No More Learning

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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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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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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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. He was pointing the
way, and not merely tramping in the footsteps of others.
Well might the Liberals already call him the champion
of the Ultras; well might Leopold von Gerlach rejoice
that here was an ally and a disciple after his own heart.
The young Junker had made his mark. At his marriage
enthusiastic friends hailed him as a new Otto the Saxon,
a coming Otto the Great.
Allies and disciples of the old dispensation. were needed.
At Venice Frederick William iv. received Bismarck
travelling on his honeymoon. Sovereign and subject next
met after the Barricades in Berlin. Before the united
Diet could renew its rejected demands, the Revolution
of 1848 had swept over Germany and Europe.
? 2. The Junker Politician, 1848-1851
The astonishing period from the March days in Berlin
and Vienna - to the Convention of Olmiitz and the
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BISMARCK
restoration of the fallen Federal Constitution and Diet of
1815, provides a panorama overloaded with bewildering
and complicated events. The revolutionary spirit en-
graved her record with steel on hearts insurgent and
scorched with fire. In the evolution of Bismarck's per-
sonality and the principles of his statecraft ' 1848 ' closed
one chapter and opened another.
The main framework and background can be briefly
disentangled. The first phase lasted from March 10 to
November 1, during which Austria was crippled by con-
tinual riots and placed practically out of action. This
gave the simultaneous risings in Germany the upper
hand, and enabled the leaders of the Revolution to con-
centrate their efforts on the National Parliament at
Frankfurt, and to work through a national assembly in
Berlin for drastic reforms in Prussia. The fate of the
Revolution depended on the capacity of this movement
to make good its work before the Austrian government
could recover and challenge its supremacy. The National
Assembly met at Frankfurt on May 13, the Prussian
Constituent Assembly on May 22; but by the end of
June the revolution in Prague had been mastered, and on
November 1 Vienna was in the hands of Windischgratz,
and the Ministry of Schwarzenberg, a determined foe to
the Revolution, was set up.
A second phase began with November 1, and lasted
until April 28, 1849, in which Austria, aided by Prussia,
practically killed the Frankfurt programme. Hungary,
with the aid of Russia, was reduced; the battle of Novara
(March 23, 1849) virtually crushed the revolution against
Austria in Northern Italy; in Berlin the National As-
sembly, removed from the capital, was dissolved, and a
written Prussian Constitution, drafted by the Crown, was
proclaimed (December 5). This was a blow at the
Frankfurt Constitution-makers, whose success depended
on the acceptance by the German States of the national
unification, nearing completion at Frankfurt. The im-
position by the Emperor of a new constitution on Austria
(March 4, 1849) drove the Prussian stroke home. In
April Austria practically declared war on the Frankfurt
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 59
party. The Liberals had one chance left--to secure
Prussia and pit her in alliance with Liberal Germany
against Austria. The hereditary Imperial Crown of a
Germany unified on a Liberal basis, guaranteed by
the written constitution drawn up at Frankfurt, was
offered to Frederick William iv. The Prussian govern-
ment rejected the Frankfurt Constitution, and the King
definitely refused the Crown (April 25). The Liberal
Revolution had failed.
In the third phase, which lasted until October 5, 1850,
the interest concentrates on the attempt of Prussia to
make her own solution, an effort mainly influenced by
the policy of Radowitz. While Prussian troops were
suppressing the remnant of Republican irreconcilables
in Baden and the south, the Prussian government en-
deavoured to form a union of the four kingdoms of
Hanover, Saxony, Wiirttemberg, and Bavaria with the
petty states under Prussian leadership. The Union was
to have a joint Directory, a common Parliament, and
a constitution, to consist only of voluntary members,
and to establish a close understanding with Austria, ex-
cluded from the Germany thus unified. The surrender
of Vilagos (August 12) and of Venice (August 22) left
Austria now completely free to deal with the Germany
that would exclude her from all share in the Prussian
Union. The Frankfurt Liberals decided to support
the Prussian scheme, but by October 5 the four kingdoms,
influenced by Austria, had seceded from the League.
Austria had killed the original scheme of the Union.
Would and could Prussia, with the petty States, carry the
truncated scheme against the four kingdoms and Austria,
and establish a union of North Germany under her
leadership?
The fourth phase was closed by the Convention or
Punctation of Olmiitz (November 29, 1850). A Parlia-
ment of the Union met at Erfurt, approved a draft
Constitution, and adjourned (April 29, 1850). Austria
replied by demanding the revival of the old Diet. The
Electpr of Hesse-Cassel was at a deadlock with his sub-
jects; Hesse-Cassel professed to be a member of the
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? 6o
BISMARCK
Union, but the Elector appealed to the old Diet, and his
cause was supported by Austria, Bavaria and Wiirttemberg.
A Federal execution was ordered. Resistance by Prussia
meant war with A\istria and her allies in the Diet, on
behalf of Liberalism in Hesse-Cassel and the Erfurt
Union. Behind Austria stood the Tsar Nicholas 1. , the
spirit incarnate of legitimism and the counter-revolution.
The Prussian Court was divided. Many Prussian Con-
servatives, including Prince William, the heir to the
throne, were for war. Much as they disliked Liberalism,
their Prussian pride could not brook the humiliation of
surrender to Austria. The Austrian party at the Berlin
Court, however, only desired to destroy the Revolution
and to work with the cause of legitimism at Vienna. War
by Prussia in alliance with Liberalism meant civil war in
Germany, which must end either in the victory of the
Revolution or the destruction of Prussia. Radowitz's
resignation on November 3 proclaimed Prussia's refusal
to take up the challenge of Austria. The Convention of
Olmutz registered the abandonment of the Union and
the acceptance by Prussia of the Austrian ultimatum.
The Austrian School at the Prussian Court had vanquished
alike the conservative Prussian particularists and Liberalism
within and without Prussia.
The final phase ended on May 16, 1851. Austrian
proposals to modify the old Federal Constitution in her
favour failed. To the exile Metternich's joy, the old
Confederation was revived unaltered. The position had
swung back to that in February 1848, with one important
qualification. Prussia accepted a secret alliance with
Austria, by which in return for the maintenance of her
territorial integrity she guaranteed the whole, and not
merely the German part, of the Austrian Empire. The
triumph of Austrianism was complete. The attempt to
unify Germany through revolution and on the principles
of Liberalism had collapsed. Nationalism had collapsed
also. When Frederick vn. in 1848 succeeded to the
Danish throne, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein
demanded joint admission to the Germanic Confederation.
The Duke of Augustenburg, who claimed to be the heir
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 61
to the Duchies, was supported by Prussia, whose troops
overran Schleswig. It looked as if the Duchies were to be
won for Germany; but Prussia (August 26) made the
truce of Malmo with Denmark. Next year, when the
Revolution had failed, the Danes compelled Prussia, un-
supported by the European Powers or by Austria, to with-
draw her troops. The Treaty of London of 1852, drawn
up by a European Conference, guaranteed the integrity
of the Danish Kingdom, provided for the succession to
the Danish Crown, and restored the status quo in the
Duchies. The attempt, which had the enthusiastic sup-
port of the Revolution to liberate 'unredeemed' Ger-
many from Danish control, and establish a German
democratic government in the Duchies, had ended
in a complete failure, for which Prussia was largely
responsible.
Throughout these three years Bismarck developed a
fiery energy. Fear was not a word to be found in his
dictionary; his will could dispose of an iron physique in
the prime of manhood. From the March days when he
scribbled a note to the King, urging him to stand firm,
he was always ready to organise resistance, or, if need be,
to head a coup <S? ? . tat. He expressed his views with the
brusque and vivid frankness which shocked and puzzled
the courts and diplomatists 'du vieux pantalon,' and was
a blow in the face of the Liberal benches. He was present
in the Marble Hall of the Palace at Potsdam on that grey
March evening in 1848 when Frederick William iv. , pale
and exhausted in mind and body, announced to the
assembled officers, waiting for the command of the War-
Lord to clear the rebel canaille from the streets of the
capital, the order for the withdrawal of the troops--a
capitulation to the Revolution. An angry clatter of half-
drawn swords thrust back into the scabbards, and a growl
of indignant mutiny, swept over the hall, ' such as a King
of Prussia in the midst of his officers had never heard
before and, I hope, will never hear again. ' Though he
had no part in the memorable Parliament of all Germany
in the Church of St. Paul at Frankfurt, Bismarck was a
member of the Prussian United Diet, of the Constituent
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? BISMARCK
Assembly, and the National Assembly at Berlin, and of the
Union Parliament at Erfurt. He spoke often, and always
in uncompromising resistance to the Liberal programme.
He took part in the so-called 'Junker Parliament' of
August 1848--a conference of the Conservative Ultras
organised in a league for defence of king and country. He
was one of the group which founded and wrote for the
Kuuzzeitung, henceforward the leading organ of the
Conservative Party; throughout he remained in the
closest touch with the Gerlach Circle, the organisers of
the famous Camarilla, the unofficial secret ministry which
utilised the social position of its members and political
intrigues to undermine every minister tainted with
Liberalism, and to force the vacillating and impressionable
Frederick William iv. into obedience to the counter-
revolution. No member of the Conservative rank and
file worked harder than Bismarck to defeat the Revolution
of the Barricades, the Liberalism of Frankfurt, or the
Union policy of Radowitz. But he remained in the
rank and file. The efforts of the Camarilla to secure
office for him failed. Frederick William recognised the
unimpeachable loyalty of this Junker subject, but to have
given office to this 'red reactionary, smacking of blood,
only to be employed when the bayonet reigns without
reservation,' would have involved a breach with the
Moderates as well as with the Liberals. The King pro-
bably saw in Bismarck the representative of the men who
waged a truceless war on every effort to link the destinies
of Prussia with a Germany from which Austria was ex-
cluded. The influence of Radowitz was predominant
until Austria made it clear that the King of Prussia must
choose between war and surrender. It is not improbable
that Frederick William justly feared the influence of
Bismarck's resolute will on his own obstinate irresolution.
Nursing to the end the dream of a monarchical Prussia
which should gather in a free union under its eagle wings
the German kings, grand dukes, and landgraves, and build
a golden bridge to meet an imperial and purified Austria,
Frederick William shrank from the pitiless freelance,
master of the flouting. phrase that stuck, who amidst
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 63
courts and national assemblies superheated with sentiment
sought for realities and realities alone.
'1 was a terrible Junker in those days,' Bismarck re-
marked long after. '1 grant,' he said in 1847,' that I am
full of prejudices; I sucked them in with my mother's
milk and I cannot argue them away. ' It is a trifle, but a
significant one, that in 1848 he deliberately inserted in his
public and private letters the 'von' in front of the Bismarck
in his signature, which hitherto he had not used. As
Frederick William said at Cologne, ' There are kings still
in Germany, and I am one of them,' so Bismarck conveyed
that there were nobles still in Germany and he was one of
them. 'A terrible Junker,' yes, but not an unattractive
one, though he lacked the higher graciousness. His
superb physical vigour, his courage, his love of meat and
drink and tobacco, his power to drink and enjoy the cup of
life to the dregs, a buoyant geniality, and an amazing
frankness, extorted admiration even from his bitterest
opponents. The trenchancy of his principles was matched
by the unrestrained recklessness of his tongue. He re-
velled in his irresponsibility and the power to castigate
everything and every one he disliked. 'A handsome,
muscular, and truly noble figure,' is the description of an
eye-witness, 'in which is revealed in every feature the
chivalrous courage and also the refinement of the landed
aristocracy'; 'un gaillard avec le diable au corps,' summed
up another critic. He was, in fact, the Bismarck of
Kniephof and the United Diet, battling now in a Ber-
serker lust for the fray with Revolution and anti-Prussians.
To be young was good, to be strong was better, to have
your adversary in your power and crush him was best of all.
'Every courtesy,' he told the Liberal von Vincke at the
buffet in the interval of a heated debate, ' every courtesy
as far as the gallows,' and he meant it. The Minister-
President of the 'sixties, who could not sleep because he
was hating all night, could assuredly boil with passion
and disdain at thirty-two. Yet SchOnhausen and his
wife and the children now being born to him, were always
in his mind. He yearned for his manorial hearth, for the
sonatas of Beethoven, when the day's work in the field or
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BISMARCK
forest was over, and he could smoke his long pipe in the
corner by the great stove. At Erfurt in the spring of 1851
he would leave the Parliament to despatch tender inquiries
about measles or headaches, to stroll for hours through the
pine woods in the sunshine, watching the birds, noting
the cattle in the field, and reckoning the value of the
timber, or he smoking countless cigars staring up at the blue
sky and reflecting that a landowner's life was freer and far
more enjoyable than these accursed politics, made worse
by the nerveless ministers who ought to drink a bottle
of champagne at every meal to give them some courage
and grit.
His political creed was as lucid as the terms in which he
expressed it. It was idle, he said in April 1848, to regret
the March days. The monarchy had itself thrown the
earth on the coffin. He could have had some sympathy,
he remarked, with the Revolution if it had proposed to
plant the German flag on the cathedral of Strasburg; it
only proposed to fasten on the healthy body of Prussia
the Nessus shirt of Gallican Jacobinism. Similarly, the
Prussian Constitution of December 5 (limited as it was)
went further than he wished, but it was a free gift from
the Crown, and it must be accepted and worked because it
came from the Crown and not from the gutter. All at-
tempts to deduce from it principles contradictory to the un-
fettered prerogative of the sovereign were illegitimate, and
must be resisted. Two points he never tired of pressing:
first, the specific and unique character of the Prussian
State; secondly, its incompatibility with the Liberalism
which would dissolve the historic independence of
Prussia in a mongrel German unity. 'What has held us
together,' he said on September 6, 1849, 'is exactly our
specific Prussianism. It was the residue of the decried
Prussianism which survived the Revolution--I mean the
Prussian army, our Prussian treasure, the fruit of long
years of intelligent administration and the living instru-
ment that stands between the Prussian king and his
people. . . . That people from which this army is drawn,
and of which the army is the truest representative, has no
desire to see its Prussian monarchy drowned in the putrid
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 65
yeast of South German anarchy. . . . We all desire the
Prussian eagle to spread its guardian and governing wings
from the Memel to the Donnersberg, but free will we see
him, not fettered by a new Parliament at Regensburg, not
sheltering under the feathers of the levelling vulture from
Frankfurt. . . . Prussians we are and Prussians we will
remain. I know that I express in these words the creed
of the majority of my countrymen, and I hope to God we
shall remain Prussians long after this piece of paper has
been forgotten like a withered autumn leaf. ' A dozen
similar passages to the same effect could be quoted. Bis-
marck rejoiced over the rejection of the Imperial Crown
offered by the Frankfurt National Parliament.
'The phantoms,' he said, ' of the theorists at Frankfurt
have cost us in six months more blood, money and tears
than thirty-three years of despotism. . . . The Frankfurt
Crown may be very brilliant, but the gold which gives
reality to the brilliance must first be won by melting down
the Prussian Crown, and I have no confidence that the
recasting will fit the form of our Prussian Constitution.
My Prussian patriotism and so-called antediluvian point
of view are as precious to me as a refuge from the flood in
Noah's ark. '
, ' I fear,'"he exclaimed, ' the whimpering sentimentality
of our century, which discovers a martyr in every fanatical
rebel and in every discontented fighter at the barricades. '
And he stated his own theory of political government when
he said:--
'History provides us with the most brilliant and grand,
though not the most beneficial, phenomenon in a special
degree under the mark of absolutism, but we can find more
numerous examples of lasting political prosperity and
power in States subject to the influence of a hereditary
aristocracy . . . the brilliant memories of the German
Empire point to a powerful Imperial nobility. The
mediaeval prosperity of our cities began to wither at the
time when the patrician families went down before the
pressure of the Guilds . . . England trod a happier path;
she had no Richelieu who cut off the heads in which a
hereditary wisdom resides to an exceptional degree. The
B. E
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BISMARCK
character of the English Revolution is Freedom, of the
French, Equality . . . French Equality is the will-of-the-
wisp, daughter of Envy and Greed, pursued without
success by that richly gifted nation for sixty years through
blood and madness.