Education and Entry into Politics
Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schonhausen,
born on April I, 1815, in the feverish month of renewed
war that followed Napoleon's escape from Elba, was the
third son of Ferdinand von Bismarck and Wilhelmina
Mencken.
Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schonhausen,
born on April I, 1815, in the feverish month of renewed
war that followed Napoleon's escape from Elba, was the
third son of Ferdinand von Bismarck and Wilhelmina
Mencken.
Robertson - Bismarck
hathitrust.
org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 38
BISMARCK
fleet, no colonies. Kiel was Danish, Hamburg a free city,
Bremen another free city, Emden belonged to Oldenburg;
due north Hanover blocked the way to the German Ocean,
and the mouths of the Rhine were Dutch.
History and the facts of everyday life taught all Prussians
the unity and sovereignty of the State; yet how could
Prussia expand in Germany when the Federal Consti-
tution guaranteed the inviolability of every German state,
and the Federal Diet was notoriously anti-Prussian?
Only by smashing the Federal Constitution to pieces in her
own and Germany's interests. The service of the Crown,
in the army, the civil service, or the educational organisation
controlled by and modelled for the needs of the State,
was the ordinary career of both the noble and the
middle class. Hence, the political theory of Hegel and
the Hegelian school, with its insistence on the State as
Power, bit deep into the Prussian mind, Conservative
and Liberal alike. It supplied the philosophical basis for,
and justification of, familiar facts; it provided the recon-
ciliation between the claims of the individual and of the
community, for each would attain their consummate
realisation through the supremacy of the unifying and
omnipotent State.
No less important was the teaching of Clausewitz--a
formative influence as powerful as the law of Military
Service, which Treitschke has emphasised. War, Mira-
beau had said, was Prussia's national industry: that
Prussia had grown by war was a commonplace to every
Prussian schoolboy. Clausewitz's Vom Kriege (On War)
was a severely scientific study of war as a subject of know-
ledge, and a manifestation of life through a nation's will
--a treatise based on deep thought and a masterly com-
parative method. The substance of his teaching that
war is simply a continuation of the policy of the State by
methods appropriate to its nature and for the achievement
of the ends of the State, unattainable by the nature of
things in any other way, bit no less deep into the minds
of the governing and middle class. The relations of war
to civil policy, and to the form, functions, and end of the
State; the exploration of first principles in close con-
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 39
nection with their application; the severity and lucidity
of the argument and the intellectual power of the author,
made Vom Kriege a classic which marked an epoch in^the
scientific study of the subject. If Clausewitz summed
up Prussian thought from Frederick to Scharnhorst, his
mental distinction and grip of method were peculiarly his
own, and they rested on the same characteristic that marked
The Wealth of Nations, the intimate connection between
the truth of the principles and their application in tested
facts. To Scharnhorst he owed the inspiration of that
intrepid and inspiring spirit, and in Napoleon he found
the most convincing proof of the doctrines he expounded;
but Clausewitz remained a great Prussian, the founder
of the great Prussian school continued by Moltke and
von der Goltz. His writings were never popular, even
in Prussia: few outside Germany before 1871 had read
him. Like our own Bentham he owed his profound in-
fluence to his mastery of minds which themselves became
masters of science or affairs--to the brain of the Prussian
army organised in the great General Staff, and to the
application of his conclusions by the professoriate in the
universities. The debates in the Prussian Parliament
from 1858 to 1866 reveal the saturation of both political
parties by Clausewitzian principles in this broader sense.
And the greatest of his disciples was not Moltke, who
acknowledged the debt, but Bismarck, who did not.
Not less significant in another sphere of thought was
the work of List, who committed suicide in 1846, and of
Roscher, first at Gottingen, and then at Leipzig. List's
System of National Economy was the foundation of modern
Protectionism; Roscher was the pioneer of the historical,
as opposed to the classical deductive school in economics.
The sum of List's teaching that the economic life and
policy of the community were subservient to, and must
be shaped to express, the will of the national State as
Power, harmonised with Rdscher's conclusions, based on
historical analysis, that economic principles and laws had
only a relative, not an absolute, validity, and were de-
pendent on, and the exemplification of, national types of
economic structure. Hence the argument that Germany
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BISMARCK
to realise its nationalism must have a German national
economy, and to achieve political freedom must first
attain a national economic independence. List and
Rdscher, therefore, and their disciples provided a powerful
antidote to the influence of British thought, so marked in
Prussian Liberalism. Their greatest conquest was not
achieved until a full generation later, when Bismarck
broke in 1879 w^tn tne economic creed of his youth and
middle age, and the converted Imperial Chancellor hoisted
his flag in the camp of Protection.
Particularism was nowhere stronger than in Prussia,
precisely because all the essential ingredients of parti-
cularism were so highly developed in the Prussian State--
a dynasty the history of which was the history of Prussia
--a definite type of civic character reflected in the form
and character of the institutions--a proud record of
achievement due to the unity of a unified and central-
ised State on a racial basis. In a word, Prussia had bought
her freedom in Germany and Europe by fidelity to her
Prussian self, and at a great price. This Prussian parti-
cularism provided an obvious policy and programme of
the future. Let Prussia continue a rigid loyalty to her
traditions. By the union of her monarchy, her army, and
her civil service, in unquestioning obedience to the
Crown, she could always maintain her pride of place and
make a greater Prussia. Her duty to Germany was best
fulfilled by fulfilling her duty to herself--that State
egoism which Bismarck was to preach so effectively. Any
alteration in her historic institutions or principles would
shatter the secret of her strength and success--her Prus-
sianism. The real danger lay in the desire of jealous
friends and baffled foes to 'mediatise' Prussia, melt her
down in a common German mould, and dissolve a good
Prussian into a flabby German, State. In opposition
to this, Prussian Liberals based their programme on the
reform period of Stein and Scharnhorst and the new
Prussia created in 1815. Their object was to complete
the edifice begun after the downfall of Jena--a disaster
in their eyes caused by the isolation of Prussia from Ger-
many, both in politics, thought, and ideals--to modernise
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 41
the Prussian State, while retaining all that was best in the
historic Prussia, and to build up a real self-governing
Prussian nation and government, in which all classes could
share. It was folly, they urged, to ignore the demands of
classes excluded from power, the character of the new
age, and the intellectual movements in Germany and
Europe. Prussia could lead the German renaissance, but
she must first give practical proof of her identity with its
principles and its objects. If she cut herself off from the
great currents in the life of the German people, she would
cease to be German; she would unite Germany against
Prussia, and experience a second time the bitter fruits of
isolation. No other State had so strong a claim to be the
successful champion of a German national movement;
no other State stood to gain so much by accepting, or to
lose so much by refusing, this duty.
A remarkable development of Prussian conservatism,
rather than of Prussian particularism, found its leaders
in the Brandenburg Circle, which took its political philo-
sophy from Haller and Stahl, its religion from a revival
of Evangelical Protestantism, and its sentiment from a
horror and fear of 'the Revolution. ' It constituted the
nucleus from which the Camarilla of the Gerlachs was
evolved; and in touch with it were many of the men
who made the circle of Frederick William iv. both as
Crown Prince and King. It exercised for thirty years a
profound influence on Prussian and German history; in
its ranks Bismarck served his apprenticeship, and his breach
with its principles was the first great formative fact in his
career. The essential points of this aristocratic and
pietistic creed--an offshoot from the Holy Alliance, tinged
in its dreams and its aversions by the Romantic movement--
can be briefly summarised: the maxim of their party was
J. de Maistre's sentence, 'Nous ne voulons pas la contre-
revolution, mais le contraire de la revolution'! The
historic danger to all states and society lay in ' the Revo-
lution '; the struggle between the Revolution and con-
servatism began long^before 1789, and was continually
taking new forms; France was the main source of revo-
lutionary principles, which either placed sovereignty in
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BISMARCK
the people, or divided it between a hybrid and fictitious
popular will and an emasculated monarchy; the political
revolution was united with the intellectual, which taught
the freedom and sufficiency of the critical reason and sub-
jected everything to rational tests. Modern Germany
was deeply infected with both the political and intellectual
revolution, which unchecked would destroy all authority
in government and be subversive of society and religion;
hence it was the duty of Prussia to unite with all govern-
ments, based on legitimate principles, in order to main-
tain those principles and to combat the Revolution.
Conservatism was not local or national; it transcended the
artificial barriers of political, racial, and geographical
division; and in practice the allies of Prussia were Austria
and Russia; England after 1815 had deserted the true
faith; France after 1830 was only a crowned bourgeois
republic. In fine, the closest political and moral under-
standing between Prussia and Austria was the pivot of
a sound German and European system: united with
Russia, Prussia and Austria could save Europe. Separated
from them she was a conspirator in a moral cataclysm.
Such a creed and such a policy differed essentially from
the ideas of Prussian Junkertum; the Prussian polity was
not justified because it was Prussian, but because it con-
formed to the tests of a universalist system, and in any
collision between Prussianism and this orthodox conser-
vatism the former must be sacrificed; but the Gerlach
school shared with the Junker governing class the antipathy
to all liberal reform. For Prussia to tread the path of
England or France would be treachery to the cause of
right. Opposed as these several parties were, they had
two points in common. They accepted as an axiom the
claim of Prussia to be a Grossmacht. They were pro-
foundly dissatisfied with Prussian inactivity from 1815
onwards, which was an abnegation of her strength and
European position. Prussia was the one German state
in which patriotism was more than a rhetorical figure,
and membership in which was a cause of pride and a basis
of duty and service. Liberals, Particularists, or Conser-
vatives demanded that the Prussian king and the Prussian
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 43
sword should play a more independent part in the political
life of Europe. Even to the Gerlachs the Austrian
alliance, the sine qu& non of Prussian policy, caused obstinate
questionings when it involved a submissive subordination
to the secular and selfish statecraft of Vienna. Liberals
felt more strongly the ' shame' of Prussian obedience to
the Carlsbad decrees, the reactionary measures of 1832,
and the Prussian share in the suppression of the Hano-
verian constitution. The alliance with Austria was in
their eyes a surrender to reaction; the Bund and the Diet
were a national disgrace, and Prussia which could give the
tone and the Liberal Law to Germany had become the
tool of selfish and reactionary Austrian interests.
Prussian thought of all schools was inevitably driven
back on the deadlock in the Bund. If Prussia continued
to act with the Diet she was an Austrian instrument; but
how could she act in defiance of it without forfeiting her
German position, and destroying the whole movement
towards a common and more effective German organi-
sation? Nor could Prussian foreign policy be based on
internal German interests. The Prusso-Russian entente
had its roots in the established traditions of policy,
gratitude to Russia for services in the past, and a deep-
seated fear of Russian powex. Since Frederick the Great
had learned the meaning of Russian enmity in the Seven
Years' War, friendship between Berlin and Petersburg was
a postulate of Prussian safety. Poland and the Polish
question drove the conclusion home. The French
danger was no less impressive. In Prussia, the memories
of Rosbach and of Jena, of Napoleonic humiliation and
partition, and of the War of Liberation, were in the
national blood as nowhere else in Germany. The portrait
of Queen Louisa, the royal saint and martyr, hung in the
manor-houses of Junkertum and the cottages of the
peasantry; her tomb by Rauch at Charlottenburg was a
national vindication of her sufferings at French hands;
and there were thousands of Prussians on both sides of the
barricades in 1848 who had marched into Paris in 1814
after having liberated their country from French domina-
tion. The new King Frederick William iv. (born in 1795),
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BISMARCK
and his brother, the Prince of Prussia (born 1797), were
boys when the French entered Berlin in 1806, and they
had both served in the Prussian army of 1813. If France
was the hereditary enemy of Germany, she was the hated
and hateful oppressor of Prussia. Prussian Conservatives
and Liberals had common ground in their repudiation of
a French hegemony in Europe. It was the duty of
Prussian intellect to assist the superiority of Prussian
science, as it was the task of Prussian arms to maintain
intact the German territory in the west assigned to their
custody. A black cloud and the warning drops falling
anywhere in Europe, and Prussia instinctively faced to the
Rhine. War with. France--long before Bismarck sat in
the Wilhelmstrasse--would always have set Prussian
nationalism aflame; for deep and inarticulate in the
heart of every Prussian lay the desire to undo the work of
Louis xiv. , which Europe, callous to Prussian services and
sacrifices, had forbidden in 1815, when Prussia was
'robbed ' of the fruits of her victories.
Prussian Liberals recognised, but underrated, the
difficulties of liberal reform. Emphasis on the logical
and historical connection of the new liberal programme
with the reformers of the Stein-Scharnhorst period ignored
the cumulative force of facts. The inertia of the mon-
archy and the obstinacy of its ally, Junkertum, were the
real reasons for the failure to complete the reforms of 1808.
The conversion of Prussia into a constitutional state of
the French or Belgian type, with rights guaranteed in a
written constitution, was a reversal of two hundred years
of development in a precisely opposite direction. Yet
the mere demand for the conversion showed the strength
of the new elements in the Prussian State. But it was
clear that it could only be accomplished with the consent
of the monarchy, or by a military disaster, or by revolution.
In 1840 a revolution seemed as improbable as a second
Jena. Hence everything turned on the character of the
new sovereign, Frederick William iv.
Like his ancestor, Frederick 1. , Frederick William iv.
was 'a Hohenzollern with his back broken,' who be-
wildered his subjects and himself by the obstinacy and
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 45
contradiction of his convictions. His pride in the army,
his belief in his unfettered prerogative and the divine
right of his Crown, his conviction that the Prussian
sovereign in the scheme of human and divine things was
appointed to be the instrument of his people's good, and
earning their love and admiration, linked him with the
past. Nature had endowed him with an acquisitive, sym-
pathetic, and versatile intelligence, and no small share of
oratorical and artistic gifts. Essentially pious, he was
deeply stirred by the new religious forces at work in
Germany; a strong Protestant, he desired the union of
the Protestant churches both in Prussia and outside, yet
could sympathise with the Roman Catholic revival, for he
regarded religious belief and emotion as the basis and
sanction of political and social development. As Crown
Prince he had gladly cultivated the leaders of politics,
philosophy, literature and art. The friends of the Crown
Prince and King numbered personalities so various and
so different as the Gerlachs with the orthodox Conser-
vatives of the Gerlach circle, Radowitz, Bunsen, Rauch,
Cornelius, the Munich leader of the Romantic movement
in art, Stockmar, Humboldt and Ranke.
The rebirth of a national Germany, equipped with
organs rescued from the Middle Ages and reshaped to
express modern ideals, the reunion of Emperor and Church
in a revived Holy Roman Empire, the reconciliation of
modern Liberalism with historic Conservatism in the
spiritual, intellectual, and political life of the German
people, inspired the vision which haunted and fired his
imagination. Of this Restauratio Imperii combining the
fundamental unity of German culture with the unity of
German religion, Austria and Prussia were marked out by
Providence to be the co-architects and co-guarantors.
The German Imperial Crown must necessarily be recreated
as the hereditary prerogative of the House of Habsburg,
but beside the Imperial Throne would stand the Hohen-
zollern sovereign as Captain-General and Arch-Cham-
berlain of the restored Empire, and round these two
would be grouped the princes, dynasties, governments
and peoples of Germany in an ordered hierarchy.
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? 46
BISMARCK
Frederick William iv. saw political realities through a
magic and distorting screen of sentiment. His aversions
were as strong as his ideals. Liberal principles were tainted
at their source by French Jacobinism, and everything
French he abominated. Obstinate and impressionable,
he was always under the spell of characters with clearer
and narrower conceptions and stronger wills than his own.
'I am not a Frederick the Great,' he pathetically con-
fessed; and when revolution and then reaction rent the
web of sentiment asunder, he was helpless--the sullen and
disillusioned victim of fate, the reluctant agent of a policy
which, if it defeated the revolution, no less shattered the
dreams and ambitions of the German and Hohenzollern
king.
The summons to Berlin in 1847 of a united Diet--the
concentration in a single assembly of the unreformed
local Estates--brought to a head the issues between the
old Prussia and the new. To the liberal demands the
King replied that the royal creation of the united Diet
redeemed the pledge of his predecessor, and that the con-
stitutional reforms were now complete; he added that
his Crown was his by the grace of God, and that no written
sheet of paper (a constitution) should ever intervene
between his people and himself.
No less significant was the demand at Heppenheim in
October, 1847, for an elected national German Parliament,
repeated in a motion by Bassermann in the Diet at Baden
(February 12, 1848), in which the reform of the obsolete
and obstructive Federal Constitution was to be accom-
plished by and according to the will of the German
nation. In Prussia and in the south the two Germanies
--the Germany of princes and governments, the Germany
of their subjects over whom the liberal and nationalist
creeds were daily gaining a clearer mastery--were set in
array. The nationalist issue could not be burked. Poland
and the Poles within and without the German Con-
federation were in effervescence. From Schleswig-
Holstein came the imperious demand of 'unredeemed'
Germans to be freed from denationalisation by Danish
'tyranny'; and Holstein, as a member of the German
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 47
Confederation, was within the jurisdiction of a federal
execution. At Paris and Prague and Buda-Pesth, in
Switzerland and Italy, the storm-cone was being hoisted.
How long could the German princes resist the pressure
from within? How long could a representative public
opinion acquiesce in an unrepresentative Federal Diet?
In 1847 Germany rang with the confusion of opposed
creeds and programmes; distinguished spokesmen there
were in plenty in every state, but as yet neither side had
produced a leader or a programme commanding an un-
divided allegiance. Well might Stockmar write: 'A
new epoch is in fusion, the particular metal and stamp
of which cannot be divined. '
It was into this Germany of 1815-47 that Bismarck was
born, and in it he grew up. It was in this Germany and
Prussia, on the eve of revolution, that, as a member of the
United Diet, he stepped on to the political stage, and into
the political history of his country.
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? CHAPTER II
THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
? I.
Education and Entry into Politics
Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schonhausen,
born on April I, 1815, in the feverish month of renewed
war that followed Napoleon's escape from Elba, was the
third son of Ferdinand von Bismarck and Wilhelmina
Mencken. Of his two elder brothers only one, Bernhard
(born 1810) survived, and a third brother (born 1819)
did not reach manhood. Of his sisters only one, Malwine
(born 1827) reached womanhood. Schonhausen, the
ancestral home of his forefathers, lies to the west of Berlin
in the Old March (Alt Mark) of Brandenburg, which was
the original nucleus of the Electorate and the very core
of the future Prussian kingdom and the cradle of the
Prussian monarchy.
'Who are these Hohenzollerns? ' Bismarck once de-
manded. 'We were in the March long before they were. '
The claim that the Bismarcks settled in the March in the
reign of Charles the Great rests only on the pious autho-
rity of the genealogical table hanging in the hall of the
manor-house at Schonhausen; but two hundred years
before the first Hohenzollern, invested with the Electorate
by Imperial hands, set to work to tame the lawless inde-
pendence of noble and Junker in the March, the petty
village of Bismarck gave its name to a Brandenburg family;
and towards the end of the thirteenth century the Bis-
marcks were established in the guild and government of
Stendal, a township hard by. In 1345, as holders of the
fief of Burgstall, they were definitely registered in the
nobility of the March, and though they never reached
the status of the great aristocracy, they were henceforward
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
49
one of the many noble families who constituted the
governing class. In 1562 they were reluctantly obliged to
transfer Burgstall to the Hohenzollerns and to take in
exchange Schonhausen. Uninterruptedly in Bismarck's
possession from that date, it gave the family the name--
Bismarck-Schonhausen--which distinguished them alike
from other Bismarcks--noble, middle-class, or plebeian.
On his father's side Otto's family record was that of
most Brandenburg squires--military service in the elec-
toral and then the royal army of Brandenburg-Prussia.
Allegiance and devotion to the ruler were the traditional
duty of the manorial lords; and the ruler's prerogative
was reflected in the territorial prerogative of the servants
of the Crown, who administered the land, led their
peasants in battle, fought an unending struggle with
Nature and their own passions, a caste to whom the State
meant their Hohenzollern master and their own divine
right to govern under his guidance. Otto's father had
served, as usual, in the army; had seen Schonhausen
(built in 1700 to replace the original manor-house, de-
stroyed in the Thirty Years' War) in French possession
after Jena, and the sacred family tree pierced by French
bayonets. Love for the French was not, therefore, a
maxim taught to the young Otto. The Old March
nourished bitter memories of the French invaders, and
inspiriting records of the War of Liberation, and these
the young Otto imbibed as soon as he was breeched.
The tradition of the Menckens was very different.
They were not noble, but they could point in their lineage
to three professors of some celebrity in their day. Wil-
helmina Mencken's father served in the Civil Cabinet of
Frederick the Great and of his successor; was accused of
Jacobinism and displaced, to return under a more liberal
dispensation as Cabinets-chef of Frederick William in.
His daughter seems to have inherited the civil, literary,
and intellectual aptitudes of her race; she combined
them with an extravagant love of building, of Berlin, and
of the dilettante society of salons and fashionable watering-
places--all of them, save perhaps the building, tastes
detested by her son Otto.
B. D
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? BISMARCK
But until 1815 neither Bismarcks nor Menckens had
contributed to the dramatic annals of Hohenzollern
Prussia a statesman, a soldier, or a writer of the first, or
even the second, quality. Both families had a long and
creditable, but essentially parochial, record, research into
which could be safely left to the county antiquarian, had
the boy born in 1815 not made his name illustrious and his
ancestry an interesting study in the origins of genius.
These Bismarcks--and in Mendelian phraseology they
were the dominating strain--for four centuries simply did
their duty as squires and earnest Protestants, and they
planted, tilled, fought, drank, duelled, married, served as
sheriffs (Landrath), begat sons and daughters, and slept
their sleep beneath their blazoned arms, 'In Trinitate
Robur,' satisfied with being Bismarcks and Branden-
burger manorial lords. They ended, in the mystery of
human things, by producing a member of their ancient
house to whom they bequeathed in treble measure their
own fierce appetites, loves, and hates, an iron physique, a
brain, ambitions, and a force unique in the history of ^he
March and of their race.
In 1816 Otto's parents moved to Kniephof, the chief
of a group of family estates, inherited in that year, and at
Kniephof in Prussian Pomerania the little Otto grew up.
It was the Paradise of his boyhood, and there the heredi-
tary Bismarck link with the soil was forged. Towns and
the life of towns neither the lad, nor the ambassador, nor
the Imperial Chancellor ever liked. Streets were a prison,
townsfolk an unpleasant riddle. Whatever else changed
in Otto von Bismarck, the passion for rural nature--the
hunger for the land and the life of the land, forests, moor,
the blue spaces of an open sky, the wind across the pas-
tures, the hard-bitten men who lived, worked, and hunted
on the land--never changed. Pictures and sculpture
do not figure in his letters: he confessed when he was an
old man that once, only once, he had entered the Berlin
Museum; of books there is singularly little; there is
much of good food and good wine; but the earth and its
unceasing pageantry of beauty are never forgotten. Dawn
and sunset, the maturing sunshine of midday, snow under
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
moonlight, mountains, crags, and wooded dales--these
things he always saw because he felt their message, their
contact with, or memory of, his own home. The grey-
haired Chancellor, with his wolf-hounds at his heels,
striding with the watchful eye of a master amongst the
sunlit- glades of his oaks and beeches at Varan or Fried-
richsruhe, was happier in his freedom from the fetters of
the State than the boy on holiday who galloped his pony
over the monotonous demesne of Kniephof, stalked snipe
and wild duck, or hunted hares through deep snow.
Otto's education was of the conventional German
humanistic and literary type. At seven years old he was
sent to a preparatory school (Plamann's Institute), and at
twelve passed on to a . gymnasium. At sixteen, as became
a young noble and Protestant, he was confirmed by
Schleiermacher, at the height of his celebrity, whose
brief injunction: 'Whatever you do, do it with all your
heart and as from the Lord,' is said to have made a deep
impression. In 1832 he entered the University of
Gottingen, where he spent two years, followed by one at
the University of Berlin. Instinct and tradition suggested
the army as a profession, but his mother apparently
desired a civil career for this passionate, self-willed and
robust son ;* whether because she feared the life of an
officer, or divined the power in her beloved Otto, is un-
certain; but she had her way, and after passing the neces-
sary examinations he entered the civil service on its
judicial side, and was attached for duty at the fashionable
Aix-la-Chapelle and at Berlin. One year had to be given
to military service, and this he spent with the Rifles of the
Guard (Garde-J'dger).
Until 1839, when he lost his mother, abruptly ter-
minated his State employment and, owing to financial
difficulties of his family, took over with his brother Bern-
hard the management of the family properties, his life
had shown little indication either of ambitions or excep-
tional abilities. As a university student, though not as
idle as legend subsequently pictured, he had failed to find
in academic studies either intellectual inspiration or prac-
tical utility. Heeren's lectures made some impression,
U. OF M. FLINT CC\ : FGE LIBRARY
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? 52
BISMARCK
but neither Dahlmann, the glory of G6ttingen, nor
Savigny at Berlin can be reckoned as formative influences
in his education as they were in the training of his con-
temporaries Windthorst and Beust. The truth is that
then, as throughout his career, Bismarck revolted against
discipleship or subordination of any kind. Life was the
only teacher from whom he was willing to learn, and the
lessons of life he hammered out for himself, and he refused
to take them ready-made. He joined a famous duelling
corps, the Hanoverana. Duelling, beer-drinking, and the
riotous escapades of undergraduate youth, provided an
outlet for his exuberant physical powers. In the punish-
ment book of the university his name figures more than
once. Friends he made in plenty, three in particular--
Moritz von Blanckenburg, Motley, the American historian,
and Roon, twelve years his senior. Little did either guess
what the latter friendship would signify for the history of
Prussia. There is a story that in 1832 he made a bet with
an American student that Germany would be unified in
twenty years; but if he made the bet, he lost it. Forty,
not twenty, years hence he could have asked from the
Wilhelmstrasse for repayment. He detested and neglected
his duties as a civil servant. The career of 'the animal
armed with a pen' behind closed windows and under
the orders of domineering, exacting, or ill-bred superiors,
stirred his Junker pride and independence to mutiny.
At Aix-la-Chapelle, crowded with fashionable pleasure-
seekers of all nations, he plunged into gambling, debt, and
dissipation. For four months he broke away altogether,
travelled to Wiesbaden and Switzerland, fell in love with
a pretty English girl, but whether he broke with her or
she with him is uncertain. The sap was running strongly
upwards, and in the dawn of superb physical vigour Bis-
marck, like many, sought in physical satisfaction an ano-
dyne for an incurable unrest. 'Yesterday,' he wrote to his
wife in 1851, ' I was in Wiesbaden. May it please God to
fill with His clear and strong wine this vessel in which then
the champagne of youth uselessly foamed and left stale
dregs. ' Neither politics nor religion came to his aid.
He had ceased to pray; he was practically an agnostic
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 53
with a vague Pantheism simmering in a brain that de-
manded positive reality. Republicanism as a political
creed had appealed to him, but the democratic excesses
at the Hambacher Fest (1832) disgusted him with radical-
ism and all its works. Prussia had no public life to offer
him. Service in the bureaucracy of an autocratic crown
and the army were the only two professions available, and
he had rejected the one and was too old now for the other.
He fell back gladly on the career of a landed proprietor.
At Kniephof he was his own master, and his father's
death in 1845 made little difference to his position. He
acquired Schonhausen and lived there; but from 1839
onwards he devoted all his brains and energies to the
family estates and restored their prosperity. He studied
the science and practice of agriculture in all its forms,
revelling in his independence on the land that he loved,
bending men and Nature into obedience to his will.
Not the least impressive of the many personal touches
that vibrate in his later speeches, are those which reveal
the lessons he had learned in the management of his
estates. It is instructive to remember that at this time,
south of the Alps, another young noble, Camillo di Cavour,
no less dissatisfied than Otto von Bismarck, was patiently
serving a self-imposed and invaluable apprenticeship in
statecraft on the estates of his ancestry. The Bismarck
of later days, too, would have understood why Walpole
in the most exacting pressure of his premiership always
opened first every morning the report from his game-
keeper and bailiff. The Prussia in which the master of
Kniephof and Schonhausen toiled was not the modern and
industrialised state, which in 1841 was just beginning to
develop a new economic life, but a kingdom of agriculture,
of landed proprietors, farmers and peasants, in which more
than seventy per cent, of the population lived on, and
wrested their food from, the land.
But the cravings and unrest of Cavour and Bismarck
were not, and could not be, satisfied with the breeding of
beasts and making two blades of grass grow where one
had grown before. The countryside of Pomerania rang
with the dare-devil exploits, the dangerous tests of skill,
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? 54
BISMARCK
nerve, and strength of ' the mad' and 'wild Junker' of
Kniephof, ready to swim, shoot, hunt, or ride anywhere
and in any weather; no less ready and able to drink half a
dozen lieutenants from neighbouring garrisons under- the
table. The gossip which represented him as a Herculean
Lothario of coarse amours and a fabulous appetite is cer-
tainly exaggerated. But a host who could wake the
tardy guest by pistol-shots through the windows, and
whose irreligious views were more disquieting than his
morals, alarmed the mothers, if they excited the curiosity
of the daughters, in the manor drawing-rooms. Gossip,
however, did not know that the mad Junker was devouring
books--history, philosophy, theology, geography, and
poetry: Feuerbach, Bauer, and Strauss, Schopenhauer,
Lessing, Schiller, Riickert, Lenau, Freiligrath, Uhland,
and especially Goethe, Shakespeare, and Byron. The
effortless felicity of allusion in his speeches to Goethe
and Shakespeare proves the grip that the imaginative
realism of these two master critics of life had on his spirit.
Yet nothing as yet could fill ' the unfathomable weariness
and emptiness' of which a letter speaks; and Bismarck, like
Cavour, left his estates to travel, now to Paris, now to the
northern sea-coasts, now to England, completing his com-
petence in French and English, noting, as always, the
scenery, and storing his impressions of institutions and
society in a retentive memory. 'I feel,' he wrote in 1845,
when his sister Malwine married, 'more than ever my
loneliness in the world. '
The gnawing at his heart, the flux in his ideas, the need
of a sure anchorage in spiritual and moral realities, grew
with the inarticulate ambition for a career wider than
the duties of a manorial lord could provide. The answer
came from an unexpected quarter, and Bismarck owed
it to a woman's ideals. Through the wife, Marie von
Thadden, of his friend, Moritz von Blanckenburg, the
master of Kniephof and Schonhausen was gradually ab-
sorbed into 'the Trieglaff circle'--a group that had
Trieglaff, the Thaddens' estate, for its centre. The
Trieglaff circle linked hands with a more political group
at Berlin, the most important members of which were
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 55
the Gerlachs and Stahl, the writer on political philosophy,
and in this way he began the memorable political friend-
ship with General Leopold and his brother Ludwig von
Gerlach. The blend of evangelical piety, prayer meetings,
conservative politics, and sentimental literary dilettantism,
of spiritual tea-parties and picnics, at first amused and
then interested Bismarck. It was a new type of adventure,
and he was to discover how much a resolute and high-
minded woman can accomplish when she deliberately pits
her strength against the will of a resolute man. Marie
von Blanckenburg had divined the power in this erring,
loyal, and forceful friend of her husband's. She made it
her duty to ' convert' him. She succeeded, though she
did not live to know her success and its results. Her
premature death deeply affected the young man and com-
pleted the conversion. He resumed the habit of prayer
and the study of the Bible; Bauer and Strauss went into
the wastepaper basket; his cynical and agnostic Pan-
theism melted like snow in the midday sunshine of April.
He returned to the unquestioning Lutheran faith of his
ancestors. His mind was made up, and henceforward
his was a conviction impregnable to all the doubts, fears,
or disillusionment provided by the life that began in 1847,
and ended in the homage of a united Germany in 1898.
'I cannot conceive,' he wrote to his wife, 'how a man
who reflects and yet knows nothing of God, and will know
nothing, can endure his life for contempt and boredom.
I do not know how I formerly endured. If I lived now
as I did then, without God, without thee, without chil-
dren, I cannot think why I should not put life aside like
a dirty shirt. ' In 1870 he said: 'I know not whence I
should derive my sense of duty, if hot from God: orders
and titles have no charm for me ; I firmly believe in a life
after death, and that is why I am a Royalist: by nature
I am disposed to be a Republican. . . . Were I not a
staunch Christian, did I not stand upon the miraculous
basis of religion, you would never have possessed a Federal
Chancellor in my person. '
Love and marriage consummated Marie von Blancken-
burg's work. An attachment to Johanna von Puttkamer,
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? 56
BISMARCK
the daughter of neighbours at Reinfeld, steadily deepened
into passion. The father who ' had heard much evil and
little good' of the suitor for his daughter's hand, was
reluctant to consent; but Bismarck was not one to be
thwarted when he had set his heart on success, and he had
Fraulein von Puttkamer on his side. 'All right' was the
brief announcement in English to his sister of his betrothal
(January 12, 1847). His marriage followed on July 25,
and a happy marriage it certainly was. In his domestic
life Bismarck is seen at his best. What his wife was to
him and what he was to her can be read in a correspon-
dence which is real literature, and a precious human and
historical document. 'I cannot,' he wrote from Biarritz
in 1851, 'enjoy seeing so much beauty away from you. '
'My wife,' he said, thirty years later, ' made me what I
am. ' That adequately sums up an intimacy into which
we need not pry further. There was a great place in 1846
waiting for a woman to^fill. Johanna von Puttkamer
showed her quality simply by filling it.
Fate had already tapped at the door. Between Bis-
marck's betrothal and his marriage (April 3 to June 24)
the united Diet had met in Berlin, quarrelled with the
Crown, and been prorogued. Bismarck was one of its
members, confronted in a public capacity for the first
time with the Liberal and National forces, to which in
numerous utterances he opposed a defiant and unbending
Conservatism. He denied that the national rising of 1813
had any constitutional significance, and had any other
object than the natural Prussian desire to hurl the foreign
invader from the Fatherland. The remark provoked
fierce dissent from the Liberal benches. Bismarck pulled
a newspaper from his pocket and read it, standing, until
the assembly was quiet. He asserted that the Crown of
Prussia was worn by the grace of God, not by the grace
of the nation; he denied the right of Jews to hold office
in a Christian State, rejected as irrelevant all parallels
between Prussia and foreign countries, and maintained that
abandonment of the Christian basis of the State would
reduce it to a fortuitous aggregate of philosophical rights.
The young man of thirty-two was in collision with ideas
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 57
and with men he disliked on political and social grounds,
and he opposed to them the traditions of the governing
class to which he belonged, and which these rebels would
destroy in the Prussia that the nobles had made. He gave
vigorous expression to the creed of Prussian particularism.
Nationalism was the traditional patriotism of Prussians,
obeying an unfettered Crown ruling as it pleased through
a hereditary aristocracy. Liberalism would destroy the
historic Prussia, which must remain the Prussia of Frederick
the Great, whom Gerlach noted Bismarck had already
adopted as his model. In all these utterances there is no
recognition that the strength of Liberalism lay in its
mandate to represent forces within and without Prussia
that could not be refuted by the rubric and articles of the
crude conservatism of a caste, there is no appreciation
of the gravity and complexity of the German problem
or of Prussia's duty to Germany. The two impressive
characteristics in these speeches are the unmistakable
sincerity of the speaker's convictions and the undefinable
atmosphere of independence which can grow into leader-
ship. Bismarck spoke for himself, but he more than
voiced, and men felt it, his party.
? 38
BISMARCK
fleet, no colonies. Kiel was Danish, Hamburg a free city,
Bremen another free city, Emden belonged to Oldenburg;
due north Hanover blocked the way to the German Ocean,
and the mouths of the Rhine were Dutch.
History and the facts of everyday life taught all Prussians
the unity and sovereignty of the State; yet how could
Prussia expand in Germany when the Federal Consti-
tution guaranteed the inviolability of every German state,
and the Federal Diet was notoriously anti-Prussian?
Only by smashing the Federal Constitution to pieces in her
own and Germany's interests. The service of the Crown,
in the army, the civil service, or the educational organisation
controlled by and modelled for the needs of the State,
was the ordinary career of both the noble and the
middle class. Hence, the political theory of Hegel and
the Hegelian school, with its insistence on the State as
Power, bit deep into the Prussian mind, Conservative
and Liberal alike. It supplied the philosophical basis for,
and justification of, familiar facts; it provided the recon-
ciliation between the claims of the individual and of the
community, for each would attain their consummate
realisation through the supremacy of the unifying and
omnipotent State.
No less important was the teaching of Clausewitz--a
formative influence as powerful as the law of Military
Service, which Treitschke has emphasised. War, Mira-
beau had said, was Prussia's national industry: that
Prussia had grown by war was a commonplace to every
Prussian schoolboy. Clausewitz's Vom Kriege (On War)
was a severely scientific study of war as a subject of know-
ledge, and a manifestation of life through a nation's will
--a treatise based on deep thought and a masterly com-
parative method. The substance of his teaching that
war is simply a continuation of the policy of the State by
methods appropriate to its nature and for the achievement
of the ends of the State, unattainable by the nature of
things in any other way, bit no less deep into the minds
of the governing and middle class. The relations of war
to civil policy, and to the form, functions, and end of the
State; the exploration of first principles in close con-
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 39
nection with their application; the severity and lucidity
of the argument and the intellectual power of the author,
made Vom Kriege a classic which marked an epoch in^the
scientific study of the subject. If Clausewitz summed
up Prussian thought from Frederick to Scharnhorst, his
mental distinction and grip of method were peculiarly his
own, and they rested on the same characteristic that marked
The Wealth of Nations, the intimate connection between
the truth of the principles and their application in tested
facts. To Scharnhorst he owed the inspiration of that
intrepid and inspiring spirit, and in Napoleon he found
the most convincing proof of the doctrines he expounded;
but Clausewitz remained a great Prussian, the founder
of the great Prussian school continued by Moltke and
von der Goltz. His writings were never popular, even
in Prussia: few outside Germany before 1871 had read
him. Like our own Bentham he owed his profound in-
fluence to his mastery of minds which themselves became
masters of science or affairs--to the brain of the Prussian
army organised in the great General Staff, and to the
application of his conclusions by the professoriate in the
universities. The debates in the Prussian Parliament
from 1858 to 1866 reveal the saturation of both political
parties by Clausewitzian principles in this broader sense.
And the greatest of his disciples was not Moltke, who
acknowledged the debt, but Bismarck, who did not.
Not less significant in another sphere of thought was
the work of List, who committed suicide in 1846, and of
Roscher, first at Gottingen, and then at Leipzig. List's
System of National Economy was the foundation of modern
Protectionism; Roscher was the pioneer of the historical,
as opposed to the classical deductive school in economics.
The sum of List's teaching that the economic life and
policy of the community were subservient to, and must
be shaped to express, the will of the national State as
Power, harmonised with Rdscher's conclusions, based on
historical analysis, that economic principles and laws had
only a relative, not an absolute, validity, and were de-
pendent on, and the exemplification of, national types of
economic structure. Hence the argument that Germany
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BISMARCK
to realise its nationalism must have a German national
economy, and to achieve political freedom must first
attain a national economic independence. List and
Rdscher, therefore, and their disciples provided a powerful
antidote to the influence of British thought, so marked in
Prussian Liberalism. Their greatest conquest was not
achieved until a full generation later, when Bismarck
broke in 1879 w^tn tne economic creed of his youth and
middle age, and the converted Imperial Chancellor hoisted
his flag in the camp of Protection.
Particularism was nowhere stronger than in Prussia,
precisely because all the essential ingredients of parti-
cularism were so highly developed in the Prussian State--
a dynasty the history of which was the history of Prussia
--a definite type of civic character reflected in the form
and character of the institutions--a proud record of
achievement due to the unity of a unified and central-
ised State on a racial basis. In a word, Prussia had bought
her freedom in Germany and Europe by fidelity to her
Prussian self, and at a great price. This Prussian parti-
cularism provided an obvious policy and programme of
the future. Let Prussia continue a rigid loyalty to her
traditions. By the union of her monarchy, her army, and
her civil service, in unquestioning obedience to the
Crown, she could always maintain her pride of place and
make a greater Prussia. Her duty to Germany was best
fulfilled by fulfilling her duty to herself--that State
egoism which Bismarck was to preach so effectively. Any
alteration in her historic institutions or principles would
shatter the secret of her strength and success--her Prus-
sianism. The real danger lay in the desire of jealous
friends and baffled foes to 'mediatise' Prussia, melt her
down in a common German mould, and dissolve a good
Prussian into a flabby German, State. In opposition
to this, Prussian Liberals based their programme on the
reform period of Stein and Scharnhorst and the new
Prussia created in 1815. Their object was to complete
the edifice begun after the downfall of Jena--a disaster
in their eyes caused by the isolation of Prussia from Ger-
many, both in politics, thought, and ideals--to modernise
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 41
the Prussian State, while retaining all that was best in the
historic Prussia, and to build up a real self-governing
Prussian nation and government, in which all classes could
share. It was folly, they urged, to ignore the demands of
classes excluded from power, the character of the new
age, and the intellectual movements in Germany and
Europe. Prussia could lead the German renaissance, but
she must first give practical proof of her identity with its
principles and its objects. If she cut herself off from the
great currents in the life of the German people, she would
cease to be German; she would unite Germany against
Prussia, and experience a second time the bitter fruits of
isolation. No other State had so strong a claim to be the
successful champion of a German national movement;
no other State stood to gain so much by accepting, or to
lose so much by refusing, this duty.
A remarkable development of Prussian conservatism,
rather than of Prussian particularism, found its leaders
in the Brandenburg Circle, which took its political philo-
sophy from Haller and Stahl, its religion from a revival
of Evangelical Protestantism, and its sentiment from a
horror and fear of 'the Revolution. ' It constituted the
nucleus from which the Camarilla of the Gerlachs was
evolved; and in touch with it were many of the men
who made the circle of Frederick William iv. both as
Crown Prince and King. It exercised for thirty years a
profound influence on Prussian and German history; in
its ranks Bismarck served his apprenticeship, and his breach
with its principles was the first great formative fact in his
career. The essential points of this aristocratic and
pietistic creed--an offshoot from the Holy Alliance, tinged
in its dreams and its aversions by the Romantic movement--
can be briefly summarised: the maxim of their party was
J. de Maistre's sentence, 'Nous ne voulons pas la contre-
revolution, mais le contraire de la revolution'! The
historic danger to all states and society lay in ' the Revo-
lution '; the struggle between the Revolution and con-
servatism began long^before 1789, and was continually
taking new forms; France was the main source of revo-
lutionary principles, which either placed sovereignty in
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? 42
BISMARCK
the people, or divided it between a hybrid and fictitious
popular will and an emasculated monarchy; the political
revolution was united with the intellectual, which taught
the freedom and sufficiency of the critical reason and sub-
jected everything to rational tests. Modern Germany
was deeply infected with both the political and intellectual
revolution, which unchecked would destroy all authority
in government and be subversive of society and religion;
hence it was the duty of Prussia to unite with all govern-
ments, based on legitimate principles, in order to main-
tain those principles and to combat the Revolution.
Conservatism was not local or national; it transcended the
artificial barriers of political, racial, and geographical
division; and in practice the allies of Prussia were Austria
and Russia; England after 1815 had deserted the true
faith; France after 1830 was only a crowned bourgeois
republic. In fine, the closest political and moral under-
standing between Prussia and Austria was the pivot of
a sound German and European system: united with
Russia, Prussia and Austria could save Europe. Separated
from them she was a conspirator in a moral cataclysm.
Such a creed and such a policy differed essentially from
the ideas of Prussian Junkertum; the Prussian polity was
not justified because it was Prussian, but because it con-
formed to the tests of a universalist system, and in any
collision between Prussianism and this orthodox conser-
vatism the former must be sacrificed; but the Gerlach
school shared with the Junker governing class the antipathy
to all liberal reform. For Prussia to tread the path of
England or France would be treachery to the cause of
right. Opposed as these several parties were, they had
two points in common. They accepted as an axiom the
claim of Prussia to be a Grossmacht. They were pro-
foundly dissatisfied with Prussian inactivity from 1815
onwards, which was an abnegation of her strength and
European position. Prussia was the one German state
in which patriotism was more than a rhetorical figure,
and membership in which was a cause of pride and a basis
of duty and service. Liberals, Particularists, or Conser-
vatives demanded that the Prussian king and the Prussian
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 43
sword should play a more independent part in the political
life of Europe. Even to the Gerlachs the Austrian
alliance, the sine qu& non of Prussian policy, caused obstinate
questionings when it involved a submissive subordination
to the secular and selfish statecraft of Vienna. Liberals
felt more strongly the ' shame' of Prussian obedience to
the Carlsbad decrees, the reactionary measures of 1832,
and the Prussian share in the suppression of the Hano-
verian constitution. The alliance with Austria was in
their eyes a surrender to reaction; the Bund and the Diet
were a national disgrace, and Prussia which could give the
tone and the Liberal Law to Germany had become the
tool of selfish and reactionary Austrian interests.
Prussian thought of all schools was inevitably driven
back on the deadlock in the Bund. If Prussia continued
to act with the Diet she was an Austrian instrument; but
how could she act in defiance of it without forfeiting her
German position, and destroying the whole movement
towards a common and more effective German organi-
sation? Nor could Prussian foreign policy be based on
internal German interests. The Prusso-Russian entente
had its roots in the established traditions of policy,
gratitude to Russia for services in the past, and a deep-
seated fear of Russian powex. Since Frederick the Great
had learned the meaning of Russian enmity in the Seven
Years' War, friendship between Berlin and Petersburg was
a postulate of Prussian safety. Poland and the Polish
question drove the conclusion home. The French
danger was no less impressive. In Prussia, the memories
of Rosbach and of Jena, of Napoleonic humiliation and
partition, and of the War of Liberation, were in the
national blood as nowhere else in Germany. The portrait
of Queen Louisa, the royal saint and martyr, hung in the
manor-houses of Junkertum and the cottages of the
peasantry; her tomb by Rauch at Charlottenburg was a
national vindication of her sufferings at French hands;
and there were thousands of Prussians on both sides of the
barricades in 1848 who had marched into Paris in 1814
after having liberated their country from French domina-
tion. The new King Frederick William iv. (born in 1795),
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? 44
BISMARCK
and his brother, the Prince of Prussia (born 1797), were
boys when the French entered Berlin in 1806, and they
had both served in the Prussian army of 1813. If France
was the hereditary enemy of Germany, she was the hated
and hateful oppressor of Prussia. Prussian Conservatives
and Liberals had common ground in their repudiation of
a French hegemony in Europe. It was the duty of
Prussian intellect to assist the superiority of Prussian
science, as it was the task of Prussian arms to maintain
intact the German territory in the west assigned to their
custody. A black cloud and the warning drops falling
anywhere in Europe, and Prussia instinctively faced to the
Rhine. War with. France--long before Bismarck sat in
the Wilhelmstrasse--would always have set Prussian
nationalism aflame; for deep and inarticulate in the
heart of every Prussian lay the desire to undo the work of
Louis xiv. , which Europe, callous to Prussian services and
sacrifices, had forbidden in 1815, when Prussia was
'robbed ' of the fruits of her victories.
Prussian Liberals recognised, but underrated, the
difficulties of liberal reform. Emphasis on the logical
and historical connection of the new liberal programme
with the reformers of the Stein-Scharnhorst period ignored
the cumulative force of facts. The inertia of the mon-
archy and the obstinacy of its ally, Junkertum, were the
real reasons for the failure to complete the reforms of 1808.
The conversion of Prussia into a constitutional state of
the French or Belgian type, with rights guaranteed in a
written constitution, was a reversal of two hundred years
of development in a precisely opposite direction. Yet
the mere demand for the conversion showed the strength
of the new elements in the Prussian State. But it was
clear that it could only be accomplished with the consent
of the monarchy, or by a military disaster, or by revolution.
In 1840 a revolution seemed as improbable as a second
Jena. Hence everything turned on the character of the
new sovereign, Frederick William iv.
Like his ancestor, Frederick 1. , Frederick William iv.
was 'a Hohenzollern with his back broken,' who be-
wildered his subjects and himself by the obstinacy and
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 45
contradiction of his convictions. His pride in the army,
his belief in his unfettered prerogative and the divine
right of his Crown, his conviction that the Prussian
sovereign in the scheme of human and divine things was
appointed to be the instrument of his people's good, and
earning their love and admiration, linked him with the
past. Nature had endowed him with an acquisitive, sym-
pathetic, and versatile intelligence, and no small share of
oratorical and artistic gifts. Essentially pious, he was
deeply stirred by the new religious forces at work in
Germany; a strong Protestant, he desired the union of
the Protestant churches both in Prussia and outside, yet
could sympathise with the Roman Catholic revival, for he
regarded religious belief and emotion as the basis and
sanction of political and social development. As Crown
Prince he had gladly cultivated the leaders of politics,
philosophy, literature and art. The friends of the Crown
Prince and King numbered personalities so various and
so different as the Gerlachs with the orthodox Conser-
vatives of the Gerlach circle, Radowitz, Bunsen, Rauch,
Cornelius, the Munich leader of the Romantic movement
in art, Stockmar, Humboldt and Ranke.
The rebirth of a national Germany, equipped with
organs rescued from the Middle Ages and reshaped to
express modern ideals, the reunion of Emperor and Church
in a revived Holy Roman Empire, the reconciliation of
modern Liberalism with historic Conservatism in the
spiritual, intellectual, and political life of the German
people, inspired the vision which haunted and fired his
imagination. Of this Restauratio Imperii combining the
fundamental unity of German culture with the unity of
German religion, Austria and Prussia were marked out by
Providence to be the co-architects and co-guarantors.
The German Imperial Crown must necessarily be recreated
as the hereditary prerogative of the House of Habsburg,
but beside the Imperial Throne would stand the Hohen-
zollern sovereign as Captain-General and Arch-Cham-
berlain of the restored Empire, and round these two
would be grouped the princes, dynasties, governments
and peoples of Germany in an ordered hierarchy.
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? 46
BISMARCK
Frederick William iv. saw political realities through a
magic and distorting screen of sentiment. His aversions
were as strong as his ideals. Liberal principles were tainted
at their source by French Jacobinism, and everything
French he abominated. Obstinate and impressionable,
he was always under the spell of characters with clearer
and narrower conceptions and stronger wills than his own.
'I am not a Frederick the Great,' he pathetically con-
fessed; and when revolution and then reaction rent the
web of sentiment asunder, he was helpless--the sullen and
disillusioned victim of fate, the reluctant agent of a policy
which, if it defeated the revolution, no less shattered the
dreams and ambitions of the German and Hohenzollern
king.
The summons to Berlin in 1847 of a united Diet--the
concentration in a single assembly of the unreformed
local Estates--brought to a head the issues between the
old Prussia and the new. To the liberal demands the
King replied that the royal creation of the united Diet
redeemed the pledge of his predecessor, and that the con-
stitutional reforms were now complete; he added that
his Crown was his by the grace of God, and that no written
sheet of paper (a constitution) should ever intervene
between his people and himself.
No less significant was the demand at Heppenheim in
October, 1847, for an elected national German Parliament,
repeated in a motion by Bassermann in the Diet at Baden
(February 12, 1848), in which the reform of the obsolete
and obstructive Federal Constitution was to be accom-
plished by and according to the will of the German
nation. In Prussia and in the south the two Germanies
--the Germany of princes and governments, the Germany
of their subjects over whom the liberal and nationalist
creeds were daily gaining a clearer mastery--were set in
array. The nationalist issue could not be burked. Poland
and the Poles within and without the German Con-
federation were in effervescence. From Schleswig-
Holstein came the imperious demand of 'unredeemed'
Germans to be freed from denationalisation by Danish
'tyranny'; and Holstein, as a member of the German
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 47
Confederation, was within the jurisdiction of a federal
execution. At Paris and Prague and Buda-Pesth, in
Switzerland and Italy, the storm-cone was being hoisted.
How long could the German princes resist the pressure
from within? How long could a representative public
opinion acquiesce in an unrepresentative Federal Diet?
In 1847 Germany rang with the confusion of opposed
creeds and programmes; distinguished spokesmen there
were in plenty in every state, but as yet neither side had
produced a leader or a programme commanding an un-
divided allegiance. Well might Stockmar write: 'A
new epoch is in fusion, the particular metal and stamp
of which cannot be divined. '
It was into this Germany of 1815-47 that Bismarck was
born, and in it he grew up. It was in this Germany and
Prussia, on the eve of revolution, that, as a member of the
United Diet, he stepped on to the political stage, and into
the political history of his country.
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? CHAPTER II
THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
? I.
Education and Entry into Politics
Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schonhausen,
born on April I, 1815, in the feverish month of renewed
war that followed Napoleon's escape from Elba, was the
third son of Ferdinand von Bismarck and Wilhelmina
Mencken. Of his two elder brothers only one, Bernhard
(born 1810) survived, and a third brother (born 1819)
did not reach manhood. Of his sisters only one, Malwine
(born 1827) reached womanhood. Schonhausen, the
ancestral home of his forefathers, lies to the west of Berlin
in the Old March (Alt Mark) of Brandenburg, which was
the original nucleus of the Electorate and the very core
of the future Prussian kingdom and the cradle of the
Prussian monarchy.
'Who are these Hohenzollerns? ' Bismarck once de-
manded. 'We were in the March long before they were. '
The claim that the Bismarcks settled in the March in the
reign of Charles the Great rests only on the pious autho-
rity of the genealogical table hanging in the hall of the
manor-house at Schonhausen; but two hundred years
before the first Hohenzollern, invested with the Electorate
by Imperial hands, set to work to tame the lawless inde-
pendence of noble and Junker in the March, the petty
village of Bismarck gave its name to a Brandenburg family;
and towards the end of the thirteenth century the Bis-
marcks were established in the guild and government of
Stendal, a township hard by. In 1345, as holders of the
fief of Burgstall, they were definitely registered in the
nobility of the March, and though they never reached
the status of the great aristocracy, they were henceforward
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
49
one of the many noble families who constituted the
governing class. In 1562 they were reluctantly obliged to
transfer Burgstall to the Hohenzollerns and to take in
exchange Schonhausen. Uninterruptedly in Bismarck's
possession from that date, it gave the family the name--
Bismarck-Schonhausen--which distinguished them alike
from other Bismarcks--noble, middle-class, or plebeian.
On his father's side Otto's family record was that of
most Brandenburg squires--military service in the elec-
toral and then the royal army of Brandenburg-Prussia.
Allegiance and devotion to the ruler were the traditional
duty of the manorial lords; and the ruler's prerogative
was reflected in the territorial prerogative of the servants
of the Crown, who administered the land, led their
peasants in battle, fought an unending struggle with
Nature and their own passions, a caste to whom the State
meant their Hohenzollern master and their own divine
right to govern under his guidance. Otto's father had
served, as usual, in the army; had seen Schonhausen
(built in 1700 to replace the original manor-house, de-
stroyed in the Thirty Years' War) in French possession
after Jena, and the sacred family tree pierced by French
bayonets. Love for the French was not, therefore, a
maxim taught to the young Otto. The Old March
nourished bitter memories of the French invaders, and
inspiriting records of the War of Liberation, and these
the young Otto imbibed as soon as he was breeched.
The tradition of the Menckens was very different.
They were not noble, but they could point in their lineage
to three professors of some celebrity in their day. Wil-
helmina Mencken's father served in the Civil Cabinet of
Frederick the Great and of his successor; was accused of
Jacobinism and displaced, to return under a more liberal
dispensation as Cabinets-chef of Frederick William in.
His daughter seems to have inherited the civil, literary,
and intellectual aptitudes of her race; she combined
them with an extravagant love of building, of Berlin, and
of the dilettante society of salons and fashionable watering-
places--all of them, save perhaps the building, tastes
detested by her son Otto.
B. D
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? BISMARCK
But until 1815 neither Bismarcks nor Menckens had
contributed to the dramatic annals of Hohenzollern
Prussia a statesman, a soldier, or a writer of the first, or
even the second, quality. Both families had a long and
creditable, but essentially parochial, record, research into
which could be safely left to the county antiquarian, had
the boy born in 1815 not made his name illustrious and his
ancestry an interesting study in the origins of genius.
These Bismarcks--and in Mendelian phraseology they
were the dominating strain--for four centuries simply did
their duty as squires and earnest Protestants, and they
planted, tilled, fought, drank, duelled, married, served as
sheriffs (Landrath), begat sons and daughters, and slept
their sleep beneath their blazoned arms, 'In Trinitate
Robur,' satisfied with being Bismarcks and Branden-
burger manorial lords. They ended, in the mystery of
human things, by producing a member of their ancient
house to whom they bequeathed in treble measure their
own fierce appetites, loves, and hates, an iron physique, a
brain, ambitions, and a force unique in the history of ^he
March and of their race.
In 1816 Otto's parents moved to Kniephof, the chief
of a group of family estates, inherited in that year, and at
Kniephof in Prussian Pomerania the little Otto grew up.
It was the Paradise of his boyhood, and there the heredi-
tary Bismarck link with the soil was forged. Towns and
the life of towns neither the lad, nor the ambassador, nor
the Imperial Chancellor ever liked. Streets were a prison,
townsfolk an unpleasant riddle. Whatever else changed
in Otto von Bismarck, the passion for rural nature--the
hunger for the land and the life of the land, forests, moor,
the blue spaces of an open sky, the wind across the pas-
tures, the hard-bitten men who lived, worked, and hunted
on the land--never changed. Pictures and sculpture
do not figure in his letters: he confessed when he was an
old man that once, only once, he had entered the Berlin
Museum; of books there is singularly little; there is
much of good food and good wine; but the earth and its
unceasing pageantry of beauty are never forgotten. Dawn
and sunset, the maturing sunshine of midday, snow under
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
moonlight, mountains, crags, and wooded dales--these
things he always saw because he felt their message, their
contact with, or memory of, his own home. The grey-
haired Chancellor, with his wolf-hounds at his heels,
striding with the watchful eye of a master amongst the
sunlit- glades of his oaks and beeches at Varan or Fried-
richsruhe, was happier in his freedom from the fetters of
the State than the boy on holiday who galloped his pony
over the monotonous demesne of Kniephof, stalked snipe
and wild duck, or hunted hares through deep snow.
Otto's education was of the conventional German
humanistic and literary type. At seven years old he was
sent to a preparatory school (Plamann's Institute), and at
twelve passed on to a . gymnasium. At sixteen, as became
a young noble and Protestant, he was confirmed by
Schleiermacher, at the height of his celebrity, whose
brief injunction: 'Whatever you do, do it with all your
heart and as from the Lord,' is said to have made a deep
impression. In 1832 he entered the University of
Gottingen, where he spent two years, followed by one at
the University of Berlin. Instinct and tradition suggested
the army as a profession, but his mother apparently
desired a civil career for this passionate, self-willed and
robust son ;* whether because she feared the life of an
officer, or divined the power in her beloved Otto, is un-
certain; but she had her way, and after passing the neces-
sary examinations he entered the civil service on its
judicial side, and was attached for duty at the fashionable
Aix-la-Chapelle and at Berlin. One year had to be given
to military service, and this he spent with the Rifles of the
Guard (Garde-J'dger).
Until 1839, when he lost his mother, abruptly ter-
minated his State employment and, owing to financial
difficulties of his family, took over with his brother Bern-
hard the management of the family properties, his life
had shown little indication either of ambitions or excep-
tional abilities. As a university student, though not as
idle as legend subsequently pictured, he had failed to find
in academic studies either intellectual inspiration or prac-
tical utility. Heeren's lectures made some impression,
U. OF M. FLINT CC\ : FGE LIBRARY
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? 52
BISMARCK
but neither Dahlmann, the glory of G6ttingen, nor
Savigny at Berlin can be reckoned as formative influences
in his education as they were in the training of his con-
temporaries Windthorst and Beust. The truth is that
then, as throughout his career, Bismarck revolted against
discipleship or subordination of any kind. Life was the
only teacher from whom he was willing to learn, and the
lessons of life he hammered out for himself, and he refused
to take them ready-made. He joined a famous duelling
corps, the Hanoverana. Duelling, beer-drinking, and the
riotous escapades of undergraduate youth, provided an
outlet for his exuberant physical powers. In the punish-
ment book of the university his name figures more than
once. Friends he made in plenty, three in particular--
Moritz von Blanckenburg, Motley, the American historian,
and Roon, twelve years his senior. Little did either guess
what the latter friendship would signify for the history of
Prussia. There is a story that in 1832 he made a bet with
an American student that Germany would be unified in
twenty years; but if he made the bet, he lost it. Forty,
not twenty, years hence he could have asked from the
Wilhelmstrasse for repayment. He detested and neglected
his duties as a civil servant. The career of 'the animal
armed with a pen' behind closed windows and under
the orders of domineering, exacting, or ill-bred superiors,
stirred his Junker pride and independence to mutiny.
At Aix-la-Chapelle, crowded with fashionable pleasure-
seekers of all nations, he plunged into gambling, debt, and
dissipation. For four months he broke away altogether,
travelled to Wiesbaden and Switzerland, fell in love with
a pretty English girl, but whether he broke with her or
she with him is uncertain. The sap was running strongly
upwards, and in the dawn of superb physical vigour Bis-
marck, like many, sought in physical satisfaction an ano-
dyne for an incurable unrest. 'Yesterday,' he wrote to his
wife in 1851, ' I was in Wiesbaden. May it please God to
fill with His clear and strong wine this vessel in which then
the champagne of youth uselessly foamed and left stale
dregs. ' Neither politics nor religion came to his aid.
He had ceased to pray; he was practically an agnostic
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 53
with a vague Pantheism simmering in a brain that de-
manded positive reality. Republicanism as a political
creed had appealed to him, but the democratic excesses
at the Hambacher Fest (1832) disgusted him with radical-
ism and all its works. Prussia had no public life to offer
him. Service in the bureaucracy of an autocratic crown
and the army were the only two professions available, and
he had rejected the one and was too old now for the other.
He fell back gladly on the career of a landed proprietor.
At Kniephof he was his own master, and his father's
death in 1845 made little difference to his position. He
acquired Schonhausen and lived there; but from 1839
onwards he devoted all his brains and energies to the
family estates and restored their prosperity. He studied
the science and practice of agriculture in all its forms,
revelling in his independence on the land that he loved,
bending men and Nature into obedience to his will.
Not the least impressive of the many personal touches
that vibrate in his later speeches, are those which reveal
the lessons he had learned in the management of his
estates. It is instructive to remember that at this time,
south of the Alps, another young noble, Camillo di Cavour,
no less dissatisfied than Otto von Bismarck, was patiently
serving a self-imposed and invaluable apprenticeship in
statecraft on the estates of his ancestry. The Bismarck
of later days, too, would have understood why Walpole
in the most exacting pressure of his premiership always
opened first every morning the report from his game-
keeper and bailiff. The Prussia in which the master of
Kniephof and Schonhausen toiled was not the modern and
industrialised state, which in 1841 was just beginning to
develop a new economic life, but a kingdom of agriculture,
of landed proprietors, farmers and peasants, in which more
than seventy per cent, of the population lived on, and
wrested their food from, the land.
But the cravings and unrest of Cavour and Bismarck
were not, and could not be, satisfied with the breeding of
beasts and making two blades of grass grow where one
had grown before. The countryside of Pomerania rang
with the dare-devil exploits, the dangerous tests of skill,
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? 54
BISMARCK
nerve, and strength of ' the mad' and 'wild Junker' of
Kniephof, ready to swim, shoot, hunt, or ride anywhere
and in any weather; no less ready and able to drink half a
dozen lieutenants from neighbouring garrisons under- the
table. The gossip which represented him as a Herculean
Lothario of coarse amours and a fabulous appetite is cer-
tainly exaggerated. But a host who could wake the
tardy guest by pistol-shots through the windows, and
whose irreligious views were more disquieting than his
morals, alarmed the mothers, if they excited the curiosity
of the daughters, in the manor drawing-rooms. Gossip,
however, did not know that the mad Junker was devouring
books--history, philosophy, theology, geography, and
poetry: Feuerbach, Bauer, and Strauss, Schopenhauer,
Lessing, Schiller, Riickert, Lenau, Freiligrath, Uhland,
and especially Goethe, Shakespeare, and Byron. The
effortless felicity of allusion in his speeches to Goethe
and Shakespeare proves the grip that the imaginative
realism of these two master critics of life had on his spirit.
Yet nothing as yet could fill ' the unfathomable weariness
and emptiness' of which a letter speaks; and Bismarck, like
Cavour, left his estates to travel, now to Paris, now to the
northern sea-coasts, now to England, completing his com-
petence in French and English, noting, as always, the
scenery, and storing his impressions of institutions and
society in a retentive memory. 'I feel,' he wrote in 1845,
when his sister Malwine married, 'more than ever my
loneliness in the world. '
The gnawing at his heart, the flux in his ideas, the need
of a sure anchorage in spiritual and moral realities, grew
with the inarticulate ambition for a career wider than
the duties of a manorial lord could provide. The answer
came from an unexpected quarter, and Bismarck owed
it to a woman's ideals. Through the wife, Marie von
Thadden, of his friend, Moritz von Blanckenburg, the
master of Kniephof and Schonhausen was gradually ab-
sorbed into 'the Trieglaff circle'--a group that had
Trieglaff, the Thaddens' estate, for its centre. The
Trieglaff circle linked hands with a more political group
at Berlin, the most important members of which were
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 55
the Gerlachs and Stahl, the writer on political philosophy,
and in this way he began the memorable political friend-
ship with General Leopold and his brother Ludwig von
Gerlach. The blend of evangelical piety, prayer meetings,
conservative politics, and sentimental literary dilettantism,
of spiritual tea-parties and picnics, at first amused and
then interested Bismarck. It was a new type of adventure,
and he was to discover how much a resolute and high-
minded woman can accomplish when she deliberately pits
her strength against the will of a resolute man. Marie
von Blanckenburg had divined the power in this erring,
loyal, and forceful friend of her husband's. She made it
her duty to ' convert' him. She succeeded, though she
did not live to know her success and its results. Her
premature death deeply affected the young man and com-
pleted the conversion. He resumed the habit of prayer
and the study of the Bible; Bauer and Strauss went into
the wastepaper basket; his cynical and agnostic Pan-
theism melted like snow in the midday sunshine of April.
He returned to the unquestioning Lutheran faith of his
ancestors. His mind was made up, and henceforward
his was a conviction impregnable to all the doubts, fears,
or disillusionment provided by the life that began in 1847,
and ended in the homage of a united Germany in 1898.
'I cannot conceive,' he wrote to his wife, 'how a man
who reflects and yet knows nothing of God, and will know
nothing, can endure his life for contempt and boredom.
I do not know how I formerly endured. If I lived now
as I did then, without God, without thee, without chil-
dren, I cannot think why I should not put life aside like
a dirty shirt. ' In 1870 he said: 'I know not whence I
should derive my sense of duty, if hot from God: orders
and titles have no charm for me ; I firmly believe in a life
after death, and that is why I am a Royalist: by nature
I am disposed to be a Republican. . . . Were I not a
staunch Christian, did I not stand upon the miraculous
basis of religion, you would never have possessed a Federal
Chancellor in my person. '
Love and marriage consummated Marie von Blancken-
burg's work. An attachment to Johanna von Puttkamer,
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? 56
BISMARCK
the daughter of neighbours at Reinfeld, steadily deepened
into passion. The father who ' had heard much evil and
little good' of the suitor for his daughter's hand, was
reluctant to consent; but Bismarck was not one to be
thwarted when he had set his heart on success, and he had
Fraulein von Puttkamer on his side. 'All right' was the
brief announcement in English to his sister of his betrothal
(January 12, 1847). His marriage followed on July 25,
and a happy marriage it certainly was. In his domestic
life Bismarck is seen at his best. What his wife was to
him and what he was to her can be read in a correspon-
dence which is real literature, and a precious human and
historical document. 'I cannot,' he wrote from Biarritz
in 1851, 'enjoy seeing so much beauty away from you. '
'My wife,' he said, thirty years later, ' made me what I
am. ' That adequately sums up an intimacy into which
we need not pry further. There was a great place in 1846
waiting for a woman to^fill. Johanna von Puttkamer
showed her quality simply by filling it.
Fate had already tapped at the door. Between Bis-
marck's betrothal and his marriage (April 3 to June 24)
the united Diet had met in Berlin, quarrelled with the
Crown, and been prorogued. Bismarck was one of its
members, confronted in a public capacity for the first
time with the Liberal and National forces, to which in
numerous utterances he opposed a defiant and unbending
Conservatism. He denied that the national rising of 1813
had any constitutional significance, and had any other
object than the natural Prussian desire to hurl the foreign
invader from the Fatherland. The remark provoked
fierce dissent from the Liberal benches. Bismarck pulled
a newspaper from his pocket and read it, standing, until
the assembly was quiet. He asserted that the Crown of
Prussia was worn by the grace of God, not by the grace
of the nation; he denied the right of Jews to hold office
in a Christian State, rejected as irrelevant all parallels
between Prussia and foreign countries, and maintained that
abandonment of the Christian basis of the State would
reduce it to a fortuitous aggregate of philosophical rights.
The young man of thirty-two was in collision with ideas
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-11-14 09:46 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 49015000251497 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 57
and with men he disliked on political and social grounds,
and he opposed to them the traditions of the governing
class to which he belonged, and which these rebels would
destroy in the Prussia that the nobles had made. He gave
vigorous expression to the creed of Prussian particularism.
Nationalism was the traditional patriotism of Prussians,
obeying an unfettered Crown ruling as it pleased through
a hereditary aristocracy. Liberalism would destroy the
historic Prussia, which must remain the Prussia of Frederick
the Great, whom Gerlach noted Bismarck had already
adopted as his model. In all these utterances there is no
recognition that the strength of Liberalism lay in its
mandate to represent forces within and without Prussia
that could not be refuted by the rubric and articles of the
crude conservatism of a caste, there is no appreciation
of the gravity and complexity of the German problem
or of Prussia's duty to Germany. The two impressive
characteristics in these speeches are the unmistakable
sincerity of the speaker's convictions and the undefinable
atmosphere of independence which can grow into leader-
ship. Bismarck spoke for himself, but he more than
voiced, and men felt it, his party.
