But
Bismarck
thought otherwise.
Robertson - Bismarck
In these negotiations Bismarck had confronted
the Southern States with a confidential revelation, not
minimised in the communication, of Napoleon's demands
for compensation. He could satisfy Napoleon, if he chose,
by acquiescing in the cession of Bavarian and Hessian
territories to a France which the South had hoped to play
off as a protector against Hohenzollern tyranny. The
alternative was still more simple. Prussia in return for
the signature of the secret military conventions would re-
sist the cession of a single yard of German territory; and
if Napoleon, now or in the future, threatened Germany the
Southern-States would join with the Northern Confedera-
tion in a united resistance. The argument was irresistible.
With the military conventions signed, sealed, and delivered,
and Napoleon definitely disposed of, Bismarck could with
an easy mind complete the formal treaty of peace that em-
bodied the preliminaries of Nikolsburg.
The Treaty of Prague (August 23) opened a new chapter
in the history of Prussia, of Austria, of Germany and of
Europe. Austria agreed that the old Confederation
should be dissolved and a new one, from which she was
excluded, formed under Prussian leadership. The line of
the river Main was fixed as the southern boundary of the
new organisation. With the exception of Venetia, trans-
ferred, through Napoleon, to Italy, the integrity of the
Austrian Empire was maintained. Schleswig-Holstein
and Lauenburg were annexed by Prussia, while the Duke
of Augustenburg subsequently abandoned his claims aud
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? 2I4
BISMARCK
released his 'subjects' from their allegiance. Napoleon
secured certain concessions. The kingdom of Saxony,
included in the Northern Confederation, retained its terri-
torial integrity, and dynastic crown. The three Southern
States--Baden, Wurttemberg, Bavaria--and the southern
portion of Hesse-Darmstadt, were prohibited from enter-
ing the Northern Confederation, with which they could
make arrangements by treaty; retaining severally their
'international independence' they were free to unite in
a separate confederation of their own. On the other
hand, Prussia was given a free hand in the North; and she
promptly prepared to annex Hanover, Nassau, Hesse-
Cassel, the northern portion of Hesse-Darmstadt, and the
former free city of Frankfurt, and to depose their several
ruling houses and governments. These annexations were
justified on the ground that the States in question had
made war as Prussia's enemies, and that' by reason of their
geographical position they could embarrass Prussia beyond
fiie measure of their natural power. ' In reality their
territories were required for military and strategic reasons,
and in order to secure for Prussia in the new Bund an over-
whelming military, political, and economic predominance.
Bismarck desired also to teach a drastic lesson to dynastic
Particularism. Saxony had been spared to humour Napo-
leon, Austria and Russia, but the rulers of Hanover, Hesse,
and Nassau must be punished by extirpation. The new
League would contain no dynasty, other than the Saxon,
with either the tradition or the power of independence, and
Saxony after this object-lesson would give no trouble in the
future. In a word, Prussia emerged from the war enlarged
to the extent of some twenty-seven thousand square miles,
and four and a quarter million inhabitants. She had not
merely tightened her grip on the Rhine and consolidated
the connection between Berlin and her Rhenish acqui-
sitions of 1815, but had secured an outlet to the North
Sea and the Baltic of supreme importance for the future.
The harbour of Kiel, in itself, was worth a king's ransom,
and the acquisition of Schleswig-Holstein with Lauenburg
would enable the canal from the Baltic to the North Sea--
so often planned in the middle of the century--to be
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
carried out as a Prussian enterprise. The sea-faring popu-
lation of the Duchies would provide a splendid nucleus
for the naval and mercantile marine that would complete
Prussia's ambition to be a European Power on terms of
equality with Great Britain and France.
The treaty was a signal triumph for Bismarck's state-
craft of 'blood and iron. ' Bismarck the man and
Bismarck the statesman were now the foremost figures on
the European stage, and behind Bismarck stood the new
Prussia conscious of its strength. Prussia and the world
were continuously reminded that fidelity to Prussian
ideals was the secret of success. Prussia had saved herself
by her efforts and Germany by her example. In 1867
Treitschke at Heidelberg as editor of the Preussische Jahr-
bilcher, could begin to teach the lesson, driven home by his
professoriate at Berlin (1874), that the Empire to come
must be an extended Prussia. The clauses in the treaty
which permitted the Southern States to form a separate
union, and forbade the incorporation of that union or any
member of it with the Northern Confederation were
worthless. No treaty could destroy the intellectual, moral,
and material bridges across the Main that a common
German civilisation, embedded in a common speech, the
intellectual fraternity of great German universities, and
the economic bonds of an increasing trade aided by the
tariff union, so richly provided, and the military bridges
were already laid by the secret conventions. A German
Empire was practically made by the Treaty of Prague. Its
complete realisation in the future could only be prevented
by destroying the framework which the Treaty of Prague
had created. The first of these conditions was Prussia
and Prussianism as Bismarck interpreted them.
But if the Treaty of Prague had gone a long way towards
stamping on Germany a particular solution of the German
problem--a solution which in 1862 had seemed so im-
probable as to be regarded as the fantasy of a political
gambler--it had not solved the two formidable problems
in foreign relations that the guaranteed form of German
unification at once raised.
The new Germany, whether federal or unitary, whether
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? 2l6
BISMARCK
divided by an arbitrary line of demarcation, the river Main,
or not, had to determine its attitude and policy towards
a new Austria and an old France--an Austria, severed as
the penalty of defeat from its historic membership in the
German organisation, and with no historical or practical
experience to inspire and direct either its policy, its status
in the world of Europe, or its internal polity and frame-
work--the old and undefeated France, whose flag flew at
Metz and Strasburg, in whose heart the two most abiding
and cherished convictions were the supremacy of France
in Europe, and the peril embodied in a unified Germany.
Thiers' indictment that Napoleon in 1866 had allowed the
Empire of Charles v. to be revived was the phrase of a
great phrase-maker, but it crystallised the fears of France
in an epigram. For the Treaty of Prague, while most
assuredly it did not threaten Europe with a revival of the
Empire of Charles v. , no less assuredly re-created for
Germany and its neighbours the problem of Central
Europe. On what principles, with what objects, and on
what system of State life ought the territory between the
Rhine and the Vistula, the Vosges and the Carpathians, to
be politically organised?
The Empire of Charles v. had attempted to solve that
recurring riddle by the effort to re-adapt to the conditions
of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery the great
mediaeval conception of the unity of secular European
Christendom under the continuance of the Holy Roman
Empire of the German nation. The effort had collapsed
with the rupture of the spiritual and moral unity of
Europe, effected by the Reformation, and aggravated by the
pressure of the territorial national State of which sixteenth-
century France was the most potent expression on the
Continent. Napoleon--the heir both of the Bourbons
and the Revolution--had attempted to solve it by the
practical abolition of Central Europe, the establishment
of the Grand Empire Francais of the West/resting on the
alliance with the Eastern Empire of Russia and the'allot-
ment of the central area to a dismembered Prussia, an
Austria expelled from Germany and cut off from the sea,
and a League of the Rhine, militarily, economically, and
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 217
politically dependent on the Empire of the West. Napo-
leon's structure was destroyed by Nationalism and sea-
power in combination. The Congress of Vienna aimed
at frustrating both Westernism and Centralism by a return
to a modernised interpretation of the old theory of the
Balance of Power. It remade a Germany that mirrored
the European equilibrium; it sustained the hegemony of
a decentralised Austria, with a sub-centre of gravity at
Berlin, as an effective counterpoise alike to Paris in the
west and Petersburg in the east, and it revived the Concert
of Europe. But the separation of Holland and Belgium,
the unification of Italy, the renaissance of Prussia and the
defeat of Austria had now wrecked the system of 1815.
The problem re-emerged. What after Koniggratz was
to be the new political framework of Central Europe?
The Treaty of Prague did not register merely the substi-
tution of Berlin for Vienna as the new nodal point of an
old political system. That old system had explicitly re-
jected the unified national State as the framework of
Central Europe. The unification of Italy was a victory
for the national State; and it was with the aid of the Italy
made by Cavour and Napoleon, that Bismarck adminis-
tered the coup de grclce to the wounded Austria of 1859.
The removal of Austria left the central site clear for the
erection of a national German State, the essence of which
lay in the assumption that Central Europe belonged to
the German race and must be so organised as to put the
claim beyond question. The Italy of Cavour's policy
combined Liberalism--government through represen-
tative institutions, ministerial responsibility, and a consti-
tutional monarchy--with Nationalism--Nationalism as the
foundation of the State that is Law and Right. But the
Prussia that had annexed Schleswig-Holstein, absorbed
Hanover, Nassau, and electoral Hesse, and defeated
Austria was the State that is Power, whose organ is Force.
And in the profound difference between these two ex-
pressions of Nationalism--the Italian and the Prussian--lay
the deep significance of the emergence of the old problem
of Central Europe. The doctrine of race in Germany had
combined not with the gospel of Law but with the gospel
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? 2l8
BISMARCK
of Power. The problem for Bismarck--the problem of
Central Europe--was how to impose the new national
German State, based on power, on the European system,
and how to remodel that system to admit the new Ger-
many. There now lay before him the task of internal
reconstruction--the making of the new confederation--
and the task of reconstructing Europe on the results of the
victory of 1866.
The constitution of the new Germany must assist
the solution of the problem imposed on foreign policy.
The new Germany must be national in form and structure,
but it could not be constitutional, parliamentary, or
liberal, as England or Italy interpreted constitutional and
realise its ambitions without a new orientation for Austria
and a drastic alteration in the status and power of France.
Not until Austria had transferred its centre of gravity (as
he had predicted in 1864) to Buda-Pesth and accepted the
role of a Danubian State, with a front facing to the south-
east of Europe; not until France had been reduced to
subordination in the west could the new Central Europe,
with Berlin as its capital, be completed. Such a solution
would be a fresh and decisive victory for the principles,
enshrined in Prussian Nationalism, and the final defeat of
the principles antagonistic to the State as Power.
If there was one certainty in 1866 it was that France
would not allow without a struggle the North German
Confederation to absorb the Southern States and ring
France in with a German Empire stretching from the
Memel and the Eider to the Alps. The claims of the old
France could not be reconciled with the ambitions of the
new Germany.
The interest therefore of the next three years in Bis-
marck's statesmanship lies in two directions: first, his
determination to secure such a constitution for the North
German Confederation as would practically ensure a State
of the same character and under a similar irresponsible
political control to those existent in Prussia; secondly, an
ultimate settlement with France that would establish the
German Empire to come--a unified national State--as the
liberal government.
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 219
dominating power in Central Europe. The connection
between the character of tin North German Confederation
and the final victory of the Bismarckian solution of the
German problem was vital. It provides an illuminating
interpretation of the deeper issues and ideals of Bismarck's
statecraft.
An ultimate reconciliation with Austria was clearly fore-
shadowed in 1866. But reconciliation with France. was
impossible in 1867, nor was it desired. Bismarck's policy re-
quired the defeat of France. The danger from France was
not purely political or military--in the union of an undefeated
France with a defeated Austria, a revival of the system of
Kaunitz and the Bourbon monarchy of 1756. Rome and
the papacy brought into the political conflict the battle of
ideas. The syllabus of 1864 led logically to the Vatican
Decrees of 1870. Papal infallibility was a victory of Ultra-
montanism. Against the sovereignty of the modern State,
over all causes and persons, ecclesiastical as well as civil,
throughout its dominions supreme, it arrayed the theory
that in spheres of thought and action, defined not by the
State but by the Church, the competence of civil authority
ceased, and that the jus dirigendi and ihejuscoercendi passed
to spiritual power, intrinsically and in the divine order of
things, superior. France, Austria, and the patrimony of
Peter, were the political strongholds of this creed and
party. The defeat of Austria and France transferred the
struggle to the floors of the Prussian Landtag and the
Imperial Reichstag. What would have been the issue
of this tremendous struggle of principles, cutting down to
the bone of civil life and the fundamentals of society, if
France had won in 1870?
For the present Bismarck had to reckon with French
and German national sentiment. On both sides of the
frontier the high explosive of national passion was stored
up in embarassing plenitude, and any political trifle might
detonate the magazines. Napoleon's repeated and vary-
ing demands had proved not so much what the Emperor
himself desired as what he knew France expected him to
extort. The extreme irritability of French public opinion
was caused by anger, humiliation, and fear, and the danger
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BISMARCK
was all the greater because Napoleon's failure in Mexico
and in European combination with the internal discontent,
imperilled the dynasty and made it imperative for the
Tuileries to re-gild its tarnished prestige with a striking
success in foreign policy. France was corroded with the
worst form of ignorance that can sap a nation's strength,
the ignorance that is steeped in vanity. The boulevards
of Paris and the estaminets de province did not know
Prussia, and they refused to recognise the profound changes
that had made the Germany of 1867 as different from the
Germany of 1815 as that Germany was from the Germany
of 1789. The France of 1867 was inspired with the
axiomatic conviction that it was still the first country of
Europe, the foyer de civilisation, first in science, letters,
the arts and arms.
The irritability of German public opinion was due co
pride and the consciousness of strength. Great things
had been accomplished, but they were only the beginning.
The supremacy in Europe was at last passing into German
hands. The injuries of the past were not yet obliterated,
and the one veto which German Nationalism was not pre-
pared to tolerate was a French veto on the completion of
German unity. After 1866 any French or German states-
man could have made a war with ease in twenty-four hours.
For things simply could not remain as they were in 1866.
Neither Napoleon nor Bismarck could postpone indefin-
itely the collision without abandoning what neither could
abandon. The maintenance of the French Empire and
the imperial dynasty on the throne was Napoleon's, the
completion of German unification was Bismarck's, task.
For Napoleon the tragedy was summed up in the impossi-
bility of refusing war if it was thrust upon him, since refusal
meant another humiliation, and that spelled ruin. The
Treaty of Prague placed the initiative in Bismarck's hands.
Obedient to the opportunism on which his statecraft rested,
he already willed the end in 1866; the means and the
moment would be revealed by circumstances that could
not be predicted in advance but might be made. It
was Bismarck's deepest conviction that true opportunism
consisted as much in creating opportunities as in seizing
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 221
them when they occurred. But as in 1864 or in 1866 the
war that lay ' in the logic of history '--a logic not made by
chance or a blind caprice, but created by statecraft--must
be strictly and essentially ' defensive. ' War must secure,
since policy could not, the conditions on which a German
Central Europe could live for the future with its neigh-
bours. The achievement of these conditions could on
Bismarclrian principles alone prove its justifiability and
necessity.
v
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? CHAPTER V
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE NORTH GERMAN
CONFEDERATION
The Making of the North German Confederation--The War
with France, 1866-1870--The Treaty of Frankfurt--The
Unification of Germany, 1870-1871.
The conclusion of the treaties which established peace was
only part of the complicated and exhausting burden of
work that Bismarck had to shoulder. This enormous pres-
sure of business could not be delegated, except in its de-
tails; and even if delegation had been possible Bismarck
was not the man to permit, in so critical a situation, the
interference of colleagues, military or civil. The gigantic
labour fell on a man already worn out, living on shattered
nerves and an adamantine will. He had returned to
Berlin on August 4, and when on September 20 he took
part in the triumphal entry of the army, every one ob-
served with concern the weary exhaustion in his face and
figure. He had in fact dragged himself from a sick bed
to ride with the generals, Moltke, Roon, Herwarth von
Bittenfeld, Steinmetz, and Vogel von Falkenstein, to re-
ceive the homage of a crowd, delirious with enthusiasm,
and the roses of the girls at the Brandenburg Gate. He
was, and he knew it, the arresting figure in the cavalcade;
men and women along the route had their eyes on the
civilian in the cuirassier uniform, merely a titular general
of brigade, for he was the magician who had achieved the
miracle. To-day it was roses--roses, roses all the way
past the statue of. his master, Frederick the Great--but
had the Crown Prince arrived too late at Koniggratz, it
would not have been even the besoms of the old women
or the stones of a duped democracy. He would have been
lying, face downwards, after the last charge.
222
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 223
The Landtag had been dissolved at the outbreak of war,
and the elections of July 8 reflected the victories. One
hundred and forty Conservatives had been returned, and
had the dissolution been deferred till the end of July it is
probable that the defeat of the opposition would have been
decisive. Junkertum was jubilant. Now was the time to
teach these pestilent Radicals a lesson. The King shared
their views.
But Bismarck thought otherwise. It was the
hour for the olive branch that he had plucked at Avignon
in September 1862. The opposition had had their lesson.
National Liberalism--not Junkertum--was the true ally
in the work of unification to come. Not even in his deal-
ings with Austria and the defeated German South did
Bismarck show himself more convincingly a masterly
realist--the statesman who appreciates realities and bends
them to his will--than in his treatment of the Landtag.
'I was in a position to carry out the boldest and most in-
cisive policy of reaction,' he told the Reichstag in 1879,
'with the success and iclat which still attached to me from
Koniggratz . . . if I had thought that absolutism in
Prussia would have better promoted the work of German
unity, I should most decidedly have counselled recourse
to it. ' For himself and for his policy the triumph would
be all the more enduring if he could now hypnotise
National Liberalism into servitude as a loyal agent of his
will. The King, not unnaturally, resisted, supported by
his military advisers, and Bismarck had a hard task, assisted
by the Crown Prince, in persuading his sovereign to accept
what he regarded as a personal humiliation and a public
surrender. Bismarck wrote to his wife (August 3) :--
'Great controversy over the speech from the Throne
. . . these folk see nothing but their own nose and practice
their swimming in the stormy flood of phrases. With
our enemies we can settle up, but our Friends! They all
wear blinkers and see only a speck of the world,'
The Landtag opened on August 5, and the royal speech
indicated that the government would throw a white sheet
over the blue uniform with the red facings. The bill,
introduced by Bismarck, provided an indemnification for
the absence of a legal budget since 1862, and additional
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BISMARCK
credits for 1866. The Budget for 1867 would be sub-
mitted to the Lower House. It was a frank admission that
the government had acted illegally, but the Minister-
President invited the House to close the constitutional
controversy, and to recognise that if the government had
been ' technically' wrong it could not have acted other-
wise under the circumstances, and that peace and pardon
were now necessary in order to proceed with the great
duties that awaited Prussia. Let bygones be bygones;
neither Crown nor Landtag in the future would assail each
other's rights. The era of conflict was over--never to
return. 'The government,' he said, later, 'has gladly
grasped the opportunity to bring the conflict to an end,
in the conviction that it serves no purpose in constitutional
life to drive matters to extremities. Constitutional
fovernment cannot be judged by mathematical, nor even
y juristic, rules. It is a continuous compromise . . .
the making of peace never satisfies every wish, never fulfils
every calculation. '
L. von Gerlach pronounced the bill a blow in the face of
Bismarck's best friends. The Conservatives received the
measure in morose silence, but it passed the Lower House
by 230 to 75 votes, and the Upper House without a
division. The irreconcilables of both camps refused the
olive branch, and from the Indemnity Bill dates a re-
grouping of Prussian and German parties which the or-
ganisation of the new Confederation definitely confirmed.
In September 1866 the Progressive party (Fortschritts-
Partei), which had been the core of the opposition, split up.
Fifteen of its important members, with eight from the
left centre, founded a new party, under Bennigsen's leader-
ship, which on the dissolution of the Nationalverein,
became the powerful National Liberal party. Its raison
d'Hre was to give the new government firm support in its
foreign policy, and to work for complete unity with free-
dom. 'Der deutsche Staat und die deutsche Freiheit
miissen gleichzeitig mit denselben Mitteln errungen
werden. ' A similar split took place in the Conserva-
tive ranks. On October 27, 1867, the Free Conservative
party was founded on the principle that Prussia had
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 225
now entered 'the class of constitutional States. ' 'The
Time of Absolutism had passed. ' The Free Conser-
vatives pledged themselves to support and work for the
'Constitutional monarchy' defined in the Constitution
of 1867. How active political thought and movement
had become under the influence of the years 1866 and 1867
can be best judged by two other party manifestations:
first, the notable Eisenach Programme which founded the
Social Democrats in August 1869; secondly, the German
Popular Party (Deutsche Volkspartet) of South Germany
in September 1868, with its ideal of the complete demo-
cratic State and responsible parliamentary government.
The Eisenach Programme, of which much was to be heard
later, aimed amongst other ends at direct legislation by a
popular legislature, substitution of a national militia for
the standing army, separation of Church and State, aboli-
tion of ecclesiastical teaching in the elementary schools,
complete independence of the judiciary, abolition of all
press laws, legal recognition of trades unions, abolition of
all indirect taxation, substitution of a single progressive
income-tax, and regulation by law of the hours, remunera-
tion, and conditions of labour.
During the short autumn session of 1866 Bismarck, ex-
hausted as he was, astonished the Landtag by his persua-
sive geniality. The old rasping irritability and explosions
of anger were reserved for the ministers of the South and
for Benedetti; it was ail the more remarkable, as he was in
daily pain and tortured by insomnia. But with Bismarck,
as with the great Napoleon, anger, insolence, and menaces
were storm-cones indicating that the situation was critical;
they were intended to drive an adversary into indiscretions.
The surer that his grip on a situation became, the politer
became Bismarck's manners.
The princes of the States north of the Main were sum-
moned to Berlin to confer (August 4); they found a
Prussian minister lavish in the amiability that is easy to the
victorious master of many legions. It was a congress of
roaches presided over by a benevolent pike. The basis of
the new Confederation was laid (August 18) in fifteen
treaties of alliance, in which the contracting parties
B. p
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BISMARCK
guaranteed the inviolability of their territories, and agreed
to refer to a constituent Parliament, chosen as in 1849 by
direct and universal manhood suffrage, the establishment
of a Federal Constitution. One point alone was settled
in advance. The troops of the allies were placed under
the supreme command of the King of Prussia.
The Landtag ratified the annexations permitted by
the Treaty of Prague. In the bill Hanover,1 Nassau,
Hesse-Cassel, Frankfurt, and Schleswig-Holstein were not
'annexed' but 'taken in possession' by the Crown. Bis-
marck however yielded with grace to the critics and agreed
to annexation pure and simple. After voting a special
military credit the Landtag was prorogued (September 27) . 2
Bismarck's endurance had given out. On September 26
he left for Pomerania, and for the next two months was
seriously ill. His constitution and will were as usual better
that a man should not die till he had smoked 100,000
cigars and drunk 5000 bottles of champagne. His wife
hailed with joy the day, after many weary weeks of pain,
sleeplessness, and black depression, when the Minister-
President once more found joy in the Moselle and Hock
specially selected by a princely host in the island of Riigen;
and with the appetite for wine and tobacco came back the
lust for work and achievement. Devoted friends had been
toiling in his absence on the new Constitution--Roon,
Delbriick, Abeken--and Bismarck called in Hepke, Lothar
Bucher, and Max Duncker. But their drafts failed to
-satisfy. In his solitude he, too, had been toiling to clarify
his ideas, and on his return to Berlin, by a tour deforce at
a single sitting, he dictated to Bucher the scheme of a
Constitution (December 13), copies of which were ready
1 Hanover, like the other annexed principalities, became Prussian territory.
It ceased to be an independent kingdom; the dynasty was dethroned, and the
reigning king became a 'legitimist1 claimant to a throne he no longer
possessed, who refused to recognise the validity of the treaty and the acts
which destroyed his crown and turned the 'kingdom' into an administrative
Prussian province.
1 Saxe-Weimar, Oldenburg, Brunswick, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg-
Gotha, Anhalt, the two Schwarzburgs, Waldeck, Reuss (younger branch),
Schaumburg-Lippe and Lippe, Lubeck, Bremen and Hamburg. The two
Mechlenburgs adhered on August 21, feaxe-Meiningen, Reuss (elder branch),
and the kingdom of Saxony on October 21.
Late in life he pronounced
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 227
(December 15) for the Conference of Plenipotentiaries
from the governments. The Conference lasted until
February 7, 1867, when the amended draft was recom-
mended by the governments for acceptance. The
elections for the Constituent Reichstag were held on
February 12, and on February 24 the Reichstag of the
North German Confederation met to discuss the recom-
mended draft. -The Constitution was finally passed on
April 17. The several governments accepted it, as
amended by the Reichstag, and it was then submitted
to the Parliaments of the several States. The Prussian
Landtag agreed by June I; the other States followed suit;
on July 1, 1867,tne Constitution was duly promulgated.
The North German Confederation was now in existence;
one further act was necessary to complete the work. On
July 14 Bismarck was appointed Federal Chancellor--
combining the duties of the new office with the Minister-
Presidency of Prussia. The task of making a Constitution
and of unifying North Germany by a victorious Prussia,
undisturbed either by enemies without or within, had
occupied eleven months of continuous and hard work
(August 4, 1866-July 1, 1867). The man of ' blood and
iron ' had been as long over the task as the dilatory and un-
practical professors, journalists, and idealists, who had toiled
at a larger task in the Church of St. Paul at Frankfurt from
May 13, 1848, to April 11, 1849. The critics, and they
are not few, who assume that men of action can produce
constitutions as easily as omelettes, and that the juristic,
moral, political, and institutional problems that even
partial unification of Germany provided could be solved
by a triumphant sword in a few days, have failed to grasp
the elements of history's lessons. One conclusion that is
certain is, that without the noble and masterly work of the
men of 1848, and the earnest co-operation of the finest
minds and characters in Germany from 1849 to 1866, the
establishment of the North German Confederation could
not have been accomplished in double the time. 'There
is spring in Germany to-day,' said a deputy; but the
intoxicating splendour of that spring had its dawn in
the Liberalism of the Revolution.
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? 228
BISMARCK
The North German Confederation was not what National
Liberalism desired, or for which it had worked so long and
with such faith and loyalty. If Max Duncker might well
remark, 'what a contrast between the seventy articles of
the Constitutional text of 1867 and the twenty articles of
the Federal act of 1815,' the comparison measures the
profound change in the principles, temper, and ideals of
the Germany made by Metternich and the Germany
made by Bismarck. But what a contrast also between the
Constitution of 1867 and that of 1849. The difference
was due to Bismarck. The North German Confederation
concentrates in lines precise and unmistakable the first
of the two great chapters in the Bismarckian solution of
the German problem. The text of the Constitution is
stamped throughout with the imprint of his personality,
genius, principles, and ideals.
The interest therefore of the eleven months' toil in
constitution-making lies as much in what was rejected as
in what was accepted, in the omissions no less than in the
inclusions, in the extreme rigidity of some, and the ex-
treme flexibility of other, parts of the framework. The
three main organs were the Presidency (Praesidium),vested
in the King of Prussia, the Federal Council (Bundesrat),
and the Parliament (Reichstag). Legislation and taxation
were shared between the Council and the Parliament, the
concurrence of both organs being required for the validity
of laws or taxes. The originality of the Confederation
lay in the functions assigned to, and the relations estab-
lished between, the Praesidium, the Council, and the
representative Parliament. As President, the King of
Prussia was not a sovereign in the ordinary sense. He was
not a member of the Council, nor was his consent necessary
to Federal legislation or taxation. He did not preside
over the Council, the Chairman of which was the Federal
Chancellor. But as President he summoned and dissolved
the Reichstag, concluded treaties, declared peace and
war, and represented the Bund in all external relations;
he promulgated the laws, and in peace and in war was
commander-in-chief of the combined Federal forces, to
whom the oath of allegiance was taken. The Council was
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 229
not an upper chamber of the legislature. It was a syndi-
cate of governmental delegates, appointed in assigned
numbers to the members of the Bund* who voted as units,
representing the assigned vote, on the instruction of their
respective governments. The Council was thus consti-
tuted not over, but out of, the States; its deliberations
were secret; its decisions were taken on a majority of
votes; it had the initiative in legislation, and it could
reject bills passed by the Reichstag. Through its various
committees, dealing with defined subjects, it acted as a
semi-executive organ. The Parliament was an assembly
of representatives sitting in a single chamber, and chosen
by direct and universal manhood suffrage from equal
electoral districts. It voted the Federal budget, and its
consent was necessary to all legislation. The one Federal
minister was the Chancellor, appointed by the Presidency,
responsible to the Bund as a whole, and in his chancellery
were concentrated the Federal executive and administration.
The Chancellor was not responsible directly either to the
Reichstag or the Bundesrat. He could not be dismissed as
the result of a parliamentary vote, but he was intended to
act as the spokesman of the Council in all matters of policy,
administration, or legislation, and it was his duty to submit
to the Presidency all matters in which the Praesidium was
the executive organ, and to countersign all notifications
in which the Presidency acted on behalf of the Bund.
This Constitution was, broadly, an adaptation of the old
Federal organisation, fundamentally modified in four
directions--the increased powers assigned to the Presi-
dency, the creation of the Federal Chancellor, the inclusion
of a popular and representative legislature, and the relations
established between the Council and the Parliament. It
was ingeniously organised to meet the two chief defects of
the old system: the absence of real unity in consequence
of the unimpaired sovereignty of the member-States, and
the limited competence and lack of coercive power of the
Federal organs. The new Federal system was a real unity;
it could legislate for and impose its Federal will on the
1 Seventeen votes were assigned to Prussia; twenty-six were assigned to the
other twenty-one States which composed the Federation.
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? BISMARCK
whole Bund in all matters denned in the Constitution as
a Federal concern. It no less ingeniously combined the
demand for popular representation and a share of all
Germans in the government of the Confederation with
the claim of Prussia to be the preponderant and directing
power. It gratified the dynasties by the position assigned
to the governments in the Council, which, although not
a Congress of Princes, was a syndicate made from the
princedoms; it recognised local particularism by leaving
the legislatures of the member-States intact in their diver-
sity of franchise and institutions, and their powers only
impaired by the transfer of defined Federal concerns to the
dual central organ of Bundesrat and Reichstag. Lastly,
and by no means least, it created a chancellorship with
powers vague and ill-defined enough to satisfy the person-
ality and ambition of a Bismarck. The position of Federal
Chancellor was what Bismarck wished to enjoy. The
office was the keystone of the Federal arch, and the whole
structure was pieced together to maintain the keystone in
its central position.
Bismarck's share, in speech, in writing, and in oral con-
ferences in the prolonged discussions from December to
June, would make more than a volume. He came to the
creative task, not merely with the glamour of an acquired
prestige, and the force of an overpowering personality, but
with an experience unrivalled in Germany of diplomacy,
administration, and knowledge of men and institutions.
Bismarck was in the plenitude of his physical and mental
powers in 1866-7--onry a Titan could have carried the
burden, and even he very nearly collapsed under it--and
he revealed in the making of the Constitution the inflexible
tenacity of aim and principle, the inexhaustible variety of
resource, the complete absence of scruple, the combina-
tion of brutal strength, velvety suppleness, and Prussian
mastery of detail that had marked his ministerial presi-
dency. No man knew better that he was fighting now to
impose the Bismarckian solution--to impose himself, his
principles, ideals, and interpretations of life--on Germany.
It was the joy of achieving that supreme ambition, the
consciousness of realising at last all that made life worth
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 231
living, all the full-blooded sense of what it was to be a
German and a Prussian, that inspired him to resist every
party, principle, or proposal opposed to the German State
he desired to establish.
Hence the procedure in the making of the Constitution.
He first concluded alliances, as noted, with the States to
be federated; then drew up the original draft, and on
behalf of Prussia obtained the ratification of the text
through plenipotentiaries by whom the governments were
pledged. The constituent Reichstag was thus confronted
with an agreed scheme, amendment of which in any funda-
mental sense was exceedingly difficult, for it must be made
the occasion for re-reference to the governments behind the
Reichstag. The Constitution passed by the Reichstag was
finally submitted to all the legislatures, with the warning
that emendation would involve a re-submission to every
State and the Reichstag as a whole for its concurrence.
Its final acceptance en bloc was thus secured. Apart from
his personal authority in argument, Bismarck had two
great weapons at his disposal. First, the power of Prussia.
If Prussia would not agree, the proposal must come to
naught; and Prussia was practically himself. The Lower and
the Upper House of the Landtag would act as he advised.
They were "strong enough to veto where they could not
create. Secondly, the critical external situation which made
rapid decision urgent. Bismarck used this consideration
both privately and in public with great skill. For while the
Constitution was on the anvil the Luxemburg crisis and
the danger of a war with France had to be faced and sur-
mounted. The European situation had indeed the same
driving influence that it had in 1689 on the English Revo-
lution and the passing of the Declaration of Rights.
'Work quickly,' Bismarck said in a famous sentence. 'Put
Germany in the saddle and she will soon ride. '
German pride, fed on its imperial history, lamented
the absence of a Kaiser and a Reich, a sovereign and an
empire. Prussian Junkertum deplored the emasculation
of the Prussian monarchy, which it desired to see ruling
North Germany as it ruled Prussia, by direct authority
and unquestioned prerogative. The tenderness to the
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the Southern States with a confidential revelation, not
minimised in the communication, of Napoleon's demands
for compensation. He could satisfy Napoleon, if he chose,
by acquiescing in the cession of Bavarian and Hessian
territories to a France which the South had hoped to play
off as a protector against Hohenzollern tyranny. The
alternative was still more simple. Prussia in return for
the signature of the secret military conventions would re-
sist the cession of a single yard of German territory; and
if Napoleon, now or in the future, threatened Germany the
Southern-States would join with the Northern Confedera-
tion in a united resistance. The argument was irresistible.
With the military conventions signed, sealed, and delivered,
and Napoleon definitely disposed of, Bismarck could with
an easy mind complete the formal treaty of peace that em-
bodied the preliminaries of Nikolsburg.
The Treaty of Prague (August 23) opened a new chapter
in the history of Prussia, of Austria, of Germany and of
Europe. Austria agreed that the old Confederation
should be dissolved and a new one, from which she was
excluded, formed under Prussian leadership. The line of
the river Main was fixed as the southern boundary of the
new organisation. With the exception of Venetia, trans-
ferred, through Napoleon, to Italy, the integrity of the
Austrian Empire was maintained. Schleswig-Holstein
and Lauenburg were annexed by Prussia, while the Duke
of Augustenburg subsequently abandoned his claims aud
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? 2I4
BISMARCK
released his 'subjects' from their allegiance. Napoleon
secured certain concessions. The kingdom of Saxony,
included in the Northern Confederation, retained its terri-
torial integrity, and dynastic crown. The three Southern
States--Baden, Wurttemberg, Bavaria--and the southern
portion of Hesse-Darmstadt, were prohibited from enter-
ing the Northern Confederation, with which they could
make arrangements by treaty; retaining severally their
'international independence' they were free to unite in
a separate confederation of their own. On the other
hand, Prussia was given a free hand in the North; and she
promptly prepared to annex Hanover, Nassau, Hesse-
Cassel, the northern portion of Hesse-Darmstadt, and the
former free city of Frankfurt, and to depose their several
ruling houses and governments. These annexations were
justified on the ground that the States in question had
made war as Prussia's enemies, and that' by reason of their
geographical position they could embarrass Prussia beyond
fiie measure of their natural power. ' In reality their
territories were required for military and strategic reasons,
and in order to secure for Prussia in the new Bund an over-
whelming military, political, and economic predominance.
Bismarck desired also to teach a drastic lesson to dynastic
Particularism. Saxony had been spared to humour Napo-
leon, Austria and Russia, but the rulers of Hanover, Hesse,
and Nassau must be punished by extirpation. The new
League would contain no dynasty, other than the Saxon,
with either the tradition or the power of independence, and
Saxony after this object-lesson would give no trouble in the
future. In a word, Prussia emerged from the war enlarged
to the extent of some twenty-seven thousand square miles,
and four and a quarter million inhabitants. She had not
merely tightened her grip on the Rhine and consolidated
the connection between Berlin and her Rhenish acqui-
sitions of 1815, but had secured an outlet to the North
Sea and the Baltic of supreme importance for the future.
The harbour of Kiel, in itself, was worth a king's ransom,
and the acquisition of Schleswig-Holstein with Lauenburg
would enable the canal from the Baltic to the North Sea--
so often planned in the middle of the century--to be
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
carried out as a Prussian enterprise. The sea-faring popu-
lation of the Duchies would provide a splendid nucleus
for the naval and mercantile marine that would complete
Prussia's ambition to be a European Power on terms of
equality with Great Britain and France.
The treaty was a signal triumph for Bismarck's state-
craft of 'blood and iron. ' Bismarck the man and
Bismarck the statesman were now the foremost figures on
the European stage, and behind Bismarck stood the new
Prussia conscious of its strength. Prussia and the world
were continuously reminded that fidelity to Prussian
ideals was the secret of success. Prussia had saved herself
by her efforts and Germany by her example. In 1867
Treitschke at Heidelberg as editor of the Preussische Jahr-
bilcher, could begin to teach the lesson, driven home by his
professoriate at Berlin (1874), that the Empire to come
must be an extended Prussia. The clauses in the treaty
which permitted the Southern States to form a separate
union, and forbade the incorporation of that union or any
member of it with the Northern Confederation were
worthless. No treaty could destroy the intellectual, moral,
and material bridges across the Main that a common
German civilisation, embedded in a common speech, the
intellectual fraternity of great German universities, and
the economic bonds of an increasing trade aided by the
tariff union, so richly provided, and the military bridges
were already laid by the secret conventions. A German
Empire was practically made by the Treaty of Prague. Its
complete realisation in the future could only be prevented
by destroying the framework which the Treaty of Prague
had created. The first of these conditions was Prussia
and Prussianism as Bismarck interpreted them.
But if the Treaty of Prague had gone a long way towards
stamping on Germany a particular solution of the German
problem--a solution which in 1862 had seemed so im-
probable as to be regarded as the fantasy of a political
gambler--it had not solved the two formidable problems
in foreign relations that the guaranteed form of German
unification at once raised.
The new Germany, whether federal or unitary, whether
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? 2l6
BISMARCK
divided by an arbitrary line of demarcation, the river Main,
or not, had to determine its attitude and policy towards
a new Austria and an old France--an Austria, severed as
the penalty of defeat from its historic membership in the
German organisation, and with no historical or practical
experience to inspire and direct either its policy, its status
in the world of Europe, or its internal polity and frame-
work--the old and undefeated France, whose flag flew at
Metz and Strasburg, in whose heart the two most abiding
and cherished convictions were the supremacy of France
in Europe, and the peril embodied in a unified Germany.
Thiers' indictment that Napoleon in 1866 had allowed the
Empire of Charles v. to be revived was the phrase of a
great phrase-maker, but it crystallised the fears of France
in an epigram. For the Treaty of Prague, while most
assuredly it did not threaten Europe with a revival of the
Empire of Charles v. , no less assuredly re-created for
Germany and its neighbours the problem of Central
Europe. On what principles, with what objects, and on
what system of State life ought the territory between the
Rhine and the Vistula, the Vosges and the Carpathians, to
be politically organised?
The Empire of Charles v. had attempted to solve that
recurring riddle by the effort to re-adapt to the conditions
of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery the great
mediaeval conception of the unity of secular European
Christendom under the continuance of the Holy Roman
Empire of the German nation. The effort had collapsed
with the rupture of the spiritual and moral unity of
Europe, effected by the Reformation, and aggravated by the
pressure of the territorial national State of which sixteenth-
century France was the most potent expression on the
Continent. Napoleon--the heir both of the Bourbons
and the Revolution--had attempted to solve it by the
practical abolition of Central Europe, the establishment
of the Grand Empire Francais of the West/resting on the
alliance with the Eastern Empire of Russia and the'allot-
ment of the central area to a dismembered Prussia, an
Austria expelled from Germany and cut off from the sea,
and a League of the Rhine, militarily, economically, and
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 217
politically dependent on the Empire of the West. Napo-
leon's structure was destroyed by Nationalism and sea-
power in combination. The Congress of Vienna aimed
at frustrating both Westernism and Centralism by a return
to a modernised interpretation of the old theory of the
Balance of Power. It remade a Germany that mirrored
the European equilibrium; it sustained the hegemony of
a decentralised Austria, with a sub-centre of gravity at
Berlin, as an effective counterpoise alike to Paris in the
west and Petersburg in the east, and it revived the Concert
of Europe. But the separation of Holland and Belgium,
the unification of Italy, the renaissance of Prussia and the
defeat of Austria had now wrecked the system of 1815.
The problem re-emerged. What after Koniggratz was
to be the new political framework of Central Europe?
The Treaty of Prague did not register merely the substi-
tution of Berlin for Vienna as the new nodal point of an
old political system. That old system had explicitly re-
jected the unified national State as the framework of
Central Europe. The unification of Italy was a victory
for the national State; and it was with the aid of the Italy
made by Cavour and Napoleon, that Bismarck adminis-
tered the coup de grclce to the wounded Austria of 1859.
The removal of Austria left the central site clear for the
erection of a national German State, the essence of which
lay in the assumption that Central Europe belonged to
the German race and must be so organised as to put the
claim beyond question. The Italy of Cavour's policy
combined Liberalism--government through represen-
tative institutions, ministerial responsibility, and a consti-
tutional monarchy--with Nationalism--Nationalism as the
foundation of the State that is Law and Right. But the
Prussia that had annexed Schleswig-Holstein, absorbed
Hanover, Nassau, and electoral Hesse, and defeated
Austria was the State that is Power, whose organ is Force.
And in the profound difference between these two ex-
pressions of Nationalism--the Italian and the Prussian--lay
the deep significance of the emergence of the old problem
of Central Europe. The doctrine of race in Germany had
combined not with the gospel of Law but with the gospel
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? 2l8
BISMARCK
of Power. The problem for Bismarck--the problem of
Central Europe--was how to impose the new national
German State, based on power, on the European system,
and how to remodel that system to admit the new Ger-
many. There now lay before him the task of internal
reconstruction--the making of the new confederation--
and the task of reconstructing Europe on the results of the
victory of 1866.
The constitution of the new Germany must assist
the solution of the problem imposed on foreign policy.
The new Germany must be national in form and structure,
but it could not be constitutional, parliamentary, or
liberal, as England or Italy interpreted constitutional and
realise its ambitions without a new orientation for Austria
and a drastic alteration in the status and power of France.
Not until Austria had transferred its centre of gravity (as
he had predicted in 1864) to Buda-Pesth and accepted the
role of a Danubian State, with a front facing to the south-
east of Europe; not until France had been reduced to
subordination in the west could the new Central Europe,
with Berlin as its capital, be completed. Such a solution
would be a fresh and decisive victory for the principles,
enshrined in Prussian Nationalism, and the final defeat of
the principles antagonistic to the State as Power.
If there was one certainty in 1866 it was that France
would not allow without a struggle the North German
Confederation to absorb the Southern States and ring
France in with a German Empire stretching from the
Memel and the Eider to the Alps. The claims of the old
France could not be reconciled with the ambitions of the
new Germany.
The interest therefore of the next three years in Bis-
marck's statesmanship lies in two directions: first, his
determination to secure such a constitution for the North
German Confederation as would practically ensure a State
of the same character and under a similar irresponsible
political control to those existent in Prussia; secondly, an
ultimate settlement with France that would establish the
German Empire to come--a unified national State--as the
liberal government.
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 219
dominating power in Central Europe. The connection
between the character of tin North German Confederation
and the final victory of the Bismarckian solution of the
German problem was vital. It provides an illuminating
interpretation of the deeper issues and ideals of Bismarck's
statecraft.
An ultimate reconciliation with Austria was clearly fore-
shadowed in 1866. But reconciliation with France. was
impossible in 1867, nor was it desired. Bismarck's policy re-
quired the defeat of France. The danger from France was
not purely political or military--in the union of an undefeated
France with a defeated Austria, a revival of the system of
Kaunitz and the Bourbon monarchy of 1756. Rome and
the papacy brought into the political conflict the battle of
ideas. The syllabus of 1864 led logically to the Vatican
Decrees of 1870. Papal infallibility was a victory of Ultra-
montanism. Against the sovereignty of the modern State,
over all causes and persons, ecclesiastical as well as civil,
throughout its dominions supreme, it arrayed the theory
that in spheres of thought and action, defined not by the
State but by the Church, the competence of civil authority
ceased, and that the jus dirigendi and ihejuscoercendi passed
to spiritual power, intrinsically and in the divine order of
things, superior. France, Austria, and the patrimony of
Peter, were the political strongholds of this creed and
party. The defeat of Austria and France transferred the
struggle to the floors of the Prussian Landtag and the
Imperial Reichstag. What would have been the issue
of this tremendous struggle of principles, cutting down to
the bone of civil life and the fundamentals of society, if
France had won in 1870?
For the present Bismarck had to reckon with French
and German national sentiment. On both sides of the
frontier the high explosive of national passion was stored
up in embarassing plenitude, and any political trifle might
detonate the magazines. Napoleon's repeated and vary-
ing demands had proved not so much what the Emperor
himself desired as what he knew France expected him to
extort. The extreme irritability of French public opinion
was caused by anger, humiliation, and fear, and the danger
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? 220
BISMARCK
was all the greater because Napoleon's failure in Mexico
and in European combination with the internal discontent,
imperilled the dynasty and made it imperative for the
Tuileries to re-gild its tarnished prestige with a striking
success in foreign policy. France was corroded with the
worst form of ignorance that can sap a nation's strength,
the ignorance that is steeped in vanity. The boulevards
of Paris and the estaminets de province did not know
Prussia, and they refused to recognise the profound changes
that had made the Germany of 1867 as different from the
Germany of 1815 as that Germany was from the Germany
of 1789. The France of 1867 was inspired with the
axiomatic conviction that it was still the first country of
Europe, the foyer de civilisation, first in science, letters,
the arts and arms.
The irritability of German public opinion was due co
pride and the consciousness of strength. Great things
had been accomplished, but they were only the beginning.
The supremacy in Europe was at last passing into German
hands. The injuries of the past were not yet obliterated,
and the one veto which German Nationalism was not pre-
pared to tolerate was a French veto on the completion of
German unity. After 1866 any French or German states-
man could have made a war with ease in twenty-four hours.
For things simply could not remain as they were in 1866.
Neither Napoleon nor Bismarck could postpone indefin-
itely the collision without abandoning what neither could
abandon. The maintenance of the French Empire and
the imperial dynasty on the throne was Napoleon's, the
completion of German unification was Bismarck's, task.
For Napoleon the tragedy was summed up in the impossi-
bility of refusing war if it was thrust upon him, since refusal
meant another humiliation, and that spelled ruin. The
Treaty of Prague placed the initiative in Bismarck's hands.
Obedient to the opportunism on which his statecraft rested,
he already willed the end in 1866; the means and the
moment would be revealed by circumstances that could
not be predicted in advance but might be made. It
was Bismarck's deepest conviction that true opportunism
consisted as much in creating opportunities as in seizing
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 221
them when they occurred. But as in 1864 or in 1866 the
war that lay ' in the logic of history '--a logic not made by
chance or a blind caprice, but created by statecraft--must
be strictly and essentially ' defensive. ' War must secure,
since policy could not, the conditions on which a German
Central Europe could live for the future with its neigh-
bours. The achievement of these conditions could on
Bismarclrian principles alone prove its justifiability and
necessity.
v
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? CHAPTER V
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE NORTH GERMAN
CONFEDERATION
The Making of the North German Confederation--The War
with France, 1866-1870--The Treaty of Frankfurt--The
Unification of Germany, 1870-1871.
The conclusion of the treaties which established peace was
only part of the complicated and exhausting burden of
work that Bismarck had to shoulder. This enormous pres-
sure of business could not be delegated, except in its de-
tails; and even if delegation had been possible Bismarck
was not the man to permit, in so critical a situation, the
interference of colleagues, military or civil. The gigantic
labour fell on a man already worn out, living on shattered
nerves and an adamantine will. He had returned to
Berlin on August 4, and when on September 20 he took
part in the triumphal entry of the army, every one ob-
served with concern the weary exhaustion in his face and
figure. He had in fact dragged himself from a sick bed
to ride with the generals, Moltke, Roon, Herwarth von
Bittenfeld, Steinmetz, and Vogel von Falkenstein, to re-
ceive the homage of a crowd, delirious with enthusiasm,
and the roses of the girls at the Brandenburg Gate. He
was, and he knew it, the arresting figure in the cavalcade;
men and women along the route had their eyes on the
civilian in the cuirassier uniform, merely a titular general
of brigade, for he was the magician who had achieved the
miracle. To-day it was roses--roses, roses all the way
past the statue of. his master, Frederick the Great--but
had the Crown Prince arrived too late at Koniggratz, it
would not have been even the besoms of the old women
or the stones of a duped democracy. He would have been
lying, face downwards, after the last charge.
222
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 223
The Landtag had been dissolved at the outbreak of war,
and the elections of July 8 reflected the victories. One
hundred and forty Conservatives had been returned, and
had the dissolution been deferred till the end of July it is
probable that the defeat of the opposition would have been
decisive. Junkertum was jubilant. Now was the time to
teach these pestilent Radicals a lesson. The King shared
their views.
But Bismarck thought otherwise. It was the
hour for the olive branch that he had plucked at Avignon
in September 1862. The opposition had had their lesson.
National Liberalism--not Junkertum--was the true ally
in the work of unification to come. Not even in his deal-
ings with Austria and the defeated German South did
Bismarck show himself more convincingly a masterly
realist--the statesman who appreciates realities and bends
them to his will--than in his treatment of the Landtag.
'I was in a position to carry out the boldest and most in-
cisive policy of reaction,' he told the Reichstag in 1879,
'with the success and iclat which still attached to me from
Koniggratz . . . if I had thought that absolutism in
Prussia would have better promoted the work of German
unity, I should most decidedly have counselled recourse
to it. ' For himself and for his policy the triumph would
be all the more enduring if he could now hypnotise
National Liberalism into servitude as a loyal agent of his
will. The King, not unnaturally, resisted, supported by
his military advisers, and Bismarck had a hard task, assisted
by the Crown Prince, in persuading his sovereign to accept
what he regarded as a personal humiliation and a public
surrender. Bismarck wrote to his wife (August 3) :--
'Great controversy over the speech from the Throne
. . . these folk see nothing but their own nose and practice
their swimming in the stormy flood of phrases. With
our enemies we can settle up, but our Friends! They all
wear blinkers and see only a speck of the world,'
The Landtag opened on August 5, and the royal speech
indicated that the government would throw a white sheet
over the blue uniform with the red facings. The bill,
introduced by Bismarck, provided an indemnification for
the absence of a legal budget since 1862, and additional
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? 224
BISMARCK
credits for 1866. The Budget for 1867 would be sub-
mitted to the Lower House. It was a frank admission that
the government had acted illegally, but the Minister-
President invited the House to close the constitutional
controversy, and to recognise that if the government had
been ' technically' wrong it could not have acted other-
wise under the circumstances, and that peace and pardon
were now necessary in order to proceed with the great
duties that awaited Prussia. Let bygones be bygones;
neither Crown nor Landtag in the future would assail each
other's rights. The era of conflict was over--never to
return. 'The government,' he said, later, 'has gladly
grasped the opportunity to bring the conflict to an end,
in the conviction that it serves no purpose in constitutional
life to drive matters to extremities. Constitutional
fovernment cannot be judged by mathematical, nor even
y juristic, rules. It is a continuous compromise . . .
the making of peace never satisfies every wish, never fulfils
every calculation. '
L. von Gerlach pronounced the bill a blow in the face of
Bismarck's best friends. The Conservatives received the
measure in morose silence, but it passed the Lower House
by 230 to 75 votes, and the Upper House without a
division. The irreconcilables of both camps refused the
olive branch, and from the Indemnity Bill dates a re-
grouping of Prussian and German parties which the or-
ganisation of the new Confederation definitely confirmed.
In September 1866 the Progressive party (Fortschritts-
Partei), which had been the core of the opposition, split up.
Fifteen of its important members, with eight from the
left centre, founded a new party, under Bennigsen's leader-
ship, which on the dissolution of the Nationalverein,
became the powerful National Liberal party. Its raison
d'Hre was to give the new government firm support in its
foreign policy, and to work for complete unity with free-
dom. 'Der deutsche Staat und die deutsche Freiheit
miissen gleichzeitig mit denselben Mitteln errungen
werden. ' A similar split took place in the Conserva-
tive ranks. On October 27, 1867, the Free Conservative
party was founded on the principle that Prussia had
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 225
now entered 'the class of constitutional States. ' 'The
Time of Absolutism had passed. ' The Free Conser-
vatives pledged themselves to support and work for the
'Constitutional monarchy' defined in the Constitution
of 1867. How active political thought and movement
had become under the influence of the years 1866 and 1867
can be best judged by two other party manifestations:
first, the notable Eisenach Programme which founded the
Social Democrats in August 1869; secondly, the German
Popular Party (Deutsche Volkspartet) of South Germany
in September 1868, with its ideal of the complete demo-
cratic State and responsible parliamentary government.
The Eisenach Programme, of which much was to be heard
later, aimed amongst other ends at direct legislation by a
popular legislature, substitution of a national militia for
the standing army, separation of Church and State, aboli-
tion of ecclesiastical teaching in the elementary schools,
complete independence of the judiciary, abolition of all
press laws, legal recognition of trades unions, abolition of
all indirect taxation, substitution of a single progressive
income-tax, and regulation by law of the hours, remunera-
tion, and conditions of labour.
During the short autumn session of 1866 Bismarck, ex-
hausted as he was, astonished the Landtag by his persua-
sive geniality. The old rasping irritability and explosions
of anger were reserved for the ministers of the South and
for Benedetti; it was ail the more remarkable, as he was in
daily pain and tortured by insomnia. But with Bismarck,
as with the great Napoleon, anger, insolence, and menaces
were storm-cones indicating that the situation was critical;
they were intended to drive an adversary into indiscretions.
The surer that his grip on a situation became, the politer
became Bismarck's manners.
The princes of the States north of the Main were sum-
moned to Berlin to confer (August 4); they found a
Prussian minister lavish in the amiability that is easy to the
victorious master of many legions. It was a congress of
roaches presided over by a benevolent pike. The basis of
the new Confederation was laid (August 18) in fifteen
treaties of alliance, in which the contracting parties
B. p
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? 226
BISMARCK
guaranteed the inviolability of their territories, and agreed
to refer to a constituent Parliament, chosen as in 1849 by
direct and universal manhood suffrage, the establishment
of a Federal Constitution. One point alone was settled
in advance. The troops of the allies were placed under
the supreme command of the King of Prussia.
The Landtag ratified the annexations permitted by
the Treaty of Prague. In the bill Hanover,1 Nassau,
Hesse-Cassel, Frankfurt, and Schleswig-Holstein were not
'annexed' but 'taken in possession' by the Crown. Bis-
marck however yielded with grace to the critics and agreed
to annexation pure and simple. After voting a special
military credit the Landtag was prorogued (September 27) . 2
Bismarck's endurance had given out. On September 26
he left for Pomerania, and for the next two months was
seriously ill. His constitution and will were as usual better
that a man should not die till he had smoked 100,000
cigars and drunk 5000 bottles of champagne. His wife
hailed with joy the day, after many weary weeks of pain,
sleeplessness, and black depression, when the Minister-
President once more found joy in the Moselle and Hock
specially selected by a princely host in the island of Riigen;
and with the appetite for wine and tobacco came back the
lust for work and achievement. Devoted friends had been
toiling in his absence on the new Constitution--Roon,
Delbriick, Abeken--and Bismarck called in Hepke, Lothar
Bucher, and Max Duncker. But their drafts failed to
-satisfy. In his solitude he, too, had been toiling to clarify
his ideas, and on his return to Berlin, by a tour deforce at
a single sitting, he dictated to Bucher the scheme of a
Constitution (December 13), copies of which were ready
1 Hanover, like the other annexed principalities, became Prussian territory.
It ceased to be an independent kingdom; the dynasty was dethroned, and the
reigning king became a 'legitimist1 claimant to a throne he no longer
possessed, who refused to recognise the validity of the treaty and the acts
which destroyed his crown and turned the 'kingdom' into an administrative
Prussian province.
1 Saxe-Weimar, Oldenburg, Brunswick, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg-
Gotha, Anhalt, the two Schwarzburgs, Waldeck, Reuss (younger branch),
Schaumburg-Lippe and Lippe, Lubeck, Bremen and Hamburg. The two
Mechlenburgs adhered on August 21, feaxe-Meiningen, Reuss (elder branch),
and the kingdom of Saxony on October 21.
Late in life he pronounced
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 227
(December 15) for the Conference of Plenipotentiaries
from the governments. The Conference lasted until
February 7, 1867, when the amended draft was recom-
mended by the governments for acceptance. The
elections for the Constituent Reichstag were held on
February 12, and on February 24 the Reichstag of the
North German Confederation met to discuss the recom-
mended draft. -The Constitution was finally passed on
April 17. The several governments accepted it, as
amended by the Reichstag, and it was then submitted
to the Parliaments of the several States. The Prussian
Landtag agreed by June I; the other States followed suit;
on July 1, 1867,tne Constitution was duly promulgated.
The North German Confederation was now in existence;
one further act was necessary to complete the work. On
July 14 Bismarck was appointed Federal Chancellor--
combining the duties of the new office with the Minister-
Presidency of Prussia. The task of making a Constitution
and of unifying North Germany by a victorious Prussia,
undisturbed either by enemies without or within, had
occupied eleven months of continuous and hard work
(August 4, 1866-July 1, 1867). The man of ' blood and
iron ' had been as long over the task as the dilatory and un-
practical professors, journalists, and idealists, who had toiled
at a larger task in the Church of St. Paul at Frankfurt from
May 13, 1848, to April 11, 1849. The critics, and they
are not few, who assume that men of action can produce
constitutions as easily as omelettes, and that the juristic,
moral, political, and institutional problems that even
partial unification of Germany provided could be solved
by a triumphant sword in a few days, have failed to grasp
the elements of history's lessons. One conclusion that is
certain is, that without the noble and masterly work of the
men of 1848, and the earnest co-operation of the finest
minds and characters in Germany from 1849 to 1866, the
establishment of the North German Confederation could
not have been accomplished in double the time. 'There
is spring in Germany to-day,' said a deputy; but the
intoxicating splendour of that spring had its dawn in
the Liberalism of the Revolution.
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? 228
BISMARCK
The North German Confederation was not what National
Liberalism desired, or for which it had worked so long and
with such faith and loyalty. If Max Duncker might well
remark, 'what a contrast between the seventy articles of
the Constitutional text of 1867 and the twenty articles of
the Federal act of 1815,' the comparison measures the
profound change in the principles, temper, and ideals of
the Germany made by Metternich and the Germany
made by Bismarck. But what a contrast also between the
Constitution of 1867 and that of 1849. The difference
was due to Bismarck. The North German Confederation
concentrates in lines precise and unmistakable the first
of the two great chapters in the Bismarckian solution of
the German problem. The text of the Constitution is
stamped throughout with the imprint of his personality,
genius, principles, and ideals.
The interest therefore of the eleven months' toil in
constitution-making lies as much in what was rejected as
in what was accepted, in the omissions no less than in the
inclusions, in the extreme rigidity of some, and the ex-
treme flexibility of other, parts of the framework. The
three main organs were the Presidency (Praesidium),vested
in the King of Prussia, the Federal Council (Bundesrat),
and the Parliament (Reichstag). Legislation and taxation
were shared between the Council and the Parliament, the
concurrence of both organs being required for the validity
of laws or taxes. The originality of the Confederation
lay in the functions assigned to, and the relations estab-
lished between, the Praesidium, the Council, and the
representative Parliament. As President, the King of
Prussia was not a sovereign in the ordinary sense. He was
not a member of the Council, nor was his consent necessary
to Federal legislation or taxation. He did not preside
over the Council, the Chairman of which was the Federal
Chancellor. But as President he summoned and dissolved
the Reichstag, concluded treaties, declared peace and
war, and represented the Bund in all external relations;
he promulgated the laws, and in peace and in war was
commander-in-chief of the combined Federal forces, to
whom the oath of allegiance was taken. The Council was
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 229
not an upper chamber of the legislature. It was a syndi-
cate of governmental delegates, appointed in assigned
numbers to the members of the Bund* who voted as units,
representing the assigned vote, on the instruction of their
respective governments. The Council was thus consti-
tuted not over, but out of, the States; its deliberations
were secret; its decisions were taken on a majority of
votes; it had the initiative in legislation, and it could
reject bills passed by the Reichstag. Through its various
committees, dealing with defined subjects, it acted as a
semi-executive organ. The Parliament was an assembly
of representatives sitting in a single chamber, and chosen
by direct and universal manhood suffrage from equal
electoral districts. It voted the Federal budget, and its
consent was necessary to all legislation. The one Federal
minister was the Chancellor, appointed by the Presidency,
responsible to the Bund as a whole, and in his chancellery
were concentrated the Federal executive and administration.
The Chancellor was not responsible directly either to the
Reichstag or the Bundesrat. He could not be dismissed as
the result of a parliamentary vote, but he was intended to
act as the spokesman of the Council in all matters of policy,
administration, or legislation, and it was his duty to submit
to the Presidency all matters in which the Praesidium was
the executive organ, and to countersign all notifications
in which the Presidency acted on behalf of the Bund.
This Constitution was, broadly, an adaptation of the old
Federal organisation, fundamentally modified in four
directions--the increased powers assigned to the Presi-
dency, the creation of the Federal Chancellor, the inclusion
of a popular and representative legislature, and the relations
established between the Council and the Parliament. It
was ingeniously organised to meet the two chief defects of
the old system: the absence of real unity in consequence
of the unimpaired sovereignty of the member-States, and
the limited competence and lack of coercive power of the
Federal organs. The new Federal system was a real unity;
it could legislate for and impose its Federal will on the
1 Seventeen votes were assigned to Prussia; twenty-six were assigned to the
other twenty-one States which composed the Federation.
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? BISMARCK
whole Bund in all matters denned in the Constitution as
a Federal concern. It no less ingeniously combined the
demand for popular representation and a share of all
Germans in the government of the Confederation with
the claim of Prussia to be the preponderant and directing
power. It gratified the dynasties by the position assigned
to the governments in the Council, which, although not
a Congress of Princes, was a syndicate made from the
princedoms; it recognised local particularism by leaving
the legislatures of the member-States intact in their diver-
sity of franchise and institutions, and their powers only
impaired by the transfer of defined Federal concerns to the
dual central organ of Bundesrat and Reichstag. Lastly,
and by no means least, it created a chancellorship with
powers vague and ill-defined enough to satisfy the person-
ality and ambition of a Bismarck. The position of Federal
Chancellor was what Bismarck wished to enjoy. The
office was the keystone of the Federal arch, and the whole
structure was pieced together to maintain the keystone in
its central position.
Bismarck's share, in speech, in writing, and in oral con-
ferences in the prolonged discussions from December to
June, would make more than a volume. He came to the
creative task, not merely with the glamour of an acquired
prestige, and the force of an overpowering personality, but
with an experience unrivalled in Germany of diplomacy,
administration, and knowledge of men and institutions.
Bismarck was in the plenitude of his physical and mental
powers in 1866-7--onry a Titan could have carried the
burden, and even he very nearly collapsed under it--and
he revealed in the making of the Constitution the inflexible
tenacity of aim and principle, the inexhaustible variety of
resource, the complete absence of scruple, the combina-
tion of brutal strength, velvety suppleness, and Prussian
mastery of detail that had marked his ministerial presi-
dency. No man knew better that he was fighting now to
impose the Bismarckian solution--to impose himself, his
principles, ideals, and interpretations of life--on Germany.
It was the joy of achieving that supreme ambition, the
consciousness of realising at last all that made life worth
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? NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION 231
living, all the full-blooded sense of what it was to be a
German and a Prussian, that inspired him to resist every
party, principle, or proposal opposed to the German State
he desired to establish.
Hence the procedure in the making of the Constitution.
He first concluded alliances, as noted, with the States to
be federated; then drew up the original draft, and on
behalf of Prussia obtained the ratification of the text
through plenipotentiaries by whom the governments were
pledged. The constituent Reichstag was thus confronted
with an agreed scheme, amendment of which in any funda-
mental sense was exceedingly difficult, for it must be made
the occasion for re-reference to the governments behind the
Reichstag. The Constitution passed by the Reichstag was
finally submitted to all the legislatures, with the warning
that emendation would involve a re-submission to every
State and the Reichstag as a whole for its concurrence.
Its final acceptance en bloc was thus secured. Apart from
his personal authority in argument, Bismarck had two
great weapons at his disposal. First, the power of Prussia.
If Prussia would not agree, the proposal must come to
naught; and Prussia was practically himself. The Lower and
the Upper House of the Landtag would act as he advised.
They were "strong enough to veto where they could not
create. Secondly, the critical external situation which made
rapid decision urgent. Bismarck used this consideration
both privately and in public with great skill. For while the
Constitution was on the anvil the Luxemburg crisis and
the danger of a war with France had to be faced and sur-
mounted. The European situation had indeed the same
driving influence that it had in 1689 on the English Revo-
lution and the passing of the Declaration of Rights.
'Work quickly,' Bismarck said in a famous sentence. 'Put
Germany in the saddle and she will soon ride. '
German pride, fed on its imperial history, lamented
the absence of a Kaiser and a Reich, a sovereign and an
empire. Prussian Junkertum deplored the emasculation
of the Prussian monarchy, which it desired to see ruling
North Germany as it ruled Prussia, by direct authority
and unquestioned prerogative. The tenderness to the
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