was to be avoided. Arma-
ments and State Socialism were the main causes of the
steady increase in expenditure. Bismarck's system placed
armaments outside the arena of discussion. The policy
and principles were imposed on the nation--whose duty
it then was obediently to pay the bill--and if the nation
resisted, a general election with the main issue of 'The
Empire and Army in danger and War in sight' invariably
proved decisive.
These ten years from 1879 to 1889 made a decade of
embittered home politics. The reactionary character of
the Chancellor's system was revealed in many ways.
Bismarck seriously suggested, for example, that biennial
budgets and biennial meetings of the . Reichstag would be
a desirable reform; the prosecutions for Bismarck Be-
leidigung steadily increased, and when men like Bunsen and
Mommsen were prosecuted (and happily acquitted) for
indicting the government measures as 'immoral,' every
one who cared for freedom of opinion and freedom of
criticism had just cause for deep misgiving. Bismarck
increasingly regarded opposition as a personal affair; to
complaints of bribery and intimidation by officials at
elections he invariably retorted by emphasising the char-
acter of the Prussian monarchy and the disloyalty of the
Progressives to the Throne. 'I do not believe,' he said,
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BISMARCK
'in electro-plated royalism. ' In 1886 he concluded one
of his speeches with unmistakable threats: 'We must aim
at becoming stronger; we must show that we stand not
on feet of clay, but of iron. We must find a means of
becoming independent of the obstruction of the majority
of the Reichstag. I do not advocate such a step, but if
the Fatherland should be endangered I should not hesitate
to propose to the Emperor the necessary measures. The
Minister who will not risk his head to save the Fatherland,
even against the will of the majority, is a coward. I will
not allow the achievements of our army to perish by
internal discord, which I will find the means of counter-
acting. ' (January 28, 1886, in the Prussian Landtag. )
Prussian Poland and Alsace-Lorraine were essentially
problems of home policy which illustrate the close con-
nection between the internal system and the principles of
Bismarck's foreign policy. The failure of Prussia to
Germanise her Polish provinces inspired the Prussian
government to drastic action. Puttkamer, the Minister
of the Interior, in 1885 pointed out that, whereas the
German element had increased from one to five per cent. ,
the Polish element had increased from eight to eleven per
cent. An Edict of May 5, 1885, expelled all Poles not
Prussian subjects, and no less than thirty-four thousand
were so expelled, bag and baggage, on the ground of State
necessity. Next year Bismarck brought in an Expro-
priation Bill. He told the Landtag that the incorporation
of the Polish provinces in 1815 was a strategical necessity,
but that the pledges then given were a blunder, which it
was against Prussia's interest in 1886 to fulfil. The bill
authorised the government to spend five million pounds
in acquiring Polish estates to be leased to German farmers,
bound to marry German wives; it also transferred the
supervision of all popular education in the district to the
central executive. The necessity for this colonisation
was due, in addition, to the gradual submerging of the
Germanic element in the Near East, in Bohemia, Hungary,
and elsewhere, and also--a very remarkable statement--
to the 'extraordinary tendency of the Germans to sym-
pathise with everything that was not German. ' Bismarck's
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 389
speech, breathing fire and fury, and the rapid acceptance
of the bill, were the most conclusive refutation of this
alleged German sympathy. 'You,' he said to the Poles,
'will never realise your ambitions except as the result of
a war, disastrous to Germany, when Prussia has been
smashed to pieces. '
To Bismarck the international aspect of the Polish
question was as dangerous as the existence within the
Prussian kingdom of an 'alien' element that, despite all
persecution, resolutely refused to abandon either its lan-
guage, its religion, or its culture. With 1863 in his mind
he told the Reichstag that it could not interfere in a
matter, reserved solely for the prerogative of the Prussian
King; and, followed by all the Prussian members of the
Bundesrat, he pointedly walked out of the House when
an attempt was made to interpellate him. The reference
to Prussian sovereignty was intended for Vienna and
Petersburg quite as much as for the South German Liberals
or the Catholic centre. Poland and the Poles were a con-
clusive reason, even if there had not been others equally
exigent, why Berlin should have a control of the vassal
State of Austria, and maintain a close understanding with
Russia. But Bismarck's policy of voluntary, and then of
forcible, expropriation was a failure. It rested on three
false assumptions: first, that racialism and nationalism
can be extinguished by administrative action, aided by a
culture the superiority of which is not evident except to
those who administer it; secondly, that the Poles would
not combine to defeat the policy; and thirdly, that the
government could control completely the economic
situation. Neither Bismarck nor any one else could
obliterate the previous history of Poland. The Germani-
sation of Prussian Poland pursued by the government
virtually required that all Poles should become Protes-
tants and German-speaking or remain celibate, and that
those who refused the Germanisation or the celibacy must
be evicted. So long as Polish men and women produced
more children than the Germans and brought them up to
be Poles in religion, speech, and ideas, there was no prac-
tical alternative between extermination and conciliation.
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? 390
BISMARCK
The futility of the law of 1886 was proved in 1906 when
the government confessed that, while ninety thousand
German colonists had been brought into the Polish pro-
vinces, the Poles had increased by two hundred thousand,
and that the increase of economic prosperity produced
by the State grants had only strengthened the economic
capacity of the Poles to buy out the German faster than
the State planted him in. Coercion, also, had made the
whole Polish population far more 'disaffected' than in
1885.
Bismarck's nationalism simply came to this: if the
German Empire required for political, strategic, or
economic reasons that certain areas should belong to
Germany, no claim based on previous history, tradition,
race, or religion could countervail the right. Necessity
of State prescribed the end, that power enabled the State
to realise. Condemnation of the iniquity and futility of
Prussian policy in West Prussia and the province of Posen
ought not, however, to blind the student of statecraft to
the problem with which Bismarck was confronted, and the
serious menace that the Slav race imposed on the German
nation. For there was a measurable risk that in a large
area the German race and language would become the
distinguishing attributes of a dwindling minority. 1 The
problem of government by a dominant minority raises
one of the most formidable difficulties that modern states-
manship is called on to solve. It is immensely intensified
when the minority deals with a majority whose civilisation
is not qualitatively but only quantitatively inferior in
consequence of previous historic injustice, an undeveloped
economic environment, and the complications arising from
the competition of other and more congenial civilisations
across the frontiers. The true indictment of Bismarck's
attempted solution of the Prussian problem of Poland is
concentrated in the assumption that German civilisation
1 In October 1914. it was authoritatively asserted on behalf of Germany that
but for German 'militarism' German culture would have perished in Europe.
Whether this means that all national civilisations depend on force for their
existence, or that German 'culture' can only compete with other 'cultures'
when it is enforced by the sword, does not call for decision here. Nor is it
necessary to decide the validity of either or both meanings.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 391
was superior, while it practically admitted that, unless it
were imposed and maintained by force of the most drastic
character, it could not hold its own. Every decade after
1886 clinched the conclusion that the Pole was successfully
competing with the Teuton in all the qualities that makes
a civilisation worth preserving. So far then from solving
the problem, Bismarck's policy made it more formidable;
worse still, it carried within itself a Nemesis the beginning,
but not the end, of which he witnessed. It made all
Poles, not merely Prussian Poles, the enemies of the
German Empire. In his determination to localise the
purely Prussian problem Bismarck internationalised the
whole Polish question, since the principles on which he
worked were no less-disastrous to other races in a similar
position both within and without the Empire. It was
not only the Poles in whom the conviction deepened that
the destruction of the Bismarckian Empire and its recon-
struction on different principles might be essential in the
interests of a true nationalism, of the European system,
and of the whole world: and that without such a recon-
struction progress in civilisation and an international
system were impossible. When Bismarck deliberately
pinned the maintenance of Germanism to the brute
capacity of a German State to enforce it, he imperilled as
well as degraded the claims of that civilisation whose
champion he was. Nor did he ever seriously- attempt
conciliation of the Polish subjects of Prussia, based on an
equality of rights and opportunity. There was a golden
chance for such a policy in 1871. The Poles had fought
bravely for Germany in 1866 and in 1870. Their reward
was the Kulturkampf, a coercive bureaucracy, and the law
of 1886, leading inevitably to the doubled coercion of 1906,
a fresh crop of legislation, the flogging of school-children, and
similar proofs of the proud claim that German civilisation
aimed at 'freedom for all in thought and activity. ' A
policy of conciliation could not have been more unsuc-
cessful than the policy of coercion; conciliation, indeed,
might have led to detaching to Prussia, ' the Liberator,'
the whole of Poland. The Russian danger, which was a
perpetual nightmare to Bismarck, Moltke, the National
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? 392
BISMARCK
Liberals, and the Radicals, might then have been thrust
back behind the Dwina and the Dnieper, instead of which
it was thrust forward from the Vistula to the Warta and
the Netze. Bismarck's system, which identified the in-
terest of Germany with the interest of the Russian auto-
cracy, made all conciliation impossible, and for this the
intensity of his own Prussian Nationalism, with its tradi-
tions and interpretation of life, was more responsible than
his conception of the State as Power.
The limitations and dangers of that Nationalism were
no less patent in Alsace-Lorraine than in Prussian Poland.
It is true that in 1874 the military government of the
Reichsland was theoretically ended and Alsace and Lorraine
were represented by fifteen members in the Reichstag.
These fifteen were simply an addition to the opposition;
and they might have stayed at home for all the practical
influence that they exerted, while their united hostility
to the government, a continuous protest against the
annexation and the policy of internal coercion, provided
a fresh argument for drastic repression. Edwin von
Manteuffel's appointment as Statthalter in 1879 was a
concession to the demand for autonomy, but Bismarck's
jealousy of Manteuffel marred the use that might have been
made of the Statthalter's great personal gifts. Hohenlohe,
who was transferred from Paris in 1884 to succeed Man-
teuffel, had a doubly difficult task; as a civilian he incurred
the enmity of the governing chiefs of the soldier-caste, as
governor he was continuously overruled by Bismarck.
His Diary, carefully edited as it clearly is, shows that the
Chancellor accepted the militarist view that the object
of the annexations was not to make a contented Alsace-
Lorraine, but to hold the Reichsland as a strategic glacis
of the Empire. There can be little question that Bismarck
had hoped in ten years or so to extort from France a re-
nunciation of the idea of recovering the provinces lost in
1871, and the temptation to make such a renunciation had
its part in the bewildering history of French internal
politics and foreign policy from the fall of Thiers to the
presidency of Carnot; but he failed to secure it, and
Alsace-Lorraine more than ever was employed to coerce
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 393
Germany by a great fear and provoke France by a per-
petual humiliation. The German effort to assimilate the
Reichsland broke on two unsurmountable obstacles--the
refusal of France permanently to accept the position de-
fined in the Treaty of Frankfurt; the claim of German
Nationalism to hold by force what it could not hold by any
other means. By 1890 Bismarck's system was steadily
making the problem of Alsace-Lorraine of international
importance. The Europe that had debarred itself in 1871
from intervening in the terms of peace, had begun to realise
that the principles involved cut down to the root of the
whole European system and raised the most fundamental
problems of international relations.
At home after 1884 there was one compensation--the
parliamentary situation became much easier for the
Chancellor. The general election of that year resulted
in a severe defeat for the new and reunited Radicals
(Deutsche Freisinnige), and for the first time Bismarck had
at his disposal a governmental bloc composed of Conser-
vatives, the Centre, and the Conservative rump of National
Liberals, which gave him a comfortable majority over all
the other groups combined. This was even more marked
in the Prussian Landtag, where the narrow franchise,' the
worst in the world,' Bismarck once said, left Progressives,
Radicals, Poles, or Guelphs in an impotent minority.
There was indeed but one shadow. The union of Crown
and Minister-President, of Emperor and Chancellor, was
the corner-stone of the Bismarckian system. In 1884 the
Emperor was eighty-seven years old. Would his suc-
cessor, whose accession could not be long delayed, accept
the position developed between 1862 and 1884? In 1884
Germany speculated on the consequences of a trial of
strength between the Crown and the Man. The trial
indeed came very shortly, but neither in the form, nor
with the results, anticipated by Germany and Bismarck.
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? 394
BLSMARCK
? 5. Foreign Policy--The Trifle Alliance--The Colonial
Problem--France and Russia, 1879-1888.
'For thirty years,' writes Naumann in his Central Europe,
'politics for us meant Bismarck. ' He could have said, with
equal truth, that for twenty years at least politics for the
whole continent meant Bismarck. After 1878 Bismarck's
personal position was unique. The Chancellor achieved
the aim of the French king who desired that not a cannon-
shot should be fired in Europe without the consent and
knowledge of France and himself. The German hege-
mony of the European State system rested on the power
and prestige of Prussia, but it was a power and prestige
interpreted by, and reflected in, the personality of a single
man; and if the revolving years strengthened the political
ascendency consummated by the Treaty of Frankfurt, the
Congress of Berlin, and the Dual Alliance--the main terms
of which were known before the ink was dry on the signa-
tures--they also emphasised the egoism and vanity of the
ministerial autocrat. Bismarck demanded homage, and
he expected incense, from all the statesmen and all the
courts. Ambassadors at Berlin informed their govern-
ments that they would do well always to consult Bismarck
on every step, for if they acted without asking his advice,
even in matters in which Germany could not be regarded
as directly interested, they would soon discover that the
jealous, suspicious, and vain Chancellor intended to make
them pay for the neglect and the implied personal insult.
'His excessive sensitiveness,' wrote Lord Ampthill, 'is
incomprehensible in so great a statesman. ' He pointed
out what a mistake ' Goschen had made ' in daring to go
on a mission to the Near East without travelling via Berlin
and seeking wisdom at Friedrichsruhe. Goschen rectified
the error by returning via Berlin. 'Prince Bismarck,'
Lord Ampthill wrote in 1882, 'has never got over or for-
given Goschen's departure from the advice he was asked
to give in the Greek question. ' Gambetta therefore, in
1879, was right when he contemplated a secret visit to
'the monster. ' The meeting, despite M. Lair's beliefs,
did not take place, but an hour between Gambetta and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
Bismarck might have made a world of difference to the
French statesman. The greatness of great men is indeed
a mysterious paradox. Bismarck's vanity had its paternal
weaknesses. If ' a pleasant truth, a well-deserved compli-
ment, publicly uttered by an English statesman had a
magic effect,' still more magic was the effect of flattery or
kindness to a son. In Herbert Bismarck the Chancellor
was training up his successor, and the generous hospitality
offered to the son when he came on special missions to
London deeply touched the father's heart. It probably
smoothed away the friction far more effectively than a
dozen dispatches. Personal kindness to the limited few
for whom he cared--and guns--these were the two argu-
ments that Bismarck understood. And those who had
not got the guns, or were afraid to use them, were well
advised to go confidentially to the Chancellor, place their
case in his hands, and ask for his disinterested offices and
advice.
An element of grandeur sublimated this vanity. More
and more the Chancellor absented himself from Berlin
and conducted the foreign affairs of Europe from Fried-
richsruhe or Varzin, and the men who combined business
and homage in a visit to Bismarck enjoyed a patrician
hospitality from the hands of a great patrician, who tried
to forget on his own hearth or in the glades of the avenues
he had planted, the methods so congenial in the Wilhelm-
strasse. If, in addition, the visitor could prove that in his
arteries ran the red blood of a fierce virility--that rich
meat and drink, physical exuberance, and joy in the carnal
framework of life and the passions of nature, appealed as
much as the conclusion of a hard bargain--Bismarck was
ready to make concessions that were not for the anaemic
and the bookworms of the Chancery. The statesmen,
such as Favre and Pouyer-Quertier, who could drain not
their glass but their flagon, earned a personal respect as
strong as the contempt meted out to his jackals such as
Busch, or the spectacled pedant whose amusements were
centred in a Kaffee-Klatsch and the gossip of women.
Statecraft was an excrescence on the natural life of the
healthy man, but as it was inevitable, let men bring into
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-11-14 09:48 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 49015000251497 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust.
