Bismarck demanded homage, and
he expected incense, from all the statesmen and all the
courts.
he expected incense, from all the statesmen and all the
courts.
Robertson - Bismarck
'--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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? 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
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? 39*
BISMARCK
it not the weaknesses of the physically unfit but the
qualities that made man the lord of the universe and of
his own hearth.
Bismarck was never on the side of the angels--for in a
dirty and sordid world he held that the angels by Divine
wisdom prudently kept clear of human affairs--but he
was never on the side of the apes. He was always' on the
side of the white man,' not ' the blonde beast,' of which
so much has been written with so much profound igno-
rance, but the white man who represented 'his idol,
Authority,' the man of the master races whose very vices
and brutality were the necessary correlatives of his virtues,
and were a proof of his strength of brain, physical vitality,
and appetite for order and discipline.
But beneath the elements of grandeur in Bismarck lay
an inferno of personal feeling as passionate and intense as
the manhood that he admired. His memory was relent-
less. Lord Derby in 1884 and 1885 was the Lord Stanley
whose share in the Luxemburg affair of 1867 was remem-
bered and requited by Bismarck's determination to chastise
him for thwarting his will. As Beust said, even the
Chancellor's boarhounds turned their backs on the former
Saxon minister and Austrian Chancellor. And from all
the agents of his instructions and his subordinates in the
Foreign Office Bismarck extorted a submissive obedience,
as Arnim and others discovered, the sanction of which
was dismissal and disgrace. Woe to the ambassador or
the under-secretary who betrayed any independence.
What men such as Holstein, whom many regarded as the
'Eminence grise ' of the Wilhelmstrasse, even in Bismarck's
day, thought the world did not learn until after 1890,
when official Berlin slowly realised that the terrifying
master would no longer emerge from Friedrichsruhe to
castigate and crush those who had dared in his absence to
take their own line.
One chapter of this^personal autocracy has never been,
and never will be, fully written for this generation.
Bismarck's devotion to his sovereign was limited to the
King-Emperor. The dignity, self-respect, and patriotism
of those concerned prevented the public, as distinct from
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
397
a narrow circle of the initiated, from knowing the full truth
of the Chancellor's conduct and relations to the Empress,
the Crown Prince and Princess, their relatives and friends.
But if that chapter is ever written, it will assuredly not
weaken the certainty that in the man were elements of
jealousy, vulgarity, meanness, pettiness, insincerity and
unscrupulousness, ineradicable and detestable. And it
is desirable to remember that the material for that chapter
was piled up by Bismarck himself, who knew that it could
not, and would not, be given to the world, in its repellent
entirety, during his lifetime--perhaps never.
The Dual Alliance of 1879 nad been intended to solve
the critical dilemma thrust upon him between 1876 and
1879, and to provide a firm foundation for his system.
But Bismarck doubtless felt that his object was identical
with that expressed in 1872 when he pronounced that he
had ' thrown a bridge across to Vienna, without breaking
down that older one to Petersburg. ' In 1879 ' the older
bridge' was hardly safe for traffic; but Bismarck was deter-
mined to reconstruct it. 1 The Dual Alliance steeled this
determination, while it provided an immovable point from
which to work. After 1879 a new method is distinctly
discernible, caused by the unexpected introduction of
wholly new elements. The position and problems of
Russia, to begin with, were fundamentally altered after
1878. The effort to effect by diplomacy and intrigue
what the Treaty of San Stefano would have established
by war and a treaty--the Balkan States controlled by
Petersburg, and a Constantinople living under the fiat of
the Tsar--the policy of Kutchuk-Kainardji (1774) and of
Unkiar Skelessi (1833) gave a wholly new turn to the
Near Eastern question. Such a policy, with Pan-Slavism
behind it, cut right across the Austrian line of develop-
ment and was wholly opposed to the ambitions of
1 'I have thus succeeded in carrying out the first stage in my political policy
--that of placing a barrier between Austria and the Western Powers. . . . I do
not despair of realising the second, that of the reconstruction of the Drei Kaiser
Bund . . . an idea that I have followed all my life . . . they will never devise
a political system offering greater guarantees for safeguarding all the Conserva-
tive elements in the modern world. '--Prince Bismarck to Prince SabourofF,
quoted in the (unpublished) memoirs by Professor J. Y. Simpson,- Nintteettth
Century, December 1917.
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BISMARCK
Germany, masked behind the Dual Alliance. It involved
Russia in desperate and tortuous courses in which the
weakness of her statesmanship was continuously revealed,
witness the folly and blindness of her treatment of Roumania
and Bulgaria, but it made a new and torturing problem
for Bismarck. The antagonism of Great Britain and
Russia was superimposed on the antagonism of Austria
and Russia; it had been recreated by the events of 1876-8,
and henceforward was a standing menace to both countries.
Russian expansion eastwards into the heart of Asia inflamed
the old quarrel of the Crimean War and of 1875-8, and
for Russia the expansion eastwards into Central Asia was
inevitable, apart from its merits as a riposte to Great
Britain, though it imposed a fresh drain on her resources,
while it restated the old problem: Was Russia to concen-
trate on her Eastern Empire, or on establishing her
position in Europe? Pan-Slavism, voiced by Skobeleff,
Katkoff, Ignatieff, and Pobodonostzev, could not decide
whether it was better to proclaim the Holy War against
the Teuton, and reach Constantinople via Berlin and
Vienna, or ignore Teutonic ingratitude and establish the
Slav in the capital of the Moguls at Delhi, and thereby
destroy the British Empire. Skobeleff at one moment
proclaimed the Eastern ideal, at another denounced the
Germans and deplored the Russians ' as dupes of German
policy, victims to German intrigues, and slaves to German
strength, only to be delivered by the sword from the
baneful influence of Germany. '
After 1878 Nihilism honeycombed Russia, and the
assassination of Alexander n. on the banks of the Catherine
Canal in 1881 terrified his successor, credited, as heirs to
the throne often are, with Liberal sympathies, into
terrorism. The necessity of an international union of
dynasties and governments against the menace of revo-
lution, sharpened by dismay at the unending surrender of
Great Britain to democracy, and detestation of republics
and republicanism, obsessed Alexander h1. Nihilism,
more than any other force, held France and Russia apart,
poisoned the relations of Great Britain and Russia, and, in
Bismarck's skilful hands, laid the basis of the compacts of
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
1884 and 1887. Alexander, swayed by Nationalism,
religion, and ambition, was continually breaking away
from the principle of a modern Holy Alliance of the Three
Monarchies, and continually being lured back by the fear
of revolution into the charmed circle of the magician at
Berlin. Well-informed statesmen were convinced that in
1880 Russia was on the point of returning to the entente
of 1872, when the assassination of Alexander n. and
the confusion caused by a change on the throne and the
internal peril to the autocracy, snapped for the time
the 'new wire' between Berlin and Petersburg. The
opposing schools of policy strove round the person of
Alexander in. , but it was not until death removed Gort-
schakov, Skobeleff, and Katkoff, and the Nihilist danger
had been comparatively mastered, that Russia and the
Tsar had both ears for Bismarck's arguments. Through
all the evidence available runs a persistent principle--the
desirability of uniting the monarchies on a common basis
of resistance to democracy and revolution--the old prin-
ciples of the historic Holy Alliance in a modern form.
Apart from the political considerations underlying a
German hegemony of Central Europe, this dynastic unity
was a bulwark of the existing social order, and no one felt
more strongly than Bismarck that his system at bottom in
Germany and without rested on the maintenance of a
defined social structure correlated to, and a guarantee of,
a distribution of political authority and defined political
principles. He could and did cordially agree with
Alexander in. that the political evolution of France and
the ideas underlying the Republic, together with the con-
tinuous lapse of Great Britain from aristocratic grace to
democracy, constituted a real peril and set up a perpetual
antithesis between the Liberal west and the Conservative
and Monarchical centre and east. The danger of infection
from the west was serious. For all the facts went to prove
that the west might inoculate and sap the centre and east,
but there was small prospect of the centre and the east
curing democratic Great Britain and France of their
deplorable heresies. Dual or Triple Alliances were of no
avail unless they aimed at ends deeper and more sub-
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? 400
BISMARCK
stantial than a nicely and perpetually readjusted political
equilibrium. A coalition of ideas and principles could be
more fatal to German supremacy than a coalition of fleets
or armies. The return, therefore, to a reactionary Con-
servatism, discussed in the previous section, was partly the
reflex, partly the inspiration, of Bismarck's foreign policy.
The disturbing elements in the situation were not con-
fined to Russia. Europe in 1880 was on the threshold of
an era with a very different outlook and ambition. Five
other characteristics can be broadly disentangled--the
Eastern Question, the problem of the Mediterranean, the
renaissance of France, the revived activity and policy of
Great Britain, and the colonial movement. Their com-
bination provided the problem for Bismarck, and his ex-
ploitation of them makes the history of his foreign policy
from 1879 to n*s faH-
After 1878 the Powers were much concerned with the
execution of the terms of the Treaty of Berlin. But the
military occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
question of Dulcigno--' Dulcigno far niente,' as was
wittily said--and similar items of the Berlin programme,
very soon faded into much larger issues--the Roumanian,
Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek questions; Egypt, Tunis,
Syria and Tripoli. Was the liquidation of the Ottoman
Empire to continue? Who were the lawful creditors of
the estate, if from any quarter a petition in bankruptcy was
seriously pressed? What was to be the dividend, and to
whom and in what shares was it to be assigned? The
Congress of Berlin had proclaimed the integrity of a
'consolidated ' and reduced Ottoman Empire, which like
the immortal' Peau de Chagrin' was always being pegged
out, and was always shrinking in defiance of every effort
to prevent it. Bismarck, therefore, had to decide what
was the interest of Germany in the Near East, and he
found the decision very difficult.
If we may judge from events, everything strengthened
his conclusion in 1879 that safety lay in a firm control of
Austria-Hungary. 1 He could pivot on the Dual Alliance
1 'Germany in view of her own lecurity could not possibly allow Austria to
have any other alliance than with herself. '--(From the Sabouroff Memoirs. )
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 401
more securely than on any other nodal, strategic, and
diplomatic point. The remarkable analysis at the end of
his Memoirs, with all its obvious omissions and veiled
allusions, shows how continuously and with what micro-
scopic diligence he watched and weighed every symptom
in Austrian policy. Austria was essential to Germany, for
if Austria collapsed the Near Eastern Question threat-
ened a catastrophe. The heart of the problem lay there-
fore in this issue: if it was easier to control Austria
than to control Russia--and to secure Russia if Austria
had been first secured--to what extent could Germany
'back the Austrian bill'? That Berlin must back the
bill drawn at Vienna broadly was clear. But the analysis
in the Memoirs and the crisis of 1890 reveal that Bismarck
fully recognised very precise limits to the German credit
placed behind the Austrian draft, and showed that he was
not prepared to support 'an unreasonable Austria' at
the price of a complete rupture with Russia. He decided,
in effect, that Germany and Austria might at some future
date have to part company, under the pressure of events:
and the decision brought him into sharp antagonism with
the new school of policy which made an Austro-German
alliance, co&te que coute, the basis of German policy in the
Near East. (See Holstein's criticisms in Hohenlohe, ii. 451. )
The main argument of that school was profoundly in-
fluenced by the growing ambition to substitute, also coute
que coute, a German ascendency at Constantinople (with
all its illimitable possibilities) for a Russian, a British, or
French ascendency; or, in other words, the integrity and
the revival of the shrinking Ottoman Empire could and
ought to be made a primary German interest. The Mayor
of the Sultan and the Sublime Porte was to be the German
Emperor, in close alliance with Austria. Bismarck between
1879 and 1890 was not prepared to go that length. He
recognised that it involved, for all its advantages, an irre-
concilable breach with Russia, and a serious antagonism to
Great Britain. To the end, while recognising a deepening
German interest in Constantinople and Turkey in Europe,
he had his eyes on the West and France. The ' Austrian
School' at Berlin was really interpreting Centralism in a
B. 2C
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? 402
BISMARCK
way that, in Bismarck's view, might imperil not merely
Germany^ interest in the East but the fundamental basis
of German supremacy in Europe. For Bismarck an
alliance of Russia and France, and the closing of the breach
between Great Britain and Russia, spelled the ruin of a
true system of European policy. The younger generation,
in short, was distinguishing between Bismarckian Central-
ism and a Weltpolitik. They aspired to make Germany a
Wdtmacht--a World-Empire--and not merely a Con-
tinental Power, and they saw the main road winding from
Hamburg through Berlin across the Balkans, through a
Constantinople controlled by Germany to Mesopotamia
and the Persian Gulf, with an entry to the seas not so
closely controlled as the routes down the Channel or
north of the Shetlands; they also saw it reaching across
the Atlantic to the Pacific, expressed in the formula ' ships,
colonies, and commerce. ' And for this young generation
the heart of the position lay in the closest offensive alliance
with Austria. It made Great Britain, not France or
Russia, the great rival of Germany. Bismarck's virtual
reply to such an argument was a paraphrase of Beacons-
field's judgment on Herat and Candahar. 'The Key of
East and West, of Centralism. . and Empire, was not in
Belgrade or Constantinople or Zanzibar--it was in Metz,
Berlin, and Thorn. '
In a more concrete form, the Near Eastern Question
from 1879 to 1890 was summed up in the antagonism of
Austria and Russia in the Balkans, and in the rivalry
between Great Britain and France in Egypt. These two
problems brought the Mediterranean into the main
diplomatic theatre, and kept it there.
By 1878 the isolation of France was proving exceedingly
difficult. The crisis of 1875 had shown that the European
Powers would not tolerate a further reduction of France
or French power; the International Exhibition of 1878
picturesquely mirrored the remarkable extent of France's
recovery from the collapse in 1870. Paris, as in 1867,
was still a great, if not the great, foyer de civilisation,
the attraction of which was inextinguishable. The new
France, working so hard to make good the blunders of the
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 403
Second Empire, would soon be, if she was not already, an
ally worth having. But the Germany that had failed to
crush her or to isolate her completely, and that must fail
to reconcile her because of Alsace and Lorraine, might
divert her gathering strength into directions that would
involve her in a collision with all the possible allies of the
new France. There were three such possible allies--
Great Britain, Russia, and Italy. The colonial movement
combined with the situation in the Mediterranean to give
Bismarck a fine chance of checkmating the rapprochement
so necessary to France and his diplomacy was equal to it.
After 1879 Colonial questions moved sharply and sud-
denly into the forefront of European controversy and
ambition. Africa and the Pacific kept the chancelleries
busy.
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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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? 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
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? 39*
BISMARCK
it not the weaknesses of the physically unfit but the
qualities that made man the lord of the universe and of
his own hearth.
Bismarck was never on the side of the angels--for in a
dirty and sordid world he held that the angels by Divine
wisdom prudently kept clear of human affairs--but he
was never on the side of the apes. He was always' on the
side of the white man,' not ' the blonde beast,' of which
so much has been written with so much profound igno-
rance, but the white man who represented 'his idol,
Authority,' the man of the master races whose very vices
and brutality were the necessary correlatives of his virtues,
and were a proof of his strength of brain, physical vitality,
and appetite for order and discipline.
But beneath the elements of grandeur in Bismarck lay
an inferno of personal feeling as passionate and intense as
the manhood that he admired. His memory was relent-
less. Lord Derby in 1884 and 1885 was the Lord Stanley
whose share in the Luxemburg affair of 1867 was remem-
bered and requited by Bismarck's determination to chastise
him for thwarting his will. As Beust said, even the
Chancellor's boarhounds turned their backs on the former
Saxon minister and Austrian Chancellor. And from all
the agents of his instructions and his subordinates in the
Foreign Office Bismarck extorted a submissive obedience,
as Arnim and others discovered, the sanction of which
was dismissal and disgrace. Woe to the ambassador or
the under-secretary who betrayed any independence.
What men such as Holstein, whom many regarded as the
'Eminence grise ' of the Wilhelmstrasse, even in Bismarck's
day, thought the world did not learn until after 1890,
when official Berlin slowly realised that the terrifying
master would no longer emerge from Friedrichsruhe to
castigate and crush those who had dared in his absence to
take their own line.
One chapter of this^personal autocracy has never been,
and never will be, fully written for this generation.
Bismarck's devotion to his sovereign was limited to the
King-Emperor. The dignity, self-respect, and patriotism
of those concerned prevented the public, as distinct from
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
397
a narrow circle of the initiated, from knowing the full truth
of the Chancellor's conduct and relations to the Empress,
the Crown Prince and Princess, their relatives and friends.
But if that chapter is ever written, it will assuredly not
weaken the certainty that in the man were elements of
jealousy, vulgarity, meanness, pettiness, insincerity and
unscrupulousness, ineradicable and detestable. And it
is desirable to remember that the material for that chapter
was piled up by Bismarck himself, who knew that it could
not, and would not, be given to the world, in its repellent
entirety, during his lifetime--perhaps never.
The Dual Alliance of 1879 nad been intended to solve
the critical dilemma thrust upon him between 1876 and
1879, and to provide a firm foundation for his system.
But Bismarck doubtless felt that his object was identical
with that expressed in 1872 when he pronounced that he
had ' thrown a bridge across to Vienna, without breaking
down that older one to Petersburg. ' In 1879 ' the older
bridge' was hardly safe for traffic; but Bismarck was deter-
mined to reconstruct it. 1 The Dual Alliance steeled this
determination, while it provided an immovable point from
which to work. After 1879 a new method is distinctly
discernible, caused by the unexpected introduction of
wholly new elements. The position and problems of
Russia, to begin with, were fundamentally altered after
1878. The effort to effect by diplomacy and intrigue
what the Treaty of San Stefano would have established
by war and a treaty--the Balkan States controlled by
Petersburg, and a Constantinople living under the fiat of
the Tsar--the policy of Kutchuk-Kainardji (1774) and of
Unkiar Skelessi (1833) gave a wholly new turn to the
Near Eastern question. Such a policy, with Pan-Slavism
behind it, cut right across the Austrian line of develop-
ment and was wholly opposed to the ambitions of
1 'I have thus succeeded in carrying out the first stage in my political policy
--that of placing a barrier between Austria and the Western Powers. . . . I do
not despair of realising the second, that of the reconstruction of the Drei Kaiser
Bund . . . an idea that I have followed all my life . . . they will never devise
a political system offering greater guarantees for safeguarding all the Conserva-
tive elements in the modern world. '--Prince Bismarck to Prince SabourofF,
quoted in the (unpublished) memoirs by Professor J. Y. Simpson,- Nintteettth
Century, December 1917.
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? 398
BISMARCK
Germany, masked behind the Dual Alliance. It involved
Russia in desperate and tortuous courses in which the
weakness of her statesmanship was continuously revealed,
witness the folly and blindness of her treatment of Roumania
and Bulgaria, but it made a new and torturing problem
for Bismarck. The antagonism of Great Britain and
Russia was superimposed on the antagonism of Austria
and Russia; it had been recreated by the events of 1876-8,
and henceforward was a standing menace to both countries.
Russian expansion eastwards into the heart of Asia inflamed
the old quarrel of the Crimean War and of 1875-8, and
for Russia the expansion eastwards into Central Asia was
inevitable, apart from its merits as a riposte to Great
Britain, though it imposed a fresh drain on her resources,
while it restated the old problem: Was Russia to concen-
trate on her Eastern Empire, or on establishing her
position in Europe? Pan-Slavism, voiced by Skobeleff,
Katkoff, Ignatieff, and Pobodonostzev, could not decide
whether it was better to proclaim the Holy War against
the Teuton, and reach Constantinople via Berlin and
Vienna, or ignore Teutonic ingratitude and establish the
Slav in the capital of the Moguls at Delhi, and thereby
destroy the British Empire. Skobeleff at one moment
proclaimed the Eastern ideal, at another denounced the
Germans and deplored the Russians ' as dupes of German
policy, victims to German intrigues, and slaves to German
strength, only to be delivered by the sword from the
baneful influence of Germany. '
After 1878 Nihilism honeycombed Russia, and the
assassination of Alexander n. on the banks of the Catherine
Canal in 1881 terrified his successor, credited, as heirs to
the throne often are, with Liberal sympathies, into
terrorism. The necessity of an international union of
dynasties and governments against the menace of revo-
lution, sharpened by dismay at the unending surrender of
Great Britain to democracy, and detestation of republics
and republicanism, obsessed Alexander h1. Nihilism,
more than any other force, held France and Russia apart,
poisoned the relations of Great Britain and Russia, and, in
Bismarck's skilful hands, laid the basis of the compacts of
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
1884 and 1887. Alexander, swayed by Nationalism,
religion, and ambition, was continually breaking away
from the principle of a modern Holy Alliance of the Three
Monarchies, and continually being lured back by the fear
of revolution into the charmed circle of the magician at
Berlin. Well-informed statesmen were convinced that in
1880 Russia was on the point of returning to the entente
of 1872, when the assassination of Alexander n. and
the confusion caused by a change on the throne and the
internal peril to the autocracy, snapped for the time
the 'new wire' between Berlin and Petersburg. The
opposing schools of policy strove round the person of
Alexander in. , but it was not until death removed Gort-
schakov, Skobeleff, and Katkoff, and the Nihilist danger
had been comparatively mastered, that Russia and the
Tsar had both ears for Bismarck's arguments. Through
all the evidence available runs a persistent principle--the
desirability of uniting the monarchies on a common basis
of resistance to democracy and revolution--the old prin-
ciples of the historic Holy Alliance in a modern form.
Apart from the political considerations underlying a
German hegemony of Central Europe, this dynastic unity
was a bulwark of the existing social order, and no one felt
more strongly than Bismarck that his system at bottom in
Germany and without rested on the maintenance of a
defined social structure correlated to, and a guarantee of,
a distribution of political authority and defined political
principles. He could and did cordially agree with
Alexander in. that the political evolution of France and
the ideas underlying the Republic, together with the con-
tinuous lapse of Great Britain from aristocratic grace to
democracy, constituted a real peril and set up a perpetual
antithesis between the Liberal west and the Conservative
and Monarchical centre and east. The danger of infection
from the west was serious. For all the facts went to prove
that the west might inoculate and sap the centre and east,
but there was small prospect of the centre and the east
curing democratic Great Britain and France of their
deplorable heresies. Dual or Triple Alliances were of no
avail unless they aimed at ends deeper and more sub-
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? 400
BISMARCK
stantial than a nicely and perpetually readjusted political
equilibrium. A coalition of ideas and principles could be
more fatal to German supremacy than a coalition of fleets
or armies. The return, therefore, to a reactionary Con-
servatism, discussed in the previous section, was partly the
reflex, partly the inspiration, of Bismarck's foreign policy.
The disturbing elements in the situation were not con-
fined to Russia. Europe in 1880 was on the threshold of
an era with a very different outlook and ambition. Five
other characteristics can be broadly disentangled--the
Eastern Question, the problem of the Mediterranean, the
renaissance of France, the revived activity and policy of
Great Britain, and the colonial movement. Their com-
bination provided the problem for Bismarck, and his ex-
ploitation of them makes the history of his foreign policy
from 1879 to n*s faH-
After 1878 the Powers were much concerned with the
execution of the terms of the Treaty of Berlin. But the
military occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
question of Dulcigno--' Dulcigno far niente,' as was
wittily said--and similar items of the Berlin programme,
very soon faded into much larger issues--the Roumanian,
Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek questions; Egypt, Tunis,
Syria and Tripoli. Was the liquidation of the Ottoman
Empire to continue? Who were the lawful creditors of
the estate, if from any quarter a petition in bankruptcy was
seriously pressed? What was to be the dividend, and to
whom and in what shares was it to be assigned? The
Congress of Berlin had proclaimed the integrity of a
'consolidated ' and reduced Ottoman Empire, which like
the immortal' Peau de Chagrin' was always being pegged
out, and was always shrinking in defiance of every effort
to prevent it. Bismarck, therefore, had to decide what
was the interest of Germany in the Near East, and he
found the decision very difficult.
If we may judge from events, everything strengthened
his conclusion in 1879 that safety lay in a firm control of
Austria-Hungary. 1 He could pivot on the Dual Alliance
1 'Germany in view of her own lecurity could not possibly allow Austria to
have any other alliance than with herself. '--(From the Sabouroff Memoirs. )
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 401
more securely than on any other nodal, strategic, and
diplomatic point. The remarkable analysis at the end of
his Memoirs, with all its obvious omissions and veiled
allusions, shows how continuously and with what micro-
scopic diligence he watched and weighed every symptom
in Austrian policy. Austria was essential to Germany, for
if Austria collapsed the Near Eastern Question threat-
ened a catastrophe. The heart of the problem lay there-
fore in this issue: if it was easier to control Austria
than to control Russia--and to secure Russia if Austria
had been first secured--to what extent could Germany
'back the Austrian bill'? That Berlin must back the
bill drawn at Vienna broadly was clear. But the analysis
in the Memoirs and the crisis of 1890 reveal that Bismarck
fully recognised very precise limits to the German credit
placed behind the Austrian draft, and showed that he was
not prepared to support 'an unreasonable Austria' at
the price of a complete rupture with Russia. He decided,
in effect, that Germany and Austria might at some future
date have to part company, under the pressure of events:
and the decision brought him into sharp antagonism with
the new school of policy which made an Austro-German
alliance, co&te que coute, the basis of German policy in the
Near East. (See Holstein's criticisms in Hohenlohe, ii. 451. )
The main argument of that school was profoundly in-
fluenced by the growing ambition to substitute, also coute
que coute, a German ascendency at Constantinople (with
all its illimitable possibilities) for a Russian, a British, or
French ascendency; or, in other words, the integrity and
the revival of the shrinking Ottoman Empire could and
ought to be made a primary German interest. The Mayor
of the Sultan and the Sublime Porte was to be the German
Emperor, in close alliance with Austria. Bismarck between
1879 and 1890 was not prepared to go that length. He
recognised that it involved, for all its advantages, an irre-
concilable breach with Russia, and a serious antagonism to
Great Britain. To the end, while recognising a deepening
German interest in Constantinople and Turkey in Europe,
he had his eyes on the West and France. The ' Austrian
School' at Berlin was really interpreting Centralism in a
B. 2C
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? 402
BISMARCK
way that, in Bismarck's view, might imperil not merely
Germany^ interest in the East but the fundamental basis
of German supremacy in Europe. For Bismarck an
alliance of Russia and France, and the closing of the breach
between Great Britain and Russia, spelled the ruin of a
true system of European policy. The younger generation,
in short, was distinguishing between Bismarckian Central-
ism and a Weltpolitik. They aspired to make Germany a
Wdtmacht--a World-Empire--and not merely a Con-
tinental Power, and they saw the main road winding from
Hamburg through Berlin across the Balkans, through a
Constantinople controlled by Germany to Mesopotamia
and the Persian Gulf, with an entry to the seas not so
closely controlled as the routes down the Channel or
north of the Shetlands; they also saw it reaching across
the Atlantic to the Pacific, expressed in the formula ' ships,
colonies, and commerce. ' And for this young generation
the heart of the position lay in the closest offensive alliance
with Austria. It made Great Britain, not France or
Russia, the great rival of Germany. Bismarck's virtual
reply to such an argument was a paraphrase of Beacons-
field's judgment on Herat and Candahar. 'The Key of
East and West, of Centralism. . and Empire, was not in
Belgrade or Constantinople or Zanzibar--it was in Metz,
Berlin, and Thorn. '
In a more concrete form, the Near Eastern Question
from 1879 to 1890 was summed up in the antagonism of
Austria and Russia in the Balkans, and in the rivalry
between Great Britain and France in Egypt. These two
problems brought the Mediterranean into the main
diplomatic theatre, and kept it there.
By 1878 the isolation of France was proving exceedingly
difficult. The crisis of 1875 had shown that the European
Powers would not tolerate a further reduction of France
or French power; the International Exhibition of 1878
picturesquely mirrored the remarkable extent of France's
recovery from the collapse in 1870. Paris, as in 1867,
was still a great, if not the great, foyer de civilisation,
the attraction of which was inextinguishable. The new
France, working so hard to make good the blunders of the
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 403
Second Empire, would soon be, if she was not already, an
ally worth having. But the Germany that had failed to
crush her or to isolate her completely, and that must fail
to reconcile her because of Alsace and Lorraine, might
divert her gathering strength into directions that would
involve her in a collision with all the possible allies of the
new France. There were three such possible allies--
Great Britain, Russia, and Italy. The colonial movement
combined with the situation in the Mediterranean to give
Bismarck a fine chance of checkmating the rapprochement
so necessary to France and his diplomacy was equal to it.
After 1879 Colonial questions moved sharply and sud-
denly into the forefront of European controversy and
ambition. Africa and the Pacific kept the chancelleries
busy.
