No More Learning

It is true that in 1874 the military government of the
Reichsland was theoretically ended and Alsace and Lorraine
were represented by fifteen members in the Reichstag.
These fifteen were simply an addition to the opposition;
and they might have stayed at home for all the practical
influence that they exerted, while their united hostility
to the government, a continuous protest against the
annexation and the policy of internal coercion, provided
a fresh argument for drastic repression. Edwin von
Manteuffel's appointment as Statthalter in 1879 was a
concession to the demand for autonomy, but Bismarck's
jealousy of Manteuffel marred the use that might have been
made of the Statthalter's great personal gifts. Hohenlohe,
who was transferred from Paris in 1884 to succeed Man-
teuffel, had a doubly difficult task; as a civilian he incurred
the enmity of the governing chiefs of the soldier-caste, as
governor he was continuously overruled by Bismarck.
His Diary, carefully edited as it clearly is, shows that the
Chancellor accepted the militarist view that the object
of the annexations was not to make a contented Alsace-
Lorraine, but to hold the Reichsland as a strategic glacis
of the Empire. There can be little question that Bismarck
had hoped in ten years or so to extort from France a re-
nunciation of the idea of recovering the provinces lost in
1871, and the temptation to make such a renunciation had
its part in the bewildering history of French internal
politics and foreign policy from the fall of Thiers to the
presidency of Carnot; but he failed to secure it, and
Alsace-Lorraine more than ever was employed to coerce
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 393
Germany by a great fear and provoke France by a per-
petual humiliation. The German effort to assimilate the
Reichsland broke on two unsurmountable obstacles--the
refusal of France permanently to accept the position de-
fined in the Treaty of Frankfurt; the claim of German
Nationalism to hold by force what it could not hold by any
other means. By 1890 Bismarck's system was steadily
making the problem of Alsace-Lorraine of international
importance. The Europe that had debarred itself in 1871
from intervening in the terms of peace, had begun to realise
that the principles involved cut down to the root of the
whole European system and raised the most fundamental
problems of international relations.
At home after 1884 there was one compensation--the
parliamentary situation became much easier for the
Chancellor. The general election of that year resulted
in a severe defeat for the new and reunited Radicals
(Deutsche Freisinnige), and for the first time Bismarck had
at his disposal a governmental bloc composed of Conser-
vatives, the Centre, and the Conservative rump of National
Liberals, which gave him a comfortable majority over all
the other groups combined. This was even more marked
in the Prussian Landtag, where the narrow franchise,' the
worst in the world,' Bismarck once said, left Progressives,
Radicals, Poles, or Guelphs in an impotent minority.
There was indeed but one shadow. The union of Crown
and Minister-President, of Emperor and Chancellor, was
the corner-stone of the Bismarckian system. In 1884 the
Emperor was eighty-seven years old. Would his suc-
cessor, whose accession could not be long delayed, accept
the position developed between 1862 and 1884? In 1884
Germany speculated on the consequences of a trial of
strength between the Crown and the Man. The trial
indeed came very shortly, but neither in the form, nor
with the results, anticipated by Germany and Bismarck.
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? 394
BLSMARCK
? 5. Foreign Policy--The Trifle Alliance--The Colonial
Problem--France and Russia, 1879-1888.
'For thirty years,' writes Naumann in his Central Europe,
'politics for us meant Bismarck. ' He could have said, with
equal truth, that for twenty years at least politics for the
whole continent meant Bismarck. After 1878 Bismarck's
personal position was unique. The Chancellor achieved
the aim of the French king who desired that not a cannon-
shot should be fired in Europe without the consent and
knowledge of France and himself. The German hege-
mony of the European State system rested on the power
and prestige of Prussia, but it was a power and prestige
interpreted by, and reflected in, the personality of a single
man; and if the revolving years strengthened the political
ascendency consummated by the Treaty of Frankfurt, the
Congress of Berlin, and the Dual Alliance--the main terms
of which were known before the ink was dry on the signa-
tures--they also emphasised the egoism and vanity of the
ministerial autocrat. Bismarck demanded homage, and
he expected incense, from all the statesmen and all the
courts. Ambassadors at Berlin informed their govern-
ments that they would do well always to consult Bismarck
on every step, for if they acted without asking his advice,
even in matters in which Germany could not be regarded
as directly interested, they would soon discover that the
jealous, suspicious, and vain Chancellor intended to make
them pay for the neglect and the implied personal insult.
'His excessive sensitiveness,' wrote Lord Ampthill, 'is
incomprehensible in so great a statesman. ' He pointed
out what a mistake ' Goschen had made ' in daring to go
on a mission to the Near East without travelling via Berlin
and seeking wisdom at Friedrichsruhe. Goschen rectified
the error by returning via Berlin. 'Prince Bismarck,'
Lord Ampthill wrote in 1882, 'has never got over or for-
given Goschen's departure from the advice he was asked
to give in the Greek question. ' Gambetta therefore, in
1879, was right when he contemplated a secret visit to
'the monster. ' The meeting, despite M. Lair's beliefs,
did not take place, but an hour between Gambetta and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
Bismarck might have made a world of difference to the
French statesman. The greatness of great men is indeed
a mysterious paradox. Bismarck's vanity had its paternal
weaknesses. If ' a pleasant truth, a well-deserved compli-
ment, publicly uttered by an English statesman had a
magic effect,' still more magic was the effect of flattery or
kindness to a son. In Herbert Bismarck the Chancellor
was training up his successor, and the generous hospitality
offered to the son when he came on special missions to
London deeply touched the father's heart. It probably
smoothed away the friction far more effectively than a
dozen dispatches. Personal kindness to the limited few
for whom he cared--and guns--these were the two argu-
ments that Bismarck understood. And those who had
not got the guns, or were afraid to use them, were well
advised to go confidentially to the Chancellor, place their
case in his hands, and ask for his disinterested offices and
advice.
An element of grandeur sublimated this vanity. More
and more the Chancellor absented himself from Berlin
and conducted the foreign affairs of Europe from Fried-
richsruhe or Varzin, and the men who combined business
and homage in a visit to Bismarck enjoyed a patrician
hospitality from the hands of a great patrician, who tried
to forget on his own hearth or in the glades of the avenues
he had planted, the methods so congenial in the Wilhelm-
strasse. If, in addition, the visitor could prove that in his
arteries ran the red blood of a fierce virility--that rich
meat and drink, physical exuberance, and joy in the carnal
framework of life and the passions of nature, appealed as
much as the conclusion of a hard bargain--Bismarck was
ready to make concessions that were not for the anaemic
and the bookworms of the Chancery. The statesmen,
such as Favre and Pouyer-Quertier, who could drain not
their glass but their flagon, earned a personal respect as
strong as the contempt meted out to his jackals such as
Busch, or the spectacled pedant whose amusements were
centred in a Kaffee-Klatsch and the gossip of women.
Statecraft was an excrescence on the natural life of the
healthy man, but as it was inevitable, let men bring into
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? 39*
BISMARCK
it not the weaknesses of the physically unfit but the
qualities that made man the lord of the universe and of
his own hearth.
Bismarck was never on the side of the angels--for in a
dirty and sordid world he held that the angels by Divine
wisdom prudently kept clear of human affairs--but he
was never on the side of the apes. He was always' on the
side of the white man,' not ' the blonde beast,' of which
so much has been written with so much profound igno-
rance, but the white man who represented 'his idol,
Authority,' the man of the master races whose very vices
and brutality were the necessary correlatives of his virtues,
and were a proof of his strength of brain, physical vitality,
and appetite for order and discipline.
But beneath the elements of grandeur in Bismarck lay
an inferno of personal feeling as passionate and intense as
the manhood that he admired. His memory was relent-
less. Lord Derby in 1884 and 1885 was the Lord Stanley
whose share in the Luxemburg affair of 1867 was remem-
bered and requited by Bismarck's determination to chastise
him for thwarting his will. As Beust said, even the
Chancellor's boarhounds turned their backs on the former
Saxon minister and Austrian Chancellor. And from all
the agents of his instructions and his subordinates in the
Foreign Office Bismarck extorted a submissive obedience,
as Arnim and others discovered, the sanction of which
was dismissal and disgrace. Woe to the ambassador or
the under-secretary who betrayed any independence.
What men such as Holstein, whom many regarded as the
'Eminence grise ' of the Wilhelmstrasse, even in Bismarck's
day, thought the world did not learn until after 1890,
when official Berlin slowly realised that the terrifying
master would no longer emerge from Friedrichsruhe to
castigate and crush those who had dared in his absence to
take their own line.
One chapter of this^personal autocracy has never been,
and never will be, fully written for this generation.
Bismarck's devotion to his sovereign was limited to the
King-Emperor. The dignity, self-respect, and patriotism
of those concerned prevented the public, as distinct from
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
397
a narrow circle of the initiated, from knowing the full truth
of the Chancellor's conduct and relations to the Empress,
the Crown Prince and Princess, their relatives and friends.
But if that chapter is ever written, it will assuredly not
weaken the certainty that in the man were elements of
jealousy, vulgarity, meanness, pettiness, insincerity and
unscrupulousness, ineradicable and detestable. And it
is desirable to remember that the material for that chapter
was piled up by Bismarck himself, who knew that it could
not, and would not, be given to the world, in its repellent
entirety, during his lifetime--perhaps never.
The Dual Alliance of 1879 nad been intended to solve
the critical dilemma thrust upon him between 1876 and
1879, and to provide a firm foundation for his system.
But Bismarck doubtless felt that his object was identical
with that expressed in 1872 when he pronounced that he
had ' thrown a bridge across to Vienna, without breaking
down that older one to Petersburg. ' In 1879 ' the older
bridge' was hardly safe for traffic; but Bismarck was deter-
mined to reconstruct it. 1 The Dual Alliance steeled this
determination, while it provided an immovable point from
which to work. After 1879 a new method is distinctly
discernible, caused by the unexpected introduction of
wholly new elements. The position and problems of
Russia, to begin with, were fundamentally altered after
1878. The effort to effect by diplomacy and intrigue
what the Treaty of San Stefano would have established
by war and a treaty--the Balkan States controlled by
Petersburg, and a Constantinople living under the fiat of
the Tsar--the policy of Kutchuk-Kainardji (1774) and of
Unkiar Skelessi (1833) gave a wholly new turn to the
Near Eastern question. Such a policy, with Pan-Slavism
behind it, cut right across the Austrian line of develop-
ment and was wholly opposed to the ambitions of
1 'I have thus succeeded in carrying out the first stage in my political policy
--that of placing a barrier between Austria and the Western Powers. . . . I do
not despair of realising the second, that of the reconstruction of the Drei Kaiser
Bund . . . an idea that I have followed all my life . . . they will never devise
a political system offering greater guarantees for safeguarding all the Conserva-
tive elements in the modern world. '--Prince Bismarck to Prince SabourofF,
quoted in the (unpublished) memoirs by Professor J. Y. Simpson,- Nintteettth
Century, December 1917.
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? 398
BISMARCK
Germany, masked behind the Dual Alliance. It involved
Russia in desperate and tortuous courses in which the
weakness of her statesmanship was continuously revealed,
witness the folly and blindness of her treatment of Roumania
and Bulgaria, but it made a new and torturing problem
for Bismarck. The antagonism of Great Britain and
Russia was superimposed on the antagonism of Austria
and Russia; it had been recreated by the events of 1876-8,
and henceforward was a standing menace to both countries.
Russian expansion eastwards into the heart of Asia inflamed
the old quarrel of the Crimean War and of 1875-8, and
for Russia the expansion eastwards into Central Asia was
inevitable, apart from its merits as a riposte to Great
Britain, though it imposed a fresh drain on her resources,
while it restated the old problem: Was Russia to concen-
trate on her Eastern Empire, or on establishing her
position in Europe? Pan-Slavism, voiced by Skobeleff,
Katkoff, Ignatieff, and Pobodonostzev, could not decide
whether it was better to proclaim the Holy War against
the Teuton, and reach Constantinople via Berlin and
Vienna, or ignore Teutonic ingratitude and establish the
Slav in the capital of the Moguls at Delhi, and thereby
destroy the British Empire. Skobeleff at one moment
proclaimed the Eastern ideal, at another denounced the
Germans and deplored the Russians ' as dupes of German
policy, victims to German intrigues, and slaves to German
strength, only to be delivered by the sword from the
baneful influence of Germany. '
After 1878 Nihilism honeycombed Russia, and the
assassination of Alexander n. on the banks of the Catherine
Canal in 1881 terrified his successor, credited, as heirs to
the throne often are, with Liberal sympathies, into
terrorism. The necessity of an international union of
dynasties and governments against the menace of revo-
lution, sharpened by dismay at the unending surrender of
Great Britain to democracy, and detestation of republics
and republicanism, obsessed Alexander h1. Nihilism,
more than any other force, held France and Russia apart,
poisoned the relations of Great Britain and Russia, and, in
Bismarck's skilful hands, laid the basis of the compacts of
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
1884 and 1887. Alexander, swayed by Nationalism,
religion, and ambition, was continually breaking away
from the principle of a modern Holy Alliance of the Three
Monarchies, and continually being lured back by the fear
of revolution into the charmed circle of the magician at
Berlin. Well-informed statesmen were convinced that in
1880 Russia was on the point of returning to the entente
of 1872, when the assassination of Alexander n. and
the confusion caused by a change on the throne and the
internal peril to the autocracy, snapped for the time
the 'new wire' between Berlin and Petersburg. The
opposing schools of policy strove round the person of
Alexander in. , but it was not until death removed Gort-
schakov, Skobeleff, and Katkoff, and the Nihilist danger
had been comparatively mastered, that Russia and the
Tsar had both ears for Bismarck's arguments. Through
all the evidence available runs a persistent principle--the
desirability of uniting the monarchies on a common basis
of resistance to democracy and revolution--the old prin-
ciples of the historic Holy Alliance in a modern form.
Apart from the political considerations underlying a
German hegemony of Central Europe, this dynastic unity
was a bulwark of the existing social order, and no one felt
more strongly than Bismarck that his system at bottom in
Germany and without rested on the maintenance of a
defined social structure correlated to, and a guarantee of,
a distribution of political authority and defined political
principles. He could and did cordially agree with
Alexander in. that the political evolution of France and
the ideas underlying the Republic, together with the con-
tinuous lapse of Great Britain from aristocratic grace to
democracy, constituted a real peril and set up a perpetual
antithesis between the Liberal west and the Conservative
and Monarchical centre and east. The danger of infection
from the west was serious. For all the facts went to prove
that the west might inoculate and sap the centre and east,
but there was small prospect of the centre and the east
curing democratic Great Britain and France of their
deplorable heresies. Dual or Triple Alliances were of no
avail unless they aimed at ends deeper and more sub-
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? 400
BISMARCK
stantial than a nicely and perpetually readjusted political
equilibrium. A coalition of ideas and principles could be
more fatal to German supremacy than a coalition of fleets
or armies. The return, therefore, to a reactionary Con-
servatism, discussed in the previous section, was partly the
reflex, partly the inspiration, of Bismarck's foreign policy.
The disturbing elements in the situation were not con-
fined to Russia. Europe in 1880 was on the threshold of
an era with a very different outlook and ambition. Five
other characteristics can be broadly disentangled--the
Eastern Question, the problem of the Mediterranean, the
renaissance of France, the revived activity and policy of
Great Britain, and the colonial movement. Their com-
bination provided the problem for Bismarck, and his ex-
ploitation of them makes the history of his foreign policy
from 1879 to n*s faH-
After 1878 the Powers were much concerned with the
execution of the terms of the Treaty of Berlin. But the
military occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
question of Dulcigno--' Dulcigno far niente,' as was
wittily said--and similar items of the Berlin programme,
very soon faded into much larger issues--the Roumanian,
Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek questions; Egypt, Tunis,
Syria and Tripoli. Was the liquidation of the Ottoman
Empire to continue? Who were the lawful creditors of
the estate, if from any quarter a petition in bankruptcy was
seriously pressed? What was to be the dividend, and to
whom and in what shares was it to be assigned? The
Congress of Berlin had proclaimed the integrity of a
'consolidated ' and reduced Ottoman Empire, which like
the immortal' Peau de Chagrin' was always being pegged
out, and was always shrinking in defiance of every effort
to prevent it. Bismarck, therefore, had to decide what
was the interest of Germany in the Near East, and he
found the decision very difficult.
If we may judge from events, everything strengthened
his conclusion in 1879 that safety lay in a firm control of
Austria-Hungary. 1 He could pivot on the Dual Alliance
1 'Germany in view of her own lecurity could not possibly allow Austria to
have any other alliance than with herself. '--(From the Sabouroff Memoirs. )
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 401
more securely than on any other nodal, strategic, and
diplomatic point. The remarkable analysis at the end of
his Memoirs, with all its obvious omissions and veiled
allusions, shows how continuously and with what micro-
scopic diligence he watched and weighed every symptom
in Austrian policy. Austria was essential to Germany, for
if Austria collapsed the Near Eastern Question threat-
ened a catastrophe. The heart of the problem lay there-
fore in this issue: if it was easier to control Austria
than to control Russia--and to secure Russia if Austria
had been first secured--to what extent could Germany
'back the Austrian bill'? That Berlin must back the
bill drawn at Vienna broadly was clear. But the analysis
in the Memoirs and the crisis of 1890 reveal that Bismarck
fully recognised very precise limits to the German credit
placed behind the Austrian draft, and showed that he was
not prepared to support 'an unreasonable Austria' at
the price of a complete rupture with Russia. He decided,
in effect, that Germany and Austria might at some future
date have to part company, under the pressure of events:
and the decision brought him into sharp antagonism with
the new school of policy which made an Austro-German
alliance, co&te que coute, the basis of German policy in the
Near East. (See Holstein's criticisms in Hohenlohe, ii. 451.
)
The main argument of that school was profoundly in-
fluenced by the growing ambition to substitute, also coute
que coute, a German ascendency at Constantinople (with
all its illimitable possibilities) for a Russian, a British, or
French ascendency; or, in other words, the integrity and
the revival of the shrinking Ottoman Empire could and
ought to be made a primary German interest. The Mayor
of the Sultan and the Sublime Porte was to be the German
Emperor, in close alliance with Austria. Bismarck between
1879 and 1890 was not prepared to go that length. He
recognised that it involved, for all its advantages, an irre-
concilable breach with Russia, and a serious antagonism to
Great Britain. To the end, while recognising a deepening
German interest in Constantinople and Turkey in Europe,
he had his eyes on the West and France. The ' Austrian
School' at Berlin was really interpreting Centralism in a
B. 2C
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? 402
BISMARCK
way that, in Bismarck's view, might imperil not merely
Germany^ interest in the East but the fundamental basis
of German supremacy in Europe. For Bismarck an
alliance of Russia and France, and the closing of the breach
between Great Britain and Russia, spelled the ruin of a
true system of European policy. The younger generation,
in short, was distinguishing between Bismarckian Central-
ism and a Weltpolitik. They aspired to make Germany a
Wdtmacht--a World-Empire--and not merely a Con-
tinental Power, and they saw the main road winding from
Hamburg through Berlin across the Balkans, through a
Constantinople controlled by Germany to Mesopotamia
and the Persian Gulf, with an entry to the seas not so
closely controlled as the routes down the Channel or
north of the Shetlands; they also saw it reaching across
the Atlantic to the Pacific, expressed in the formula ' ships,
colonies, and commerce. ' And for this young generation
the heart of the position lay in the closest offensive alliance
with Austria. It made Great Britain, not France or
Russia, the great rival of Germany. Bismarck's virtual
reply to such an argument was a paraphrase of Beacons-
field's judgment on Herat and Candahar. 'The Key of
East and West, of Centralism. . and Empire, was not in
Belgrade or Constantinople or Zanzibar--it was in Metz,
Berlin, and Thorn. '
In a more concrete form, the Near Eastern Question
from 1879 to 1890 was summed up in the antagonism of
Austria and Russia in the Balkans, and in the rivalry
between Great Britain and France in Egypt. These two
problems brought the Mediterranean into the main
diplomatic theatre, and kept it there.
By 1878 the isolation of France was proving exceedingly
difficult. The crisis of 1875 had shown that the European
Powers would not tolerate a further reduction of France
or French power; the International Exhibition of 1878
picturesquely mirrored the remarkable extent of France's
recovery from the collapse in 1870. Paris, as in 1867,
was still a great, if not the great, foyer de civilisation,
the attraction of which was inextinguishable. The new
France, working so hard to make good the blunders of the
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 403
Second Empire, would soon be, if she was not already, an
ally worth having. But the Germany that had failed to
crush her or to isolate her completely, and that must fail
to reconcile her because of Alsace and Lorraine, might
divert her gathering strength into directions that would
involve her in a collision with all the possible allies of the
new France. There were three such possible allies--
Great Britain, Russia, and Italy. The colonial movement
combined with the situation in the Mediterranean to give
Bismarck a fine chance of checkmating the rapprochement
so necessary to France and his diplomacy was equal to it.
After 1879 Colonial questions moved sharply and sud-
denly into the forefront of European controversy and
ambition. Africa and the Pacific kept the chancelleries
busy. For Africa was the one great area, of vast extent,
and unlimited possibilities, a continent not yet properly
explored, and not yet finally allotted to, or occupied by,
any great European Power. With 1880 'the scramble
for Africa ' seriously began, and it behove the Powers that
had started late in the foundation of colonies to be quick,
or the one fine field left in a limited world would be over-
run and mastered by the Powers which had started early,
and were already settled at various points on the rim of
the Continent. Everything combined to make the
'African appeal' urgent and critical--the romance of
exploration, the prose of business and trade, missions and
religion, coaling stations, hinterlands and doctrines of
international law, struggling to establish principles which
distinguished spheres of influence, protectorates, treaty
rights, and the nature of actual or virtual possession; and
with these mingled the claims of humanity and the slave-
trade, the rights of races and civilisation,' the white man's
burden,' and the territorial ambitions that underlay the
conception of the State as the incarnation of Power, or the
State as the incarnation of Right and Law. Darkest . and
unknown Africa indeed summed up everything for Europe,
from the selfless heroism of a Livingstone, the stubborn
pertinacity of a Stanley, and the philanthropy of a
Lavigerie to the imperialism of a Rhodes or the syndicates
of gold and diamond companies, the provision of raw
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? 404
BISMARCK
materials for the workshops of Europe, or the cruder
claim to sell bad guns and the poison of potato-spirit in
return for rubber extracted by the lash. And in Africa,
with its harbours and mighty rivers and its stepping-
stones, east or west, might not prescient statecraft call a
new world into existence that would not merely redress,
but completely upset, the balance of the old? Africa
was the whole which developed the rivalries of other and
more purely local areas--for the Mediterranean was a
localised form both of the larger African and the Near
Eastern problems.
The diversion, as distinct from the isolation, of France,
began in 1878. Whether Bismarck first, in the green-
rooms of the Berlin Congress, where so many tempting
whispers were uttered, suggested the idea of France occupy-
ing Tunis, as a compensation for losses elsewhere, or
whether the suggestion fell from Beaconsfield and Salis-
bury, may be a nice question in the origin of things, the
evidence for which is still incomplete; but it is tolerably
certain that France understood after 1878 that, if she did
go to Tunis, Germany and Great Britain would not com-
bine to make the occupation a casus belli, or an occasion
for a humiliating rebuff. In 1881 France accordingly
went to Tunis--with the results that Bismarck at any
rate had foreseen and intended. Great Britain was
already hard pressed by difficulties in Egypt; her relations
with France were becoming strained, and the new Foreign
Secretary at London regretted the virtual pledge of his
predecessor.
That France should quarrel with Great Britain was just
what Bismarck desired, and the causes of quarrel could be
extended by judicious diplomacy inflaming further French
colonial ambitions in Africa, in Siam, Cochin-China, and
the Pacific. The more that France spent in men or
money on colonial expansion, the less she would have for
her eastern frontier in Europe; the more she stared
across the seas the less she would be 'hypnotised by the
gap in the Vosges'; she would not find European allies
by expeditions to the Nile, the Mekong, or the Niger,
but European rivals, whose ambitions would be reflected
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 405
and refracted at London, Paris, Rome, Petersburg,
Brussels, and the Hague: colonial policy and colonial
failures have, moreover, always been since 1660 a fine
dissolvent of ministries in most European States. French
and British ministries would come to grief at home because
French or British expeditions met with reverses on the
Nile or the Niger: France must therefore be encouraged
to suffer a perpetual angina pectoris, in which colonialism
would be an irritant, very shattering to the Republic.
No less beneficial to Berlin and Central Europe, Tunis
and French Mediterranean ambitions brought France at
once into sharp collision with the sister Latin race in Italy.
The kingdom of Italy desired colonies and a sure grip on
the Mediterranean. - The French occupation of Tunis
was a bitter blow. How was France to be prevented from
adding Tripoli to Tunis? And if she had a condominium
in Egypt, what was there left in the Mediterranean for
Italy? An isolated Italy studied the map and the diplo-
matic constellations. Her position was becoming des-
perate. She could not stand alone. But with whom
could she act? A confidential explanation from Berlin
of the terms and meaning of the Dual Alliance of 1879,
made one certainty absolutely clear. 'Unredeemed
Italy' (Italia irredenta)--Trieste and Istria, the Alpine
frontier of the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy of 1810, the
Balkan littoral of the Adriatic were now postponed to
the German Kalends. If Italy could not get these from
Austria single-handed, she assuredly could not get them
by a war in which Germany stood behind Austria. The
Dual Alliance sponged from the screen of the future the
Italian dream of rounding off the unification of 1859 and
1866 by the incorporation of unredeemed Italy or securing
the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. And the exposed
shores of the peninsula were vulnerable to sea-power and
to French sea-power, located at Toulon, Corsica, Tunis,
Bizerta--perhaps Egypt. Given the conditions of 1882,
the accession of Italy to the Dual Alliance was--if the invi-
tation were held out from Berlin--a foregone conclusion.
On May 20, 1882, Italy's accession turned the Dual
into the Triple Alliance. The text of the treaty has
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? 406
BISMARCK
never been officially published; but it is certain that in
1882 Italy joined for five years, and that the treaty was
renewed in 1887 and at subsequent intervals, with which
Bismarck was not concerned. It is practically certain that
the three signatory Powers gave a reciprocal guarantee
for the integrity of their respective territories, undertook
to assist each other in the case of attack by any European
Power (i. e. France), and (probably by secret conventions)
agreed to allot with precision the nature and amount of
their respective military contribution to a joint effort.
It is practically certain that no guarantee was given to
Italy either by Germany or Austria of support in a colonial
policy in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, and that Italy
was in no way bound to support Balkan or other adven-
tures of Germany or Austria. The maintenance of the
existing balance of power in the Mediterranean, or the
nature of any future rearrangement of the Mediterranean
situation, probably did not fall within the scope of the
engagements undertaken in 1882.
The wisdom or the inexpediency of Italy's action in
1882 do not call for judgment here; but two other con-
siderations, besides those mentioned, unquestionably
weighed with Depretis and his successors. Alliance with
Berlin was a powerful support to the Quirinal against the
Vatican, and in 1882 the relations of Quirinal and Vatican
were severely strained: if the Dual Alliance made 'un-
redeemed Italy' an affair beyond redemption, the Triple
Alliance made the restoration of the temporal power of
the Papacy and the removal of the House of Savoy from
Rome practically impossible. The annoyance and anger
of Ultramontanism in Italy, Austria and France, and also
in Germany, are the best- proof of this consequence of the
Triple Alliance. Secondly, it did not prevent Italy from
improving an historic friendship with Great Britain, and
obtaining, if circumstances required, the assistance or
protection of the British fleet, with one of its bases
at Malta. The more strained Anglo-French relations
became, the greater became the likelihood of such assist-
ance; the better Anglo-German relations became, the
better would become the relations of Great Britain and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
Italy. Italy was, and was desired at Berlin to be, a middle
term between Great Britain and the new Triple Alliance.
To Bismarck the conclusion of the Treaty of May 20,
1882, was the culmination of his system. Henceforward
German hegemony in Central Europe moved securely
on the pivotal point of the Triple Alliance, which gradu-
ally and naturally grew into the one grand combination
in the European State system, with which all other possible
combinations or ententes had to reckon. And for Bismarck
the accession of Italy had every advantage and no disad-
vantages. Italy from 1878 to 1882 was in a restless and
excited state. 1 She might indeed precipitate a crisis
which would upset the carefully poised equilibrium of
Europe. Crises that arise from the action of strong
States are often not as dangerous as the crises provoked
by the recklessness of weak States. Italian policy in 1882
came under the control of the Wilhelmstrasse, and control
was stealthily and relentlessly followed by the moral and
economic penetration of the German bankers, cartels,
syndicates, and commercial travellers. After 1878 the
Ottoman Empire was similarly 'penetrated. ' How
deeply the penetration had pierced in both cases--how
enmeshed had become the finance and the springs of trade
by German wheels and cogs and 'controls'--Italy and
the world learned in 1914. 'Trade followed the alliances,
and the alliances followed trade. '
In 1882 the Kulturkampf was by no means healed. The
agreement of ' May 20, 1882' was a potent schedule to
'the May Laws' of 1873 and 1875. Prussia now had a
rod, steeped in Italian brine, which it could use, if required.
Crispi, who figures so prominently in the later phases of
the story, had known and fought under great and hypnotic
men--Garibaldi and Cavour. At Friedrichsruhe he met
another hypnotic personality and succumbed. Bismarck
and Crispi, exchanging their memories over cigars and
wine at Friedrichsruhe, the old revolutionary of the red-
1 'This whole attitude shows that Italy must not be numbered to-day among
the peace-loving and conservative Powers, who must reckon with the fact. . . .
Every encouragement to Italian policy to join the bellicose and predatory
Powers in Europe is contrary to German interests. '--Bismarck to Prince Reuss
at Vienna, Jap. z8, 1880. --Busch, Bismarck, Hi. p. zn,
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? 408
BISMARCK
shirts and 'The Thousand' and the veteran Junker who
had denounced the journey to Canossa, overthrown clerical
France and Apostolic Austria, were not a pleasant thought,
we may be sure, in the Apostolic chancery of the Vatican.
But Bismarck, in concluding the Triple Alliance, was
not thinking so much of the Vatican or the British fleet,
as of Central Europe and France. The Triple Alliance
completed Central Europe; it closed the Alpine passes;
it barred the great gate to Vienna through which Napoleon
had marched in 1796; it opened the Mediterranean to
Germany; it rent away from France the ally of the sister
Latin race and made it henceforward necessary for her to
keep two of her best corps to guard against invasion
through the Maritime Alps. Best of all, it shivered the
serious menace of 1869 and 1871. France, Austria and
Italy, bound in a common war of revenge, had been a
real danger. Austria had been secured as an ally in 1879;
Italy was secured in 1882. It would take genius on the
one side or bungling on the other to undo the Triple
Alliance. Where were now the possible allies of France?
Great Britain? Russia?
In 1882, with the bombardment of Alexandria, the re-
bellion of Arabi, the fall of Gambetta (January 26), and
the Anglo-Egyptian Campaign, war was more likely than
an alliance between France and Great Britain. The
Triple Alliance, in fact, largely. undid the benefits to
France of the benevolent hint to take Tunis and to take it
at once. In the future Italy's claims in the Mediter-
ranean might be much more serious, if Berlin found it
convenient to give them 'moral' support. Bismarck's
'moral' support was unlike that of most European
Powers. It was only given because he had decided that,
if need be, behind it lay 'the immoral' support of
German force.
And there was another supreme advantage in Bismarck's
eyes. If Austria kept Italy in check, Italy could be used
to keep Austria in vassalage. There was little fear that
Italy, the weakest of the three allies, would break loose,
take the bit in her teeth, and defy Berlin and Vienna,
while France was hostile, and Great Britain vaguely
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
friendly. But there was always a real danger that the
men in the Ball-Platz might lose their heads. Megalo-
mania and folly were hereditary diseases in the statesman-
ship of Imperial Vienna. Modern history was a dreary
record of Austrian blunders--from Charles VI. to Francis
Joseph; we are almost tempted to add from Charles v1.
to Aerenthal, Hotzendorf and Tisza. Italy provided the
Wilhelmstrasse with a very useful curb for keeping the
Ball-Platz 'in hand. ' In that unwritten chapter of the
relations of Berlin and Vienna after 1879 the historical
student of Bismarck's statecraft, provoked by the tempting
glimpses revealed here and there, sighs indeed for a few
weeks uninterrupted work in the archives of Vienna and
the Wilhelmstrasse with an unrestricted general warrant,
entitling him to examine all confidential documents.
Such a search would not merely satisfy a hungry curi-
osity; it would be invaluable in the scientific appreciation
of Bismarck's statecraft. The use of Italy's aspirations in
pruning the rank growth of Austrian appetites is an
obscure chapter in Bismarck's system--but would be an
illuminating one. It might, indeed probably would, fur-
nish an instructive contrast between Bismarck and the
post-Bis marckians.
Italy in 1882 was like Italy in 1866. She had concluded
a treaty which imposed obligations, but conferred prac-
tically no rights. Bismarck had, to a certainty, refused in
any way to endorse in advance the ' Italian draft' on the
future. How far he had cautiously endorsed a very limited
Austrian 'draft' is, as has been pointed out, very un-
certain; but Italian claims and aspirations in Albania or
elsewhere, that so obviously conflicted with an Austrian
programme, could be, and were, used after 1882 to keep
Austria 'in order. ' How far Bismarck's successors de-
parted from the Bismarckian system--how far they
gradually interpreted the articles of association in the very
limited liability company that constituted Bismarck's
Triple Alliance, as constituting a company of unlimited
liability, how far they gradually came to regard it as
practically a Dual Alliance in which Italy made a negli-
gible third, who would not dare to break away, and at the
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? BISMARCK
worst would observe a sulking and peevish neutrality--
it is neither necessary, nor possible, to decide here. But
to Bismarck, the Continentalist in feeling, thought, and
fibre, the Triple Alliance was of supreme importance, for
it secured the Continental position that made the marrow
and bone of Bismarckian Central Europe; and if it was
never easy from 1882 to 1890 to prevent his two allies
from snarling at, or quarrelling with each other, such
management called for all the arts and skill which Bismarck
rejoiced to prove that he had. The position of arbiter
was precisely what he desired, and in the exercise of the
office he was consummate.