Moltke, more silent than ever, spied
out the nakedness of the land, and in his morning walks
studied the artillery positions from which this Paris, like
the Florence of Charles vm.
out the nakedness of the land, and in his morning walks
studied the artillery positions from which this Paris, like
the Florence of Charles vm.
Robertson - Bismarck
Bismarck's
views are susceptible of very various interpretation. It
is certain that he contemplated union between south
and north, as the consummation of the work of 1867. It
is no less certain that he recognised more deeply than
many of his critics the external and internal difficulties
in the realisation of such a union. It has been held by
many then, and since, that the fluid and elastic element in
the Constitution of 1867 was deliberately emphasised to
permit a subsequent incorporation of Bavaria, Wiirttem-
modification of the main lines of the Federal structure.
It has, on the other hand, been argued that the Consti-
tution of 1867 was deliberately provisional, and that Bis-
marck intended to recast the whole system on an imperial
Baden,
without substantial
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 241
pattern. Bismarck can be quoted for and against both
these interpretations. The truth would seem to be that
he had not really decided, and could not really decide,
when and how union with the south would be possible.
The form would turn on the particular situation, Euro-
pean as well as German. 'It is impossible to see in
advance with sufficient clearness the ways of Divine Provi-
dence. ' (August 13, 1875. ) When Miquel maintained
that' the line of the Main is no longer a line of separation,
but simply a stopping station at which we draw breath,
as an engine takes in coal and water, in order to proceed
on our route,' Bismarck could reply that 'we all carry
national union in our hearts; but for the calculating
statesman the necessary comes first and then the ideally
desirable . . . if Germany attains its goal in the nine-
teenth century, I should regard that as a great achieve-
ment; if it were reached in ten or five years it would be
something quite extraordinary, an unexpected crowning
gift from God. . . . I have always said to the National
Liberals that I look on the matter with a hunter's eyes.
If I lay a bait for game I do not shoot at the first doe, but
wait until the whole herd is busy feeding. '
Apart from the obligations1 implied rather than defined
in the Treaty of Prague--which France regarded as a
positive prohibition of complete union--and in the main-
tenance of which in all probability she would have the
support of Austria, Bismarck recognised the grave internal
objections and obstacles to union. Dynasticism, Parti-
cularism, Radicalism, and Clericalism were very strong in
the south. The Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria had a
historic tradition of independence that made its fusion in
a truly Federal Constitution, and its subordination to a
Hohenzollern presidency, virtually impossible in 1867;
the Radicals were predominant in Wiirttemberg and the
Clericals very powerful in Bavaria. Representation of
the south in the Reichstag of 1867 on the basis of universal
1 Article 4 of the Treaty of Prague ran: 'H. M. the Emperor of Austria
. . . also agrees that the German State to the south of this line shall form a
union, the national connection of which with the Northern Confederacy is
reserved for a more defined agreement between both parties, and . which u ti
maintain an international independent existence.
B. d
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? 242
BISMARCK
suffrage would have made formidable additions to the
National Liberals and Centre parties, and completely
swamped the Conservatives. The Federal Council would
have had an anti-Prussian majority; and the parliamen-
tary situation was sufficiently difficult already, without
swelling the volume of discontent created by the dis-
possession of the dynasties in Hanover, Nassau, and Hesse-
administrative incorporation of the annexed territories
was being carried out by the Prussian bureaucracy.
French statesmen, it is true, were congratulating them-
selves and France that Germany was now definitely split
into three clearly marked divisions--les trots tronfons, of
which Rouher spoke--the North, the South, and Austria,
and calculated that allies could be found south of the Main
and on the Danube. This view of the south was a pure
illusion, which sprang from an incurable persistence in
interpreting German thought and feeling in 1867 by the
light of a history that was as dead as Frederick Barbarossa
or Louis xiv. The conditions that had made the policy
of Richelieu and Mazarin, Louvois and ' the dance of the
Louis d'ors,' even of Napoleon 1. and the Confederation
of the Rhine feasible, had vanished by 1848--never to
return. It was the same fatal prepossession which had
ruined Napoleon's Italian policy; for it had led him to
suppose that Italy in 1859 could be really carved out into
a north, a centre, and a south, animated by a common
sentiment of Italian Nationalism, but retaining the
dynastic Particularism which could only exist on de-
nationalisation propped up by foreign bayonets. At the
Tuileries, in the Corps Legislatif, on the boulevards, and
in the 'estaminets de province,' Wittelsbach pride, the
clerical press, and the Radical critics and caricatures of the
south were regarded as proofs that the red trousers of the
French army would receive a warmer welcome in Bavaria
than. the blue uniform with red facings from the north.
Bismarck entertained no such foolish illusions. The
south he knew was as German as the north. But it was
much more anti-Prussian. It had never come under the
influence of Prussia to the extent that the non-Prussian
efficiency with which the
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 243
States north of the Main had; it had not assimilated the
principles and postulates of the Prussian State, which
were repugnant to all its traditions and outlook on life.
But that repugnance did not involve any readiness to
accept either French culture or political domination, still
less the principles of the Second Empire. Quite the
contrary. A Ludwig of Bavaria, a Prince Hohenlohe, a
von der Pfordten, a Bray, a Dollinger, a Varnbiiler, a Dal-
wigk, the representatives of the various warring parties
--Unionists, Clericals, Radicals, Particularists, Democrats
--that made the south such a tangle of conflicting
aims and such a confusion of discordant voices, carried
beneath their party robes as stout and patriotic German
hearts as any that beat north of the Main. Because they
were such good Germans they were so anti-Prussian, and
had not yet learned to bow the knee in the house of Hohen-
zollern; they were not ready yet to accept incorporation
on the terms of the North German Confederation, or to be
de-Germanised in order to be baptized by platoons into
Prussianism.
Bismarck on his side was decided in his refusal to sacri-
fice the assured Prussian hegemony in the north to South
German dynasticism, Clericalism, and Radicalism. Had
he been willing in 1866 to risk a war with France and
Austria he would have overcome the external but not the
internal obstacle to unification; had Germany been vic-
torious in such a war, the unification that would have
crowned the victory would have been very different to
the loosely jointed settlement achieved in 1867. But
Bismarck never took unnecessary risks, particularly to
achieve ends not in themselves absolutely urgent. Every-
thing therefore pointed to delay; but a halt implied that
everything meanwhile must be done by practical administra-
tion and cautious diplomacy to improve the conditions that
made for the ultimate acceptance of the Prussian solution
by the south. The chart of the future was studded with
rocks--many of them sunken, many just awash when the
national tide was at its full--but Bismarck's navigation was
in the next three years masterly. He had secured the sub-
stance in the offensive and defensive military conventions, in
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? BISMARCK
themselves a shattering refutation of the dreams dreamed
at the Tuileries; the Unitarians must be sedulously
nursed and continuously denied; the economic bonds
must be tightened into a halter round the neck of the
south; France and Austria must be carefully cherished in
the conviction that union was neither desired nor possible.
The unitarian force of Nationalism could be trusted to
work of itself, all the stronger if it was drenched from
time to time with Prussian cold water. France, not
Prussia, must be represented as the obstacle to union;
France which coveted the Bavarian Palatinate, which
threatened Bavaria and Baden because it was the unlawful
occupant of German Alsace and Lorraine. 'You cannot,'
Bismarck said, 'ripen opinion in the south by holding a
lamp under it,' and when Baden, the most Unitarian of the
Southern States, and the friends of Baden in the Reichstag,
repeatedly pleaded for its incorporation with the North
German Confederation, Bismarck put the demand on one
side with courteous firmness. The Treaty of Prague was
against it; it would be a breach of faith with Napoleon,
whose heart was hard, and it would annoy Bavaria and
Wurttemberg, who ought not to be annoyed. 'Why,'
he asked, 'skim off the cream, and leave the rest of the
milk to go sour? '
But, above all, make Prussia strong. The new Prussia
was not ready. She had to be hammered together.
Time was required for the Prussian bureaucracy to Prus-
sianise the north, for the General Staff to impose Prussian
organisation on the Federal forces and screw them up to
the Prussian concert pitch, for Germany to accustom
itself to the Prussian praesidium of the Hohenzollern
monarchy, for himself as Federal Chancellor to acquire
the moral prestige over the north that had taken four
hard years from 1862 to 1866 to acquire in Prussia itself.
When the north was really unified--kneaded, moulded,
and hardened by the Prussian leaven--the anti-Prussian
south could be swallowed--perhaps. The damping down
of Junker Particularism, the quarrels with the Kreuz-
zeitung and . the Conservatives, the entente with National
Liberalism that disquieted Roon and angered Prince
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 245
Frederick Charles and the fierce militarist Conservatives
of the old guard, were not without their influence on the
south. Bismarck, like other great Conservative leaders,
whose political imagination is as strong as their fidelity
to the essentials of the Conservative creed, had to educate
a party that did not desire to be educated. He had not
strained soul and body beyond endurance to win victories
for Liberalism. He was leading a rebellious and incredu-
lous Junkertum through the wilderness to the promised
land of an assured supremacy. Their faith faltered; why
not be content with the flesh-pots of the old Prussianism?
The Junker camp swarmed with Korahs, Dathans and
Abirams. Round the King the malcontents swarmed,
and the King was at heart as Prussian as the most reaction-
ary squire from the old March. He showed it by his
resentment at Junker sedition. When Conservatives
behaved as if they were middle-class parliamentary Liberals
William turned his royal back on them at levees, or rated
the rebels in the language of the Prussian War Book.
The strength of German Nationalist feeling was con-
vincingly shown in the Luxemburg affair, that came to a
head while the Constitution was still on the anvil. The
establishment of the Confederation of the North had
destroyed the legal and political status of the duchy in
the dissolved Bund of 1815. Napoleon, obsessed with the
policy of pourboires, grasped at the opportunity of acquir-
ing Luxemburg, linked by a personal union with Holland
through the house of Orange-Nassau. Bismarck main-
tained throughout that he would acquiesce in the annexa-
tion--it would please Napoleon and be no danger to
Prussia--provided that France would settle rapidly with
Holland and present him with a fait accompli. But he
warned Napoleon that he could not, and would not, on
behalf of the Confederation formally guarantee the trans-
action beforehand. In the spring of 1867, with the
Constitution unsettled, he had no desire yet to quarrel
with France, but he could not come to the Reichstag and
confess that he had agreed to the cession of what Germany
regarded as German territory. It is probable that this
line of action was sincere, and that, in presence of a fait
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? 246
BISMARCK
accompli, he could have persuaded the militant Nationalist
Liberals that a war for Luxemburg was unjustifiable and
not worth the cost. But Bismarck forgot that others had
good reason to distrust his sincerity and his methods.
The King of Holland, in fear of Prussian aggression on
Limburg, was prepared to close with Napoleon, provided
that the contract had been first approved of by Prussia.
He not unnaturally was afraid of making a bargain that
Bismarck could easily employ as an excuse for attacking
Holland. And Napoleon, on the principle that the supper
with the Devil must have a long spoon, feared a trap, unless
Prussia formally consented prior, and not subsequently,
to the agreement with France. The Quai d'Orsay had had
bitter experience of Bismarck's verbal assurances. This
time they would have a bond.
The negotiations were bruited abroad--perhaps deli-
berately by the Prussian Foreign Office--and at once the
National Liberals were up in arms. They found solid
support from Prince Frederick Charles and the Conser-
vatives; Nationalist sentiment was no less stirred in
France, and at the commencement of March Bismarck
was faced with the alternative of yielding to French pres-
sure or acting with the German Nationalists and defying
France. He insisted that France and Holland had bungled
the business and put him in a position where he had no
choice but to resist. Be that as it may, he extricated him-
self with his usual mixture of menace and skill. On
March 19 he published in the official Gazette the secret
military conventions with the Southern States--a plain
warning that France would meet a united Germany if it
came to war over German soil; and it is practically certain
that Bennigsen's interpellation of April 1 in the Reichstag
was arranged by Bismarck with the full concurrence of
the Conservative party. Bennigsen's fiery oration spoke
out the thought of Germany, and is an instructive object
lesson in the German Nationalism of the Liberals. Bis-
marck's reply was a disavowal of the idea that Prussia
would consent to any infringement of German rights,
coupled with the assurance that a pacific solution, honour-
able to all parties, could be found.
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 247
An International Congress at London devised the solu-
tion. Luxemburg had its fortifications razed; the Prus-
sian garrison which had occupied it as a Federal fortress
was withdrawn; and the duchy itself was neutralised
under the guarantees of the great contracting Powers,
signatory to the treaty. The whole affair was another
rebuff to Napoleon--another feather in Bismarck's cap.
Napoleon did not get his pourboire; French national
feeling was angered at a fresh humiliation, and the secret
military conventions with the south; German Nationalism
was, if not triumphant, pacified by the influence it had
exercised. It is not surprising that at the Quai d'Orsay
Bismarck's conduct was interpreted in the most sinister
light. He had lured prance on in order to inflict a fresh
rebuff. This man was neither to hold nor to bind--which
was perfectly true. The Franco-Prussian negotiations, in
fact, from July 5, 1866 to June 1867 explain, though they
do not justify, the determination three years later to wring
from the King of Prussia a categorical renunciation of the
Hohenzollern candidature. Still more significant was the
revelation of passionate feeling in France and Germany,
which an incident far more trifling than Luxemburg
could fire at any moment into an explosion. France felt
she was being steadily ringed with a German girdle that
only war could break; Germany desired complete union,
and was perpetually reminded that France vetoed it. In
May 1867 a word from Napoleon or from Bismarck would
have brought about war. But in May 1867 Prussia was
not ready, and Napoleon was absorbed in the success of the
universal exhibition, which made Paris the carnival of
Europe.
Bismarck was in a genial temper. The Prussian Diet
had assigned a large sum of money for rewarding the
Prussian leaders in the victories of 1866, and the King,
very properly, selected his Minister-President for dis-
tinction. He desired that the sum assigned (400,000
thalers) should be invested in an estate, perpetually as-
sociated 'with the fame of your name and your family. '
Bismarck bought a property at Varzin, in the north of
Pomerania, some five-and-twenty miles from the Baltic
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BISMARCK
coast, and surrounded by the landed aristocracy which
regarded itself as 'vassals of the Margrave of Brandenburg. '
At Varzin he could live the life he loved, the life of great
spaces, swept by the winds across the heather and through
the woods, the life of the manorial lord, hunter, forester,
agriculturist, the dispenser of a seigneurial hospitality in
the old German manner, more interested, his wife pro-
nounced, in turnips than politics. Around him, as at
Schonhausen, were the estates of friends and kinsmen--
the men who made the marrow and bone of Prussianism--
and Bismarck flung himself into the task of ordering and
developing his new property, planting trees, felling timber,
fencing, draining, manuring, sowing, breeding cattle,
creating outlets for his produce, buying in the cheapest,
and selling in the dearest, market. The infernal toil of the
Wilhelmstrasse, the perpetual audiences with the King,
the daily flow and ebb of telegrams, deputies, ministers,
ambassadors and the grinding pen-work intensified his
passion for blue sky and the fragrance of the pine-woods with
the salt of the Baltic in the north wind. Varzin was a better
reward than the steady drizzle of crosses, stars, and orders,
now descending on him from German kings or foreign
potentates. But even at Varzin after a day on horseback,
or in the marshes after snipe and woodcock, when the
lights had been extinguished and the household slept, the
lamp in Bismarck's study burned till dawn. The great
Pomeranian boarhounds, asleep, but a symbol of Prussia
toujours en vedette, knew that at his desk their master,
freed from the day's routine, was hammering out, through
cigar after cigar, the practical solution of the problems
with which his brain never ceased to wrestle. It. was in
these lonely vigils that Schleswig-Holstein was annexed,
Austria overthrown, Napoleon duped and chastised, the
North German Confederation brazed together, the German
Empire made--in the watches of the night that Bismarck
would open his Bible and find the confirmation of his
faith in a Divine Providence and a God Who ordered the
world and chose the instruments of His inscrutable will.
All the world flocked to Paris. The reconciliation of
France and Prussia was apparently sealed by the visit of
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 249
King William and the princes and elders of the Prussian
congregation. The exhibition of 1867, like the exhibition in
London of 1862 that preceded the American and Austrian
wars, proclaimed to the Europe and the America that had
witnessed Gettysburg and Koniggratz peace and goodwill,
and an era of beneficent rivalry in the unrestrained quality
of trade, commerce, and the arts. Paris has been, since
the history of France . began, a matchless creator of life's
greater ironies. It surpassed itself in the summer of 1867,
when Napoleon received his royal and imperial guests with
balls, dirtners, soirees, reviews, the enchantments of the
exhibition, the galaxy of beauty at the Tuileries, fit to
adorn the creative genius of Worth and the Rue de la Paix,
and over all the carnal gaiety of La Grande Duchesse de
Gerolstein, and the intoxicating romp of Offenbach's in-
vitation to dance and dance again. 'Let us laugh, let us
sing, and to-morrow we shall die. ' What is life but an
opera bouffe, the buzz of pleasure-loving insects in a brief
circle of warm sunshine, the grey but rose-tipped dawn, the
splendour of midday, and the annihilating darkness of night?
What did it matter that Berejowski tried with his pistol to
avenge the wrongs of Poland, that at Queretaro Maximilian
had been shot, that Garibaldi had risen again and been
wounded at Aspromonte, that the French chassepots had
'wrought marvels' at the Mentana which denied Rome
to Italy and reaffirmed the temporal power of the Papacy,
that men and women were sweated and starved at Lyons,
and that the 'red international' was laying the basis of
the commune in the hungry squalor of the faubourgs of
St. Antoine and Belleville?
With King William came Moltke and Bismarck, ready
for a brief respite between the task of crushing Austria and
crushing France.
Moltke, more silent than ever, spied
out the nakedness of the land, and in his morning walks
studied the artillery positions from which this Paris, like
the Florence of Charles vm. only fit to be looked on in
days of holiday, could be bombarded. It was Moltke's
first visit, and he used it to make the next time a memor-
able one for himself and the world. Bismarck knew Paris
well. He shrugged his broad shoulders at the hisses of the
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BISMARCK
patriots in the crowd. 'I am not surprised at my recep-
tion,' he remarked; f we politicians cannot please every-
body. ' But for all that he conquered Paris by his gallant
readiness to drain to the dregs the cup that Circe daily
brewed for her guests. He walked and dined, drank and
supped, enjoyed the Jeerie at the Hotel de Ville, laughed
at the gala performances of La Grande Duchesse, with its
raillery of the morals, vanities, pettinesses, and pipe-clay
militarism of the small German courts. He danced.
Madame Carette records in her Souvenirs Intimes her waltz
with the Minister-President. 'Deign, madame,' he said,
offering her the rose from his buttonhole, ' to keep this as
a remembrance of the last waltz I shall dance in my life,
'and which I shall not forget. ' Nor did he omit to call at
the Quai d'Orsay, and with the barbed frankness of which
he was a master, half in jest, half in earnest, expose the
blunders that France had made in her diplomacy, and
suggest how the French Foreign Office could have put a
dozen nasty spokes in the Prussian wheels. Marshal
Lebceuf, immortal for his guarantee in 1870 that France
was ready to the last gaiter-button, divined the Prussian
heart when he solemnly conducted Bismarck and Moltke
round Versailles. 'Sire,' he related to Napoleon, ' I have
had a terrible day with two men who hate us with a mortal
hatred. ' It was so true. But to Paris Bismarck appeared,
as Marshal Vaillant told him, a very human and fascinating
giant. 'Vraiment, c'est un bon bougre. Un gaillard qui
n'a pas froid aux yeux. ' He promised to return--and
soon. Bismarck's next visit to Paris!
A year of patient work followed his return, bringing the
new Federal machinery into operation, but principally
occupied with comp. eting the economic union of Germany.
The military conventions when submitted for ratification
to the Parliaments at Munich and Stuttgart provoked
obstinate criticism and opposition. Bismarck promptly
replied with a stroke at a vital and exposed part of the
Southern States. The renewal of the tariff union between
south and north was declared to be dependent on the
acceptance of the conventions. Threatened with eco-
nomic ruin the Parliaments sulkily ratified the defensive
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 251
and offensive military agreements. Bismarck now carried
the Zollverein far beyond the form and scope of the previ-
ous organisation. A Tariff Parliament of deputies, chosen
by direct universal suffrage, and a Tariff Federal Council
(Zoll Bundesrat) on the model of the Federal Council of
the north, were created to authorise the economic legis-
lation of the future. The first session was held at Berlin
on April 27, 1868, and Germany, including Luxemburg,
had now a representative organisation at work, in which
south and north met in common conference for common
German purposes. The economic, like the military union,
preceded the political by three years.
That first session of the Tariff Parliament was a notable
illustration of the forces at work for and against the main-
tenance of the divided Germany of 1867. Ardent union-
ists north and south of the Main hoped to dovetail into the
Tariff Parliament powers to discuss political business
common to both Germanies. But the proposal to extend
the economic authority of the new organ was defeated by
a narrow majority. The prickly particularism of the dele-
gates from the south took its revenge for the coercion
over the military conventions. Bismarck wisely kept
aloof from the debates. But in private he accomplished
much by frank intercourse with friends and critics. The
economic machinery would have its effect in time. The
inevitable union could be floated meanwhile in a flood of
good German Munich beer and Prussian hock, or en-
visaged with the eye of faith through the blue clouds of
after-dinner cigars. A fine chance was given him, and he
grasped it at once. Probst, a deputy from Stuttgart,
warned the Parliament against the union of north and
south, since it would involve a war to the knife with
France. Bismarck replied that he could understand and
sympathise with the argument that the south must not be
coerced by the north--when union came, it must be the
free act of both Germanies--but the argument of fear--
as to that, he concluded with vibrating passion and amid
a hurricane of cheers,' the appeal to fear will never find an
echo in German hearts. ' It was the note of power struck
on the keyboard of Nationalism. In Bismarck's political
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BISMARCK
armoury it derived its tremendous force from the person-
ality and achievements of the speaker, one who neithe-
feared nor flattered flesh.
Since 1867 the barometer of Unionism had been steadily
falling. Reaction had inevitably set in, and shallow de-
pression after shallow depression drenched the two
Germanies. The formation of the Southern States in a
separate union, with an independent international exist-
ence, had not been established, and there was no likelihood
of its being carried through. The south felt that such a
union would facilitate incorporation with the north on the
terms of the north; Bismarck suspected that it would fall
under Austrian control, while Austria feared that it would
be a fresh sphere of Prussian influence, and France that it
would be a fresh obstacle to French ambition. Hohenlohe
summed the matter up: 'The reason why such a federa-
tion has not been consummated has hitherto lain in the
purely negative attitude taken by the governments of
Wurttemberg, Baden, and Hesse, and in the lack of any
sympathy with this idea among the people . . . and if the
Southern Confederation meets with insuperable difficulties
in Wurttemberg, you will admit that in Baden impossi-
bility stares it in the face ' (Memoirs, i. 226 and 395). The
Bavarian feeling was no less strong in its indifference and
in its attachment to Bavarian autonomy. The failure was
all in Bismarck's favour. The independence of the four
southern States enabled him later (see p. 283) to negotiate
separately with each state and utilise the separate bargains
to compel acceptance of his terms. Had there been a
southern union in 1870, acting as a single unit, it would
have demanded and obtained far more favourable terms
as the condition of entering the Empire.
The real achievement of Prussia after 1867--the patient
manipulation of the Bundesrat, the unifying legislation
begun in the Reichstag, the remorseless assimilation of the
annexed provinces by the Prussian civil service, the solid
concrete of science, research, and political thought laid by
the intellectuals of National Liberalism and the flower of
the professoriate--was largely concealed from the foreign
public opinion outside the Confederation, which expects
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 253
to discover the soul, thought, and work of a nation in the
columns of the newspapers with which its women light
their stoves and the men their cigars. The entrenched
Philistia of Great Britain, regarding universities as places
where youths learned either to become gentlemen or book-
worms, and science as a harmless recreation for literary
institutes or the finger-staining drudgery of the apothe-
cary, persisted in regarding the German universities, where
the renaissance of the German mind was being completed,
as centres of dreamy idealism or the dreary laboratories
of an unintelligible theology. The apostle of sweet-
ness and light, Matthew Arnold, writing the classical
reports in which he foretold the coming supremacy of
Germany because, like the Italian renaissance, it strove to
combine the humanities with science, with 1866 staring
him in the face, believed that the French army in 1870
would smash the Prussian. So potent even on priestly
rebels of the House of Levi are the Idols of the Market-
place and of the Tribe. Colonel Stoffel, a tragic Cas-
sandra, if ever there was one, for three years warned his
government at Paris of what Prussia was preparing; but
the men like Marechal Niel, who had divined the truth,
either perished under the surgeon's knife or were impotent.
The Second Empire had justly forfeited the confidence of
thinking and toiling France; and the ears of the Tuileries
and the Quai d'Orsay were stuffed with clerical wax.
But the lower the barometer fell, the harder, with
Bismarck's kno-vledge, did the Great General Staff work.
Thanks to the Federal Chancellor, it was free from the
interference not merely of journalists or irresponsible
politicians but of a Cabinet which had never studied war
or regarded it as an unexpected disease, to be dealt with on
its symptoms when there could be no doubt it had broken
out. To Bismarck there were two certainties, and only
two, in an inscrutable world--the Prussian Crown and the
Prussian Army. The Prussian King was his affair, and on
him, as on the rocher de bronze, the compass of policy could
swing freely in the dirtiest weather. The time of blood
and iron had not passed. It was truer than ever in his
interpretation that the greatest question of the age, the
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BISMARCK
settlement with France, would not be settled by resolutions
in the Reichstag and the Zoll Parliament, the speeches of
Thiers, or the manufactured plebiscites of the Minister of
the Interior at Paris. The surgery of war was needed to
let the bad blood out in Germany. When some thousands
of Bavarians and Wurttembergers had fallen beside Prus-
sian, Saxon, Hanoverian, and Nassauer, the Empire would
be made. The iron crown of the Imperial Hohenstaufen
would not be picked up in the gutters of Frankfurt or
Berlin--that was the folly of 1848 and 1866--but on a
victorious battlefield in France.
The idea of disarmament had been in the air since 1868,
and Daru at Paris, Virchow and the Radicals at Berlin were
playing with it. But Lord Newton in his Life of Lord
Lyons has kindly lifted the blinds for us, and the instructive
episode in which the British government, inspired from
Paris, confidentially invited in the spring of 1870 Prussia
to join in a European disarmament can now be studied in
its entirety. Bismarck maintained a grave courtesy--he
was never gravely courteous with the realities of statecraft
or of fife--but the admirable essays of Lord Clarendon
must have stirred 'the irreverent merriment' that he
allowed himself when English pacifism was proved by the
sale of an ironclad to Prussia and the readiness to sell
another. These excellent insulars simply did not live in
the world of facts, and Bismarck put them aside with the
soothing firmness that self-control owes to a well-meaning
but hysterical woman.
Clarendon in 1864 had protested that he desired no
further intercourse with cet homme, sansfoi et sans hi; he
now appealed to Count Bismarck--' I am sure that a
statesman so liberal and far-sighted will admit without
regret'--a sentence the choice of the epithets in which is
delicious. Bismarck replied quietly,' that he did not dare
even to name the subject of the letter to the King. . . .
Coming from England it would make the worst impression
on him. ' He added 'that any weakening of Prussia's
power, any disturbance of the Balance of Power in Europe,
can hardly be for the interest of England'--and empha-
sised the formidable dangers that Prussia had to face from
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 255
France, Austria, Russia, and--a pretty stroke--Denmark.
'I saw,' wrote our ambassador, 'it was useless to pursue
the question further. ' In reality it was useless to have
raised it at all.
This is not a case of superior wisdom after the event.
When our Foreign Office suggested that Prussia should
disarm, it was asking Prussia to cease to be the Prussia of
Frederick the Great and Bismarck; it was further asking
that Prussia and Germany should abandon the ideal of
unification on Bismarckian lines. There was substantial
truth in Bismarck's contention that France was irrecon-
cilably hostile to German ambitions, and that this hostility
made the armed strength of Prussia a first condition of
security, and, though he did not say so, of attaining her end
in defiance of that hostility. If Lord A. Loftus had not
categorically informed our Foreign Office that north and
south would seize the first opportunity of agreement
between the two parties to unite, he was writing, as
Bismarck said in 1862, 'more nonsense to London than I
suspected. ' There was as little chance of the government
at Berlin abandoning this ideal of union, as there was of
England renouncing the union with Scotland and Ireland
on the suggestion of Berlin 'in the interest of European
peace and the Balance of Power,' or of the United States
abandoning American unity in 1861 or 1867, because it
suited the aristocrats of Great Britain and Europe. The
suggestion of renunciation was to the German mind an
impertinence which proved English jealousy. Lord Lyons,
Ollivier, Daru, Napoleon in. , the Empress Eugenie, Thiers,
the young Gambetta, who had leaped into fame over the
proces Baudouin, could all have told Clarendon that
neither the Second Empire nor France would permit the
union of North and South Germany--the establishment
on their frontier of a military empire, controlled by
Bismarck. Had our Foreign Office informed the Quai
d'Orsay that the condition of disarmament was the accept-
ance by France of a German Empire from the Alps to the
Baltic, the reply would have been truly enough that it was
a command to Napoleon to abdicate. We had no answer
to Bismarck's interpolation that he could have settled
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BISMARCK
with Napoleon by letting him have Belgium and Luxem-
burg--Belgium, Palmerston's creation of 1839. From
1867 to 1870 our Foreign Office, like every other Foreign
Office, was kept in a perpetual fret and fever by Napoleon's
direct and indirect efforts to pave the way for annexing
Belgium, and Belgium did not settle the problem of the
Rhine. Alsace and Lorraine were to all Germans 'un-
redeemed Germany'; they were to German Nationalism
what Rome was to Italian Nationalism. Nothing but
French bayonets and the chassepots of Mentana kept Italy
out of Rome. Nothing but the chassepots kept the French
flag flying at Strasburg and Metz; nothing but German
bayonets would get the Germans across the upper Rhine.
If Lord Clarendon did not recognise these plain realities
he and his colleagues at Downing Street were simply de-
ceiving themselves. It was easy for a British minister and
British public opinion--the combined expression of a
triumphant Nationalism--to dismiss these distressing
realities as the symptoms of the diseased mind. The
poultice of disarmament did not and could not pluck from
German- and French memory a rooted sorrow, and the
idea that it could was neither statesmanship nor even
common sense.
The error went far deeper and much further back into
the history of the European State system. Bismarck could
smother the proposal in a tangle of detail: but the prin-
ciple of disarmament cut down to the bone and marrow
of the Prussian State. A progressive disarmament levied
on the European States like a progressive income-tax, with
a super-tax for all exceeding some fixed limit, ignored the
fundamentals of the situation. Was Prussia expected to
give up, or was she not, the law of 1814 and the reorganised
military system of 1862-66 by which every Prussian male
was required to receive military training? How could
Prussia ' disarm' without abandoning this principle? The
Prussian army of 1867 was simply a scientific organisation
to realise this fundamental of her civic polity, at a minimum
of cost and friction to the civil population and the crvSl
state. The Prussian State was the outcome of the prin-
ciple--Das Folk in Waffen; the army was not as in Great
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION. 257
Britain a state mackintosh that could be thrown off in fine,
and rediscovered from the national cupboard for use in
dirty, weather. Yet Great Britain and Europe persisted
in regarding the Prussian army--the Prussian nation in
arms, achieving national aims by force controlled and
directed by the Crown--as a luxury of the monarchy, and
a dangerous but superfluous tool in the hands of un-
scrupulous ministers. The truest reply to the secret
dispatch of Lord Clarendon would have been a volume
of select extracts from the memoranda of Frederick
William 1. , the writings of Frederick the Great, the docu-
ments of the Prussian reformers--vom Stein, Scharnhorst,
the Humboldts--bound up with the salient passages from
Clausewitz's Vom Krjege, and the correspondence of Moltke
and Bismarck himself.
The evidence for the principles of Prussianism both in
theory and fact had lain open for more than a generation
to all who cared to study it. Carlyle's Frederick, which
appeared between 1858 and 1865, was a noble and brilliant
contribution to historical literature, but the connection
between the Frederick portrayed by Carlyle and the Prussia
of the age of Bismarck was not grasped by the generation
that read Carlyle. The diplomatists of the Clarendon
School, of Cobden and Bright, of Gladstone and Disraeli,
continued to regard the Continent and the European
State system with the eyes of tradition, insularism, or ideal-
ism. Yet Bismarck had been there since 1851. Since
1862 his speeches were reported and his acts were written
out in language unmistakable. The North German
Confederation was there in full daylight, and the Prussian
General Staff and army had proved their principles and
their power to carry them out. Morier in 1868 drew up
for Lord Stanley a memorandum on the German situation,
in which the truth is told with remarkable accuracy. A
few sentences may be quoted here :--
'The motive power we seek resides, of course, in the Chancellor;
not however in the office, but in the individual Bismarck who at
present fills the office. . . . The Federal Council, after the fashion
of diplomatic congresses, works underground and away from the
light of day . . . hence the work is bona fide got through at the
B. R
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?
views are susceptible of very various interpretation. It
is certain that he contemplated union between south
and north, as the consummation of the work of 1867. It
is no less certain that he recognised more deeply than
many of his critics the external and internal difficulties
in the realisation of such a union. It has been held by
many then, and since, that the fluid and elastic element in
the Constitution of 1867 was deliberately emphasised to
permit a subsequent incorporation of Bavaria, Wiirttem-
modification of the main lines of the Federal structure.
It has, on the other hand, been argued that the Consti-
tution of 1867 was deliberately provisional, and that Bis-
marck intended to recast the whole system on an imperial
Baden,
without substantial
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 241
pattern. Bismarck can be quoted for and against both
these interpretations. The truth would seem to be that
he had not really decided, and could not really decide,
when and how union with the south would be possible.
The form would turn on the particular situation, Euro-
pean as well as German. 'It is impossible to see in
advance with sufficient clearness the ways of Divine Provi-
dence. ' (August 13, 1875. ) When Miquel maintained
that' the line of the Main is no longer a line of separation,
but simply a stopping station at which we draw breath,
as an engine takes in coal and water, in order to proceed
on our route,' Bismarck could reply that 'we all carry
national union in our hearts; but for the calculating
statesman the necessary comes first and then the ideally
desirable . . . if Germany attains its goal in the nine-
teenth century, I should regard that as a great achieve-
ment; if it were reached in ten or five years it would be
something quite extraordinary, an unexpected crowning
gift from God. . . . I have always said to the National
Liberals that I look on the matter with a hunter's eyes.
If I lay a bait for game I do not shoot at the first doe, but
wait until the whole herd is busy feeding. '
Apart from the obligations1 implied rather than defined
in the Treaty of Prague--which France regarded as a
positive prohibition of complete union--and in the main-
tenance of which in all probability she would have the
support of Austria, Bismarck recognised the grave internal
objections and obstacles to union. Dynasticism, Parti-
cularism, Radicalism, and Clericalism were very strong in
the south. The Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria had a
historic tradition of independence that made its fusion in
a truly Federal Constitution, and its subordination to a
Hohenzollern presidency, virtually impossible in 1867;
the Radicals were predominant in Wiirttemberg and the
Clericals very powerful in Bavaria. Representation of
the south in the Reichstag of 1867 on the basis of universal
1 Article 4 of the Treaty of Prague ran: 'H. M. the Emperor of Austria
. . . also agrees that the German State to the south of this line shall form a
union, the national connection of which with the Northern Confederacy is
reserved for a more defined agreement between both parties, and . which u ti
maintain an international independent existence.
B. d
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? 242
BISMARCK
suffrage would have made formidable additions to the
National Liberals and Centre parties, and completely
swamped the Conservatives. The Federal Council would
have had an anti-Prussian majority; and the parliamen-
tary situation was sufficiently difficult already, without
swelling the volume of discontent created by the dis-
possession of the dynasties in Hanover, Nassau, and Hesse-
administrative incorporation of the annexed territories
was being carried out by the Prussian bureaucracy.
French statesmen, it is true, were congratulating them-
selves and France that Germany was now definitely split
into three clearly marked divisions--les trots tronfons, of
which Rouher spoke--the North, the South, and Austria,
and calculated that allies could be found south of the Main
and on the Danube. This view of the south was a pure
illusion, which sprang from an incurable persistence in
interpreting German thought and feeling in 1867 by the
light of a history that was as dead as Frederick Barbarossa
or Louis xiv. The conditions that had made the policy
of Richelieu and Mazarin, Louvois and ' the dance of the
Louis d'ors,' even of Napoleon 1. and the Confederation
of the Rhine feasible, had vanished by 1848--never to
return. It was the same fatal prepossession which had
ruined Napoleon's Italian policy; for it had led him to
suppose that Italy in 1859 could be really carved out into
a north, a centre, and a south, animated by a common
sentiment of Italian Nationalism, but retaining the
dynastic Particularism which could only exist on de-
nationalisation propped up by foreign bayonets. At the
Tuileries, in the Corps Legislatif, on the boulevards, and
in the 'estaminets de province,' Wittelsbach pride, the
clerical press, and the Radical critics and caricatures of the
south were regarded as proofs that the red trousers of the
French army would receive a warmer welcome in Bavaria
than. the blue uniform with red facings from the north.
Bismarck entertained no such foolish illusions. The
south he knew was as German as the north. But it was
much more anti-Prussian. It had never come under the
influence of Prussia to the extent that the non-Prussian
efficiency with which the
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 243
States north of the Main had; it had not assimilated the
principles and postulates of the Prussian State, which
were repugnant to all its traditions and outlook on life.
But that repugnance did not involve any readiness to
accept either French culture or political domination, still
less the principles of the Second Empire. Quite the
contrary. A Ludwig of Bavaria, a Prince Hohenlohe, a
von der Pfordten, a Bray, a Dollinger, a Varnbiiler, a Dal-
wigk, the representatives of the various warring parties
--Unionists, Clericals, Radicals, Particularists, Democrats
--that made the south such a tangle of conflicting
aims and such a confusion of discordant voices, carried
beneath their party robes as stout and patriotic German
hearts as any that beat north of the Main. Because they
were such good Germans they were so anti-Prussian, and
had not yet learned to bow the knee in the house of Hohen-
zollern; they were not ready yet to accept incorporation
on the terms of the North German Confederation, or to be
de-Germanised in order to be baptized by platoons into
Prussianism.
Bismarck on his side was decided in his refusal to sacri-
fice the assured Prussian hegemony in the north to South
German dynasticism, Clericalism, and Radicalism. Had
he been willing in 1866 to risk a war with France and
Austria he would have overcome the external but not the
internal obstacle to unification; had Germany been vic-
torious in such a war, the unification that would have
crowned the victory would have been very different to
the loosely jointed settlement achieved in 1867. But
Bismarck never took unnecessary risks, particularly to
achieve ends not in themselves absolutely urgent. Every-
thing therefore pointed to delay; but a halt implied that
everything meanwhile must be done by practical administra-
tion and cautious diplomacy to improve the conditions that
made for the ultimate acceptance of the Prussian solution
by the south. The chart of the future was studded with
rocks--many of them sunken, many just awash when the
national tide was at its full--but Bismarck's navigation was
in the next three years masterly. He had secured the sub-
stance in the offensive and defensive military conventions, in
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? BISMARCK
themselves a shattering refutation of the dreams dreamed
at the Tuileries; the Unitarians must be sedulously
nursed and continuously denied; the economic bonds
must be tightened into a halter round the neck of the
south; France and Austria must be carefully cherished in
the conviction that union was neither desired nor possible.
The unitarian force of Nationalism could be trusted to
work of itself, all the stronger if it was drenched from
time to time with Prussian cold water. France, not
Prussia, must be represented as the obstacle to union;
France which coveted the Bavarian Palatinate, which
threatened Bavaria and Baden because it was the unlawful
occupant of German Alsace and Lorraine. 'You cannot,'
Bismarck said, 'ripen opinion in the south by holding a
lamp under it,' and when Baden, the most Unitarian of the
Southern States, and the friends of Baden in the Reichstag,
repeatedly pleaded for its incorporation with the North
German Confederation, Bismarck put the demand on one
side with courteous firmness. The Treaty of Prague was
against it; it would be a breach of faith with Napoleon,
whose heart was hard, and it would annoy Bavaria and
Wurttemberg, who ought not to be annoyed. 'Why,'
he asked, 'skim off the cream, and leave the rest of the
milk to go sour? '
But, above all, make Prussia strong. The new Prussia
was not ready. She had to be hammered together.
Time was required for the Prussian bureaucracy to Prus-
sianise the north, for the General Staff to impose Prussian
organisation on the Federal forces and screw them up to
the Prussian concert pitch, for Germany to accustom
itself to the Prussian praesidium of the Hohenzollern
monarchy, for himself as Federal Chancellor to acquire
the moral prestige over the north that had taken four
hard years from 1862 to 1866 to acquire in Prussia itself.
When the north was really unified--kneaded, moulded,
and hardened by the Prussian leaven--the anti-Prussian
south could be swallowed--perhaps. The damping down
of Junker Particularism, the quarrels with the Kreuz-
zeitung and . the Conservatives, the entente with National
Liberalism that disquieted Roon and angered Prince
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 245
Frederick Charles and the fierce militarist Conservatives
of the old guard, were not without their influence on the
south. Bismarck, like other great Conservative leaders,
whose political imagination is as strong as their fidelity
to the essentials of the Conservative creed, had to educate
a party that did not desire to be educated. He had not
strained soul and body beyond endurance to win victories
for Liberalism. He was leading a rebellious and incredu-
lous Junkertum through the wilderness to the promised
land of an assured supremacy. Their faith faltered; why
not be content with the flesh-pots of the old Prussianism?
The Junker camp swarmed with Korahs, Dathans and
Abirams. Round the King the malcontents swarmed,
and the King was at heart as Prussian as the most reaction-
ary squire from the old March. He showed it by his
resentment at Junker sedition. When Conservatives
behaved as if they were middle-class parliamentary Liberals
William turned his royal back on them at levees, or rated
the rebels in the language of the Prussian War Book.
The strength of German Nationalist feeling was con-
vincingly shown in the Luxemburg affair, that came to a
head while the Constitution was still on the anvil. The
establishment of the Confederation of the North had
destroyed the legal and political status of the duchy in
the dissolved Bund of 1815. Napoleon, obsessed with the
policy of pourboires, grasped at the opportunity of acquir-
ing Luxemburg, linked by a personal union with Holland
through the house of Orange-Nassau. Bismarck main-
tained throughout that he would acquiesce in the annexa-
tion--it would please Napoleon and be no danger to
Prussia--provided that France would settle rapidly with
Holland and present him with a fait accompli. But he
warned Napoleon that he could not, and would not, on
behalf of the Confederation formally guarantee the trans-
action beforehand. In the spring of 1867, with the
Constitution unsettled, he had no desire yet to quarrel
with France, but he could not come to the Reichstag and
confess that he had agreed to the cession of what Germany
regarded as German territory. It is probable that this
line of action was sincere, and that, in presence of a fait
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? 246
BISMARCK
accompli, he could have persuaded the militant Nationalist
Liberals that a war for Luxemburg was unjustifiable and
not worth the cost. But Bismarck forgot that others had
good reason to distrust his sincerity and his methods.
The King of Holland, in fear of Prussian aggression on
Limburg, was prepared to close with Napoleon, provided
that the contract had been first approved of by Prussia.
He not unnaturally was afraid of making a bargain that
Bismarck could easily employ as an excuse for attacking
Holland. And Napoleon, on the principle that the supper
with the Devil must have a long spoon, feared a trap, unless
Prussia formally consented prior, and not subsequently,
to the agreement with France. The Quai d'Orsay had had
bitter experience of Bismarck's verbal assurances. This
time they would have a bond.
The negotiations were bruited abroad--perhaps deli-
berately by the Prussian Foreign Office--and at once the
National Liberals were up in arms. They found solid
support from Prince Frederick Charles and the Conser-
vatives; Nationalist sentiment was no less stirred in
France, and at the commencement of March Bismarck
was faced with the alternative of yielding to French pres-
sure or acting with the German Nationalists and defying
France. He insisted that France and Holland had bungled
the business and put him in a position where he had no
choice but to resist. Be that as it may, he extricated him-
self with his usual mixture of menace and skill. On
March 19 he published in the official Gazette the secret
military conventions with the Southern States--a plain
warning that France would meet a united Germany if it
came to war over German soil; and it is practically certain
that Bennigsen's interpellation of April 1 in the Reichstag
was arranged by Bismarck with the full concurrence of
the Conservative party. Bennigsen's fiery oration spoke
out the thought of Germany, and is an instructive object
lesson in the German Nationalism of the Liberals. Bis-
marck's reply was a disavowal of the idea that Prussia
would consent to any infringement of German rights,
coupled with the assurance that a pacific solution, honour-
able to all parties, could be found.
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 247
An International Congress at London devised the solu-
tion. Luxemburg had its fortifications razed; the Prus-
sian garrison which had occupied it as a Federal fortress
was withdrawn; and the duchy itself was neutralised
under the guarantees of the great contracting Powers,
signatory to the treaty. The whole affair was another
rebuff to Napoleon--another feather in Bismarck's cap.
Napoleon did not get his pourboire; French national
feeling was angered at a fresh humiliation, and the secret
military conventions with the south; German Nationalism
was, if not triumphant, pacified by the influence it had
exercised. It is not surprising that at the Quai d'Orsay
Bismarck's conduct was interpreted in the most sinister
light. He had lured prance on in order to inflict a fresh
rebuff. This man was neither to hold nor to bind--which
was perfectly true. The Franco-Prussian negotiations, in
fact, from July 5, 1866 to June 1867 explain, though they
do not justify, the determination three years later to wring
from the King of Prussia a categorical renunciation of the
Hohenzollern candidature. Still more significant was the
revelation of passionate feeling in France and Germany,
which an incident far more trifling than Luxemburg
could fire at any moment into an explosion. France felt
she was being steadily ringed with a German girdle that
only war could break; Germany desired complete union,
and was perpetually reminded that France vetoed it. In
May 1867 a word from Napoleon or from Bismarck would
have brought about war. But in May 1867 Prussia was
not ready, and Napoleon was absorbed in the success of the
universal exhibition, which made Paris the carnival of
Europe.
Bismarck was in a genial temper. The Prussian Diet
had assigned a large sum of money for rewarding the
Prussian leaders in the victories of 1866, and the King,
very properly, selected his Minister-President for dis-
tinction. He desired that the sum assigned (400,000
thalers) should be invested in an estate, perpetually as-
sociated 'with the fame of your name and your family. '
Bismarck bought a property at Varzin, in the north of
Pomerania, some five-and-twenty miles from the Baltic
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BISMARCK
coast, and surrounded by the landed aristocracy which
regarded itself as 'vassals of the Margrave of Brandenburg. '
At Varzin he could live the life he loved, the life of great
spaces, swept by the winds across the heather and through
the woods, the life of the manorial lord, hunter, forester,
agriculturist, the dispenser of a seigneurial hospitality in
the old German manner, more interested, his wife pro-
nounced, in turnips than politics. Around him, as at
Schonhausen, were the estates of friends and kinsmen--
the men who made the marrow and bone of Prussianism--
and Bismarck flung himself into the task of ordering and
developing his new property, planting trees, felling timber,
fencing, draining, manuring, sowing, breeding cattle,
creating outlets for his produce, buying in the cheapest,
and selling in the dearest, market. The infernal toil of the
Wilhelmstrasse, the perpetual audiences with the King,
the daily flow and ebb of telegrams, deputies, ministers,
ambassadors and the grinding pen-work intensified his
passion for blue sky and the fragrance of the pine-woods with
the salt of the Baltic in the north wind. Varzin was a better
reward than the steady drizzle of crosses, stars, and orders,
now descending on him from German kings or foreign
potentates. But even at Varzin after a day on horseback,
or in the marshes after snipe and woodcock, when the
lights had been extinguished and the household slept, the
lamp in Bismarck's study burned till dawn. The great
Pomeranian boarhounds, asleep, but a symbol of Prussia
toujours en vedette, knew that at his desk their master,
freed from the day's routine, was hammering out, through
cigar after cigar, the practical solution of the problems
with which his brain never ceased to wrestle. It. was in
these lonely vigils that Schleswig-Holstein was annexed,
Austria overthrown, Napoleon duped and chastised, the
North German Confederation brazed together, the German
Empire made--in the watches of the night that Bismarck
would open his Bible and find the confirmation of his
faith in a Divine Providence and a God Who ordered the
world and chose the instruments of His inscrutable will.
All the world flocked to Paris. The reconciliation of
France and Prussia was apparently sealed by the visit of
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 249
King William and the princes and elders of the Prussian
congregation. The exhibition of 1867, like the exhibition in
London of 1862 that preceded the American and Austrian
wars, proclaimed to the Europe and the America that had
witnessed Gettysburg and Koniggratz peace and goodwill,
and an era of beneficent rivalry in the unrestrained quality
of trade, commerce, and the arts. Paris has been, since
the history of France . began, a matchless creator of life's
greater ironies. It surpassed itself in the summer of 1867,
when Napoleon received his royal and imperial guests with
balls, dirtners, soirees, reviews, the enchantments of the
exhibition, the galaxy of beauty at the Tuileries, fit to
adorn the creative genius of Worth and the Rue de la Paix,
and over all the carnal gaiety of La Grande Duchesse de
Gerolstein, and the intoxicating romp of Offenbach's in-
vitation to dance and dance again. 'Let us laugh, let us
sing, and to-morrow we shall die. ' What is life but an
opera bouffe, the buzz of pleasure-loving insects in a brief
circle of warm sunshine, the grey but rose-tipped dawn, the
splendour of midday, and the annihilating darkness of night?
What did it matter that Berejowski tried with his pistol to
avenge the wrongs of Poland, that at Queretaro Maximilian
had been shot, that Garibaldi had risen again and been
wounded at Aspromonte, that the French chassepots had
'wrought marvels' at the Mentana which denied Rome
to Italy and reaffirmed the temporal power of the Papacy,
that men and women were sweated and starved at Lyons,
and that the 'red international' was laying the basis of
the commune in the hungry squalor of the faubourgs of
St. Antoine and Belleville?
With King William came Moltke and Bismarck, ready
for a brief respite between the task of crushing Austria and
crushing France.
Moltke, more silent than ever, spied
out the nakedness of the land, and in his morning walks
studied the artillery positions from which this Paris, like
the Florence of Charles vm. only fit to be looked on in
days of holiday, could be bombarded. It was Moltke's
first visit, and he used it to make the next time a memor-
able one for himself and the world. Bismarck knew Paris
well. He shrugged his broad shoulders at the hisses of the
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BISMARCK
patriots in the crowd. 'I am not surprised at my recep-
tion,' he remarked; f we politicians cannot please every-
body. ' But for all that he conquered Paris by his gallant
readiness to drain to the dregs the cup that Circe daily
brewed for her guests. He walked and dined, drank and
supped, enjoyed the Jeerie at the Hotel de Ville, laughed
at the gala performances of La Grande Duchesse, with its
raillery of the morals, vanities, pettinesses, and pipe-clay
militarism of the small German courts. He danced.
Madame Carette records in her Souvenirs Intimes her waltz
with the Minister-President. 'Deign, madame,' he said,
offering her the rose from his buttonhole, ' to keep this as
a remembrance of the last waltz I shall dance in my life,
'and which I shall not forget. ' Nor did he omit to call at
the Quai d'Orsay, and with the barbed frankness of which
he was a master, half in jest, half in earnest, expose the
blunders that France had made in her diplomacy, and
suggest how the French Foreign Office could have put a
dozen nasty spokes in the Prussian wheels. Marshal
Lebceuf, immortal for his guarantee in 1870 that France
was ready to the last gaiter-button, divined the Prussian
heart when he solemnly conducted Bismarck and Moltke
round Versailles. 'Sire,' he related to Napoleon, ' I have
had a terrible day with two men who hate us with a mortal
hatred. ' It was so true. But to Paris Bismarck appeared,
as Marshal Vaillant told him, a very human and fascinating
giant. 'Vraiment, c'est un bon bougre. Un gaillard qui
n'a pas froid aux yeux. ' He promised to return--and
soon. Bismarck's next visit to Paris!
A year of patient work followed his return, bringing the
new Federal machinery into operation, but principally
occupied with comp. eting the economic union of Germany.
The military conventions when submitted for ratification
to the Parliaments at Munich and Stuttgart provoked
obstinate criticism and opposition. Bismarck promptly
replied with a stroke at a vital and exposed part of the
Southern States. The renewal of the tariff union between
south and north was declared to be dependent on the
acceptance of the conventions. Threatened with eco-
nomic ruin the Parliaments sulkily ratified the defensive
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 251
and offensive military agreements. Bismarck now carried
the Zollverein far beyond the form and scope of the previ-
ous organisation. A Tariff Parliament of deputies, chosen
by direct universal suffrage, and a Tariff Federal Council
(Zoll Bundesrat) on the model of the Federal Council of
the north, were created to authorise the economic legis-
lation of the future. The first session was held at Berlin
on April 27, 1868, and Germany, including Luxemburg,
had now a representative organisation at work, in which
south and north met in common conference for common
German purposes. The economic, like the military union,
preceded the political by three years.
That first session of the Tariff Parliament was a notable
illustration of the forces at work for and against the main-
tenance of the divided Germany of 1867. Ardent union-
ists north and south of the Main hoped to dovetail into the
Tariff Parliament powers to discuss political business
common to both Germanies. But the proposal to extend
the economic authority of the new organ was defeated by
a narrow majority. The prickly particularism of the dele-
gates from the south took its revenge for the coercion
over the military conventions. Bismarck wisely kept
aloof from the debates. But in private he accomplished
much by frank intercourse with friends and critics. The
economic machinery would have its effect in time. The
inevitable union could be floated meanwhile in a flood of
good German Munich beer and Prussian hock, or en-
visaged with the eye of faith through the blue clouds of
after-dinner cigars. A fine chance was given him, and he
grasped it at once. Probst, a deputy from Stuttgart,
warned the Parliament against the union of north and
south, since it would involve a war to the knife with
France. Bismarck replied that he could understand and
sympathise with the argument that the south must not be
coerced by the north--when union came, it must be the
free act of both Germanies--but the argument of fear--
as to that, he concluded with vibrating passion and amid
a hurricane of cheers,' the appeal to fear will never find an
echo in German hearts. ' It was the note of power struck
on the keyboard of Nationalism. In Bismarck's political
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BISMARCK
armoury it derived its tremendous force from the person-
ality and achievements of the speaker, one who neithe-
feared nor flattered flesh.
Since 1867 the barometer of Unionism had been steadily
falling. Reaction had inevitably set in, and shallow de-
pression after shallow depression drenched the two
Germanies. The formation of the Southern States in a
separate union, with an independent international exist-
ence, had not been established, and there was no likelihood
of its being carried through. The south felt that such a
union would facilitate incorporation with the north on the
terms of the north; Bismarck suspected that it would fall
under Austrian control, while Austria feared that it would
be a fresh sphere of Prussian influence, and France that it
would be a fresh obstacle to French ambition. Hohenlohe
summed the matter up: 'The reason why such a federa-
tion has not been consummated has hitherto lain in the
purely negative attitude taken by the governments of
Wurttemberg, Baden, and Hesse, and in the lack of any
sympathy with this idea among the people . . . and if the
Southern Confederation meets with insuperable difficulties
in Wurttemberg, you will admit that in Baden impossi-
bility stares it in the face ' (Memoirs, i. 226 and 395). The
Bavarian feeling was no less strong in its indifference and
in its attachment to Bavarian autonomy. The failure was
all in Bismarck's favour. The independence of the four
southern States enabled him later (see p. 283) to negotiate
separately with each state and utilise the separate bargains
to compel acceptance of his terms. Had there been a
southern union in 1870, acting as a single unit, it would
have demanded and obtained far more favourable terms
as the condition of entering the Empire.
The real achievement of Prussia after 1867--the patient
manipulation of the Bundesrat, the unifying legislation
begun in the Reichstag, the remorseless assimilation of the
annexed provinces by the Prussian civil service, the solid
concrete of science, research, and political thought laid by
the intellectuals of National Liberalism and the flower of
the professoriate--was largely concealed from the foreign
public opinion outside the Confederation, which expects
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 253
to discover the soul, thought, and work of a nation in the
columns of the newspapers with which its women light
their stoves and the men their cigars. The entrenched
Philistia of Great Britain, regarding universities as places
where youths learned either to become gentlemen or book-
worms, and science as a harmless recreation for literary
institutes or the finger-staining drudgery of the apothe-
cary, persisted in regarding the German universities, where
the renaissance of the German mind was being completed,
as centres of dreamy idealism or the dreary laboratories
of an unintelligible theology. The apostle of sweet-
ness and light, Matthew Arnold, writing the classical
reports in which he foretold the coming supremacy of
Germany because, like the Italian renaissance, it strove to
combine the humanities with science, with 1866 staring
him in the face, believed that the French army in 1870
would smash the Prussian. So potent even on priestly
rebels of the House of Levi are the Idols of the Market-
place and of the Tribe. Colonel Stoffel, a tragic Cas-
sandra, if ever there was one, for three years warned his
government at Paris of what Prussia was preparing; but
the men like Marechal Niel, who had divined the truth,
either perished under the surgeon's knife or were impotent.
The Second Empire had justly forfeited the confidence of
thinking and toiling France; and the ears of the Tuileries
and the Quai d'Orsay were stuffed with clerical wax.
But the lower the barometer fell, the harder, with
Bismarck's kno-vledge, did the Great General Staff work.
Thanks to the Federal Chancellor, it was free from the
interference not merely of journalists or irresponsible
politicians but of a Cabinet which had never studied war
or regarded it as an unexpected disease, to be dealt with on
its symptoms when there could be no doubt it had broken
out. To Bismarck there were two certainties, and only
two, in an inscrutable world--the Prussian Crown and the
Prussian Army. The Prussian King was his affair, and on
him, as on the rocher de bronze, the compass of policy could
swing freely in the dirtiest weather. The time of blood
and iron had not passed. It was truer than ever in his
interpretation that the greatest question of the age, the
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BISMARCK
settlement with France, would not be settled by resolutions
in the Reichstag and the Zoll Parliament, the speeches of
Thiers, or the manufactured plebiscites of the Minister of
the Interior at Paris. The surgery of war was needed to
let the bad blood out in Germany. When some thousands
of Bavarians and Wurttembergers had fallen beside Prus-
sian, Saxon, Hanoverian, and Nassauer, the Empire would
be made. The iron crown of the Imperial Hohenstaufen
would not be picked up in the gutters of Frankfurt or
Berlin--that was the folly of 1848 and 1866--but on a
victorious battlefield in France.
The idea of disarmament had been in the air since 1868,
and Daru at Paris, Virchow and the Radicals at Berlin were
playing with it. But Lord Newton in his Life of Lord
Lyons has kindly lifted the blinds for us, and the instructive
episode in which the British government, inspired from
Paris, confidentially invited in the spring of 1870 Prussia
to join in a European disarmament can now be studied in
its entirety. Bismarck maintained a grave courtesy--he
was never gravely courteous with the realities of statecraft
or of fife--but the admirable essays of Lord Clarendon
must have stirred 'the irreverent merriment' that he
allowed himself when English pacifism was proved by the
sale of an ironclad to Prussia and the readiness to sell
another. These excellent insulars simply did not live in
the world of facts, and Bismarck put them aside with the
soothing firmness that self-control owes to a well-meaning
but hysterical woman.
Clarendon in 1864 had protested that he desired no
further intercourse with cet homme, sansfoi et sans hi; he
now appealed to Count Bismarck--' I am sure that a
statesman so liberal and far-sighted will admit without
regret'--a sentence the choice of the epithets in which is
delicious. Bismarck replied quietly,' that he did not dare
even to name the subject of the letter to the King. . . .
Coming from England it would make the worst impression
on him. ' He added 'that any weakening of Prussia's
power, any disturbance of the Balance of Power in Europe,
can hardly be for the interest of England'--and empha-
sised the formidable dangers that Prussia had to face from
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 255
France, Austria, Russia, and--a pretty stroke--Denmark.
'I saw,' wrote our ambassador, 'it was useless to pursue
the question further. ' In reality it was useless to have
raised it at all.
This is not a case of superior wisdom after the event.
When our Foreign Office suggested that Prussia should
disarm, it was asking Prussia to cease to be the Prussia of
Frederick the Great and Bismarck; it was further asking
that Prussia and Germany should abandon the ideal of
unification on Bismarckian lines. There was substantial
truth in Bismarck's contention that France was irrecon-
cilably hostile to German ambitions, and that this hostility
made the armed strength of Prussia a first condition of
security, and, though he did not say so, of attaining her end
in defiance of that hostility. If Lord A. Loftus had not
categorically informed our Foreign Office that north and
south would seize the first opportunity of agreement
between the two parties to unite, he was writing, as
Bismarck said in 1862, 'more nonsense to London than I
suspected. ' There was as little chance of the government
at Berlin abandoning this ideal of union, as there was of
England renouncing the union with Scotland and Ireland
on the suggestion of Berlin 'in the interest of European
peace and the Balance of Power,' or of the United States
abandoning American unity in 1861 or 1867, because it
suited the aristocrats of Great Britain and Europe. The
suggestion of renunciation was to the German mind an
impertinence which proved English jealousy. Lord Lyons,
Ollivier, Daru, Napoleon in. , the Empress Eugenie, Thiers,
the young Gambetta, who had leaped into fame over the
proces Baudouin, could all have told Clarendon that
neither the Second Empire nor France would permit the
union of North and South Germany--the establishment
on their frontier of a military empire, controlled by
Bismarck. Had our Foreign Office informed the Quai
d'Orsay that the condition of disarmament was the accept-
ance by France of a German Empire from the Alps to the
Baltic, the reply would have been truly enough that it was
a command to Napoleon to abdicate. We had no answer
to Bismarck's interpolation that he could have settled
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BISMARCK
with Napoleon by letting him have Belgium and Luxem-
burg--Belgium, Palmerston's creation of 1839. From
1867 to 1870 our Foreign Office, like every other Foreign
Office, was kept in a perpetual fret and fever by Napoleon's
direct and indirect efforts to pave the way for annexing
Belgium, and Belgium did not settle the problem of the
Rhine. Alsace and Lorraine were to all Germans 'un-
redeemed Germany'; they were to German Nationalism
what Rome was to Italian Nationalism. Nothing but
French bayonets and the chassepots of Mentana kept Italy
out of Rome. Nothing but the chassepots kept the French
flag flying at Strasburg and Metz; nothing but German
bayonets would get the Germans across the upper Rhine.
If Lord Clarendon did not recognise these plain realities
he and his colleagues at Downing Street were simply de-
ceiving themselves. It was easy for a British minister and
British public opinion--the combined expression of a
triumphant Nationalism--to dismiss these distressing
realities as the symptoms of the diseased mind. The
poultice of disarmament did not and could not pluck from
German- and French memory a rooted sorrow, and the
idea that it could was neither statesmanship nor even
common sense.
The error went far deeper and much further back into
the history of the European State system. Bismarck could
smother the proposal in a tangle of detail: but the prin-
ciple of disarmament cut down to the bone and marrow
of the Prussian State. A progressive disarmament levied
on the European States like a progressive income-tax, with
a super-tax for all exceeding some fixed limit, ignored the
fundamentals of the situation. Was Prussia expected to
give up, or was she not, the law of 1814 and the reorganised
military system of 1862-66 by which every Prussian male
was required to receive military training? How could
Prussia ' disarm' without abandoning this principle? The
Prussian army of 1867 was simply a scientific organisation
to realise this fundamental of her civic polity, at a minimum
of cost and friction to the civil population and the crvSl
state. The Prussian State was the outcome of the prin-
ciple--Das Folk in Waffen; the army was not as in Great
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION. 257
Britain a state mackintosh that could be thrown off in fine,
and rediscovered from the national cupboard for use in
dirty, weather. Yet Great Britain and Europe persisted
in regarding the Prussian army--the Prussian nation in
arms, achieving national aims by force controlled and
directed by the Crown--as a luxury of the monarchy, and
a dangerous but superfluous tool in the hands of un-
scrupulous ministers. The truest reply to the secret
dispatch of Lord Clarendon would have been a volume
of select extracts from the memoranda of Frederick
William 1. , the writings of Frederick the Great, the docu-
ments of the Prussian reformers--vom Stein, Scharnhorst,
the Humboldts--bound up with the salient passages from
Clausewitz's Vom Krjege, and the correspondence of Moltke
and Bismarck himself.
The evidence for the principles of Prussianism both in
theory and fact had lain open for more than a generation
to all who cared to study it. Carlyle's Frederick, which
appeared between 1858 and 1865, was a noble and brilliant
contribution to historical literature, but the connection
between the Frederick portrayed by Carlyle and the Prussia
of the age of Bismarck was not grasped by the generation
that read Carlyle. The diplomatists of the Clarendon
School, of Cobden and Bright, of Gladstone and Disraeli,
continued to regard the Continent and the European
State system with the eyes of tradition, insularism, or ideal-
ism. Yet Bismarck had been there since 1851. Since
1862 his speeches were reported and his acts were written
out in language unmistakable. The North German
Confederation was there in full daylight, and the Prussian
General Staff and army had proved their principles and
their power to carry them out. Morier in 1868 drew up
for Lord Stanley a memorandum on the German situation,
in which the truth is told with remarkable accuracy. A
few sentences may be quoted here :--
'The motive power we seek resides, of course, in the Chancellor;
not however in the office, but in the individual Bismarck who at
present fills the office. . . . The Federal Council, after the fashion
of diplomatic congresses, works underground and away from the
light of day . . . hence the work is bona fide got through at the
B. R
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