Since 1815
Prussia as a German state and as a European Power had done
nothing to justify her claim to parity with the other great
Powers.
Prussia as a German state and as a European Power had done
nothing to justify her claim to parity with the other great
Powers.
Robertson - Bismarck
But these tech-
nical questions were completely overshadowed by the
constitutional controversy. The opposition did not dis-
pute the prerogative of the sovereign, as commander-in-
chief, or the duty of every Prussian male to be trained in
the army; but they put forward three claims. First,
that as the obligation of military service affected every
man in Prussia, the nation had the legal and moral right
through its representatives to decide on what conditions
that service should be performed, and if Parliament chose
to reduce the period with the Colours from three years to
two, it had the right to do so; secondly, Parliament had
the legal right to vote or to refuse the taxes required for
maintaining the army; thirdly, the army estimates were
part of the annual budget, and the representatives of the
nation had the right annually to review this budget, since
without parliamentary sanction no taxes were legal for the
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? no
BISMARCK
army or any other institution of the State. In so far as
the army was dependent on statute law and taxation for
its existence, the concurrence of Parliament was essential.
The importance of these claims did not he in their legal
validity, which was undeniable, but in the principles and
consequences they involved. The Prince Regent and
Roon quite correctly grasped that the opposition was
determined to assert, through the annual revision of the
budget, the principle of ministerial responsibility to the
Lower House; and that through the power of the purse
the establishment of ministerial responsibility would lead
inevitably to a general and unlimited control of policy and
executive ministerial action. Prussia would cease to be a
State in which the King governed through the legislature;
it would become a State in which ministers, dependent on
the legislature, governed through the King. The army
would be turned into a creation of the Landtag, and the
prerogative of the sovereign would be legislated out of
existence. In a word, the old conception of the monarchy
was in irreconcilable collision with the new conception of
parliamentary Liberalism. For the Crown, the power and
character of the monarchy were at stake; for the Liberals,
the power and character of Parliament as a national insti-
tution of government. An issue had been raised on which
compromise was impossible. Was there, or was there not,
to be parliamentary and constitutional government in
Prussia? It was recognised that the decision would
affect not merely Prussia, but the whole of Germany.
At the outset the struggle was embittered by an act of
bad faith. The opposition temporarily voted the addi-
tional money required on the understanding that the
ministerial scheme should be withdrawn and the whole
question of reorganisation reserved for future consideration.
But the War Office promptly created the new regiments;
colours were solemnly given them by the Regent; and
the revised budget assumed that the scheme had been ap-
proved. William, who had become king in 1861, peremp-
torily refused to disavow the accomplished facts. His
acts as War-Lord (Kriegesherf) were not subject to parlia-
mentary revision; the money had been voted, and it was
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN in
within his prerogative to apply it. Rejection of the
budget and a dissolution of Parliament followed, with the
result that the Conservative minority was smitten hip and
thigh. The Conservative party numbered a tiny handful
in the new Landtag. The Crown was apparently con-
fronted with surrender to the opposition or resort to a
coup cPEtat.
Bismarck rejoiced in the quarrel. He had had nothing so
far to do either with framing the scheme or the crisis that
arose out of it. In his judgment-nothing could be better
than to strengthen the army, and it was for the soldiers to
decide how most effectively to do this. But even better was
the collision between the Crown and the Liberals. The
control of the army by an irresponsible Crown and ministers
responsible to the Crown alone, lay in the essence of his
everything that he hated and feared--parliamentary
government, the Landtag as a government-making, policy-
making organ, and ministers under the thumb of a majority
composed of professors, lawyers, journalists, and middle-class
amateurs. Even if the scheme were wrong, the Crown
must be supported and the opposition smashed into heel.
The King was desperately unhappy. His Liberal minis-
ters saw no solution but to yield. How could the
government continue without a budget? The country
at the general election had pronounced. The Crown
Prince had the gravest misgivings about a policy which
threatened to destroy national confidence in the sovereign,
perhaps even shatter the throne. Prussia was at this
moment insisting that the incurable autocrat of Hesse-
Cassel must obey his constitution and his legislature, yet
at home was defying the plain rights of the Landtag to vote
taxes and determine their application laid down in the
Prussian law of the land. Roon and the soldiers daily
reminded his Majesty that the army as a monarchical
institution was at stake, and a Hohenzollern who betrayed
the army betrayed himself. Surrender? Civil war? A
coup d fitat? Abdication? Which was King William to
choose? Roon also suggested that if his Majesty's
ministers refused to do their plain duty and defy Parlia-
programme. The demands of the
implied
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? 112
BISMARCK
ment, there was at Petersburg an experienced diplo-
matist who could be trusted to do the King's business.
But William shrank at the thought. Bismarck would be
loyal, but he would Insist on carrying out his foreign
policy, an entente with France and opposition to Austria.
His appointment was burning the bridges and blowing
up the magazines. The opposition might still be brought
to an honourable compromise, but not by Bismarck.
The 'Baden Memorial' (Denkschrift), drawn up by
Bismarck for King William in July 1861, repeated the
familiar analysis of the reasons why the existing federal
system was ruinous to Prussia--the continuous deadlock,
Austrian jealousy, the subordination of Prussian initiative
and independence to the votes of petty States, organised by
a non-German Empire at Vienna. Bismarck urged the
King to put Prussia at the head of the unitary movement
and lay before the Federal Diet a proposal to create a
national Parliament, chosen by direct suffrage from all
Germany, which would give Prussia the political direction
that it had already in the Tariff Union. Skilfully devised,
such a Parliament would enlist for Prussia popular sym-
pathy throughout Germany and largely heal the internal
strife in Prussia itself. The 'Baden Memorial' marks an
important stage in the evolution of Bismarck's thought.
It assumed the existence of a strong Prussian army, and
the will to employ it at the right moment in imposing a.
Prussian solution on all recalcitrants. 'Make me,' he said,
with reference to the Hesse-Cassel affair, 'an Under-
Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and I will produce for you
in three weeks a civil war of the first quality. '
Throughout 1861 and the spring of 1862 gossip in the
capital was rife with reports that the ambassador at
Petersburg was to be given ministerial office. Roon
kept Bismarck closely informed of all that was passing.
More than once he was brought' on sick leave ' to Berlin,
to be ready, but nothing came of it. The King was fas-
cinated and repelled by the idea. Audiences between
Bismarck and his sovereign improved their personal but not
their political relations. William felt that in this strong,
frank, masterful man's hands he would be dragged whither
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 113
he knew not. 'He goes furthest who knows not whither
he is going,' pronounced the practical mysticism of Crom-
well, And in Bismarck's surveys of the future there was
always a grand and indefinable atmosphere, a conscious-
ness of the vastness of life, and the illimitable potencies of
the future floating over the concrete directness of his grip
on realities. He knew not whither he was going--he did
not wish to know. Forces beyond human calculation
were driving Prussia, and he must march with them. The
Time-spirit would provide the golden opportunities and
reveal how they could be used.
Bismarck concluded that his transference (May 29,
1862) to the embassy at Paris signified a definitive refusal
of a ministerial portfolio at Berlin. He had learned much
at Petersburg: sounded and charted the European
situation; established a personal friendship with the
Tsar; and by meekly sitting at the feet of the vain Gort-
schakov had created a credit on which in good time he
intended to draw. 'The hatred of Austria here,' he
wrote from Petersburg, 'exceeds everything I had
believed possible. ' Paris was the political centre of
Europe, and a pleasanter place than Petersburg. The
Court of the Second Empire was at the zenith of its social
brilliance. The Empress Eugenie and her galaxy of frail
butterflies--fetes, balls, fashions, and opera--would be
an agreeable background to the serious political work of
exploiting Napoleon. On June 1 he was presenting his
credentials to the Man of Sin at the Tuileries, and before
long intimately discussing the higher statecraft with the
Emperor and his ministers, and suggesting with a delicious
audacity that a tyro in diplomacy would be grateful for
all the instructions he could receive from the French ex-
perts--Bismarck instructed by a Persigny, a Drouyn de
Lhuys, a Walewski, or a De Morny! He was also scrib-
bling notes to Roon on the iniquities of the Liberal majority
in the Landtag, and letters to his wife and sister describ-
ing the Parisian fashions, with touches on the vanity of
French ministers, and the beauty of the Champs Elysees
in a Paris midsummer. He dashed off to London to see
the great Exhibition and met Palmerston and Disraeli at
B. II
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? H4
BISMARCK
the Russian Embassy. An amusing fellow this Prussian
Ambassador, every one agreed. His verve and racy reck-
lessness delighted the company, and his sketch of how in
a few years he would settle Europe and Germany was more
exhilarating than, and quite as evanescent as, champagne.
Disraeli judged more correctly. 'Take care of that man;
he means what he says,' was a verdict no less accurate and
prophetic than Bismarck's scribbled comment to Roon.
'I am just back from London. People there are much
better informed about China and Turkey than about
Prussia. Loftus (the English Ambassador in Berlin) must
write to his minister much more nonsense than I imagine. '
It was tragically true. Neither at the Foreign Office,
nor in Parliament, not even in the office of The Times, or in
the exalted circles of the Court, did they know the truth
about Prussia and Germany, and it is doubtful whether
they wished to know.
From Paris Bismarck visited Trouville, and then, rest-
less and dissatisfied, went on a tour to the south' Not
even ' the Lafitte, Mouton Rothschild, Pichon, Laroze,
Latour, Margaux, St. Julien, Beaune, Armillac, and other
wines'--the ' other ' is a pretty touch--which he noted as
having drunk at Bordeaux, nor the beauty of dawn on the
seashore and of sunset in the Pyrenees, described in letters
to his wife, could appease his feeling that Paris after all
was exile; that the world of action lay in Berlin, and that
he was shut out from it. Life was slipping away. Was
he to'be an ambassador all his days, and never have the
great political levers in his hands i Ministerial office
was hateful, yet he could not be happy without it. 'My
furniture,' he wrote on September 12, 1862, 'is still at
Petersburg and will freeze there; my carriages are at
Stettin, my horses at grass near Berlin, my family in
Pomerania, and I am on the streets. '
Three days later came a telegram from Roon: 'Come.
The pear is ripe. Periculum in mora. ' He plucked an
olive branch as he hurried through Avignon on his way to
Paris, and was in Berlin on the morning of September 20.
In the forenoon of September 22 he had a memorable
interview with the King at Schloss Babelsberg. He per-
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 115
suaded William 1. to tear up the abdication he had drafted,
put himself unreservedly at his sovereign's disposal, and
declared his readiness to fight for the rights of the Crown
and the royal scheme of reorganisation of the army to the
last. There could be no surrender. This was a fight for
honour and existence and must be fought to a finish.
Next day (September 23) the Gazette announced the
appointment of Herr von Bismarck-Schonhausen to office
as temporary Minister-President. On the same day the
budget for 1862, providing for the army in accordance with
the royal scheme of reorganisation, was decisively rejected
in the Lower House of the Landtag by 273 to 68 votes.
September 23,1862, is a red-letter day in the Hohenzollern
calendar; it opened a new chapter, or rather a new
volume, in the history of Prussia and of Europe.
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? CHAPTER IV
THE M1NJSTER-PRES1DENT, 1S62-1867
? I. 1'he Constitutional Conflict, the Polish Question, and
the German Problem
On October 8, 1862, Bismarck's provisional appointment
as Minister-President was definitely ratified. He took up
his residence in the Wilhelmstrasse, which was to be his
official abode for twenty-eight years. The new minister
was in his forty-eighth year, and he had passed, without
any ministerial experience, direct from an embassy to the
highest office in the State. Both in Prussia and outside it
men naturally asked, What did it mean? What would
happen next?
Apart from the constitutional controversy and the dead-
lock created by the overwhelming vote of September 23
--a situation grave enough to demand the undivided
energies of the government--a series of critical questions
in foreign policy pressed for solution. Schleswig-Holstein,
the situation in Hesse-Cassel, Poland, the renewal of the
Zollverein, the proposed commercial treaty with France,
the German problem--each and all of these in combination
threatened to become acute. They involved the relations
of Prussia as a German Power with the middle and petty
States in Germany, and her relations as a European Power
with Austria, France, Great Britain, Russia, and the new
but incomplete kingdom of Italy. Public opinion in Ger-
many recognised the gravity of the crisis, and was aware
that a false step in foreign policy would create an inter-
national situation which would leave Prussia isolated and
confronted with a hostile coalition that would reduce her
to a humiliating impotence.
Bismarck's appointment was clearly a challenge. It
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
117
provoked in different quarters indignation, amazement,
contempt, amusement. As we look back to-day and deli-
berately forget the knowledge of what happened between
1862 and 1871, it is instructive to read in contemporary
literature--the newspapers, memoirs, letters, pamphlets,
caricatures and dispatches--the judgments and inter-
pretations expressed in these critical years of 1862-66.
Rechberg at Vienna in 1862 described Bismarck to
Gramont as 'incapable de sacrifier une idee preconcue, un
prejuge, une idee de parti, a n'importe quelle raison d'un
ordre superieur; il n'a pas le sens pratique de la politique,
c'est un homme de parti dans la force du mot,' adding
truly enough, 'ce n'est pas un ami que nous aurons la. '
The new appointment was so clearly either a jest four rire
to cover a deliberate ride for a fall, a surrender to the oppo-
sition, and perhaps the King's abdication, or it was the
gambler's last throw, the discovery of a Prussian Polignac
which proclaimed a coming coup d'lttat. Capitulation or
revolution? What else could it mean, when the King
selected this Junker diplomatist, known only too well for
his violent, reckless, and impenitent championship of Prus-
sian Conservatism in its most particularist form? The
constitutional crisis and the international situation de-
manded a cool, conciliatory, and experienced statesman.
The King replied by appointing a red reactionary. In the
chancelleries of Europe the statesmen du vieux panialon
shrugged their shoulders and made bets whether Bismarck
would last three weeks or three months. To the Liberals,
above all, in Prussia the King's action was a stinging affront,
and a summons either to make a revolution or to capitulate.
Such judgments--and they could be cited by the page
? --were natural under the circumstances, for neither the
official world at London, Paris, Vienna, Dresden, and
Munich, nor the superheated public in Berlin knew the
real Bismarck. They simply saw in him the Junker of
1848-51. When he had practically disappeared at Frank-
furt from the public gaze the little that had emerged since
1852 confirmed the assumption that he had not altered,
indeed, that he was more than ever the sworn foe of the
causes he had opposed with such fiery audacity. The
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? n8
BISMARCK
profound change in his views and the breadth and variety
of his experience were unknown to most, and were even
misinterpreted by the few who had the material for
framing a correct judgment. In September 1862 no one
had divined the intellectual power, the cool and calculating
brain, the intensity of conviction, the political nerve, and
the extraordinary strength of character and will stored up
and disciplined in that titanic frame. As with Moltke, so
with Bismarck, the revelation of the next eight years was
to astound and hypnotise Germany and Europe.
And if men did not know Bismarck they were no less
ignorant in 1862 of Prussia and Prussianism.
Since 1815
Prussia as a German state and as a European Power had done
nothing to justify her claim to parity with the other great
Powers. She had produced competent internal adminis-
trators, distinguished professors, and ardent but ineffective
politicians. Her statesmen for fifty years were mediocrities;
her policy continuously tarnished by prejudice, timidity,
and irresolution--reaction ruined by spasmodic and in-
sincere repentance. The material and economic strength
of the country had been enormously increased since 1815;
in her organised civil service and her army, no less than
her system of education, Prussia was in 1862 far ahead of
every other German state, and superior not merely to
Austria and Russia but to France and Great Britain. The
generation born in the Napoleonic epoch, under the
shadows of Jena and the sunlight of the great age of reform
--the age of Scharnhorst, Stein, and the War of Liberation
--had been patiently moulded and tempered in the chill
school of work and disappointment to a capacity for sus-
tained sacrifice and effort which only required leadership
--a man and a cause--to . evoke a single-minded co-opera-
tion. Here lay the secret of the strength of the opposition
in Parliament, for it represented a Prussia which had
broken with the historic tradition because the organs of
that tradition--monarchy, ministers, and the executive--
seemed blind to the greatness of the German renaissance,
and ignorant of the moral and intellectual forces that com-
Eelled the true German mind to be Liberal and Nationalist.
>eaf to the call of the future, Prussia had frittered for
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
forty years the vigour of the nation on a parochial
prosperity or the ignoble scuffles of the dynasties in the
Federal Diet.
Bismarck was a child of the age that had produced 1848
and the constitutional crisis of 1862--lived, learned, and
inwardly digested. Like the Liberals whom he detested
he had divined the strength of Prussia, but, unlike the
Liberals, he diagnosed the cause of Prussia's failure in one
vital and fatal omission. The Frederician tradition had
been successfully followed in domestic administration, but
had been neglected or betrayed in policy, above all, foreign
policy. The time had come at last--and not too late--
to prove what a strong Prussia could do, when her policy
was shaped and directed by a minister to whom nothing
was sacred or unclean, prepared like Frederick, the master,
to devote soul, brain and body to the service of Prussia, and
determined to concentrate unflinchingly the whole force
of the State on one end and one end alone, the greatness
of Prussia--a man to whom parties, causes, principles, con-
ventions, were either means to that end or empty phrases.
Prussia herself and Europe had forgotten the principles
and methods of Frederick the Great. The schools of
Metternich and Canning, of Palmerston, Guizot or
Nicholas 1. j lingered on in the shibboleths of the middle-
aged, who advised their governments from office desks in
the Foreign Offices; the school of Cavour had come and
gone with 1861; in the west at Paris reigned the sham
Napoleonism of the Second Empire; at London were the
statesmen of both parties who persisted in interpreting the
Continent, if they interpreted it at all, in the terms of an
obsolete continental or a complacent insular tradition, no
longer in touch with realities. By 1871 it began to dawn
on Europe that in Bismarck had come to life a reincarnation
of the Frederick who had shattered the Europe of Walpole,
Maria Theresa, and Louis xv. , a statesman controlling an
organised Prussia, far stronger relatively than the Prussia
of Frederick the Great--a statesmanship that was a re-
created gospel in action. The State as Egoism and the
State as Power, directed by the genius of the illuminated
despot, had made a new Europe and a new Prussia between
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? 120
BISMARCK
1740 and 1786; directed by the illuminated genius of
Bismarck it was to make a new Prussia, a new Germany,
and a new Europe between 1862 and 1890.
It was not therefore either the unrepentant Berserker
of Junkertum or a mere diplomatist trained in the conven-
tional manege of Frankfurt, Petersburg, and Paris, who
at Roon's bidding had promised his sovereign in the garden
of Schloss Babelberg to lead a forlorn hope. Bismarck had
studied the men both at Berlin and all over Europe with
whom he would have to deal; he was convinced that in
a test of resource, nerve, courage, and tenacity of will, or
in mastery of the realities in any situation, it would not be
he who would fail. This bitter quarrel was none of his
making, and his first step, when he met the triumphant
majority of the opposition in 'The House of Phrases,' as
he called the Landtag, was quietly to lay on the table the
olive branch that he had plucked at Avignon, with the
remark that it was a present to the progressive party, but
the time for it had apparently not yet come.
Bismarck's desire for an honourable compromise was pro-
bably sincere. He desired to be free from internal compli-
cations in order to deal with foreign policy. However, it
was a fixed principle of his system, enunciated now and fifty
times in the next twenty-five years, that government by
a monarchy through a representative assembly must rest
on compromises, and it was the function of statesmanship
to frame and work them. The external situation was
critical; foreign policy would demand for the next two
or three years sleepless vigilance, and the difficulties,
sufficiently great in themselves, would be aggravated by
an embittered controversy at home. He v/as new to
office; his position would be enormously strengthened
if he could inaugurate his minister-presidency by a reason-
able settlement. Neither now, nor at any time, was it his
habit to close the doors or drive an adversary to open war
until he was convinced that negotiation could not secure
the essentials. But he made his terms perfectly clear.
Let the controversy over rights on both sides be dismissed
as misleading juristic jargon. But the Crown must have
the money for the reorganisation of the army, and the
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 121
control of that army and of policy must rest with the King.
Co-operation with Parliament by all means, government
by a parliamentary majority--never. If the opposition
chose to make the issue not a question of right but of
might, between government by the monarchy and govern-
ment by the Lower House of the Landtag, against the'will
of the King and the Upper House, the struggle must be
fought out, and there would only be one end to it--the
defeat of the opposition which usurped the lawful authority
of the State, inalienably inherent in the Crown.
Bismarck calmly explained his interpretation of the con-
stitution, and to this he adhered through the period of
conflict. He quietly ignored the overwhelming endorse-
ment of the action taken in the previous Parliament by
the general election. The Lower House had the right, he
agreed, to vote taxes or reject the budget, but the veto of
the Lower House was not conclusive, for the budget was
expressed in a law, and laws required the assent of the
Crown and the Upper, as well as of the Lower, House.
If the consent of any one of these were withheld, a dead-
lock was created which could, under the constitution, only
be removed by the voluntary act of the organ concerned
and by no other means. Failing such, the constitution
expressly reserved to the Crown the residual right of
government. The Crown was therefore legally entitled
to carry on the administration during the emergency
created by the deadlock. Otherwise it failed in its duty
to itself as the head of the State and to the whole kingdom.
The Crown, therefore, simply was driven to avail itself of
the special powers provided to meet a temporary and ex-
ceptional situation. The King might challenge the wisdom
or patriotism of the action which had produced the
deadlock, but in exercising his special powers he was not
denying the legal rights of the Lower House, which was
similarly bound not to deny the legal rights of the Crown.
The action of the Lower House amounted to a claim to
compel the Crown to surrender its prerogative at dis-
cretion, and to make the King's government dependent on
the fiat of one chamber of the legislature, or, if the Crown
refused to give way, to make all government impossible.
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? 122
BISMARCK
Bismarck made it no less clear that as a minister he was
not appointed, nor could be dismissed, by Parliament. So
long as he had the confidence of his sovereign he would re-
main in office, no matter what Parliament said or voted.
The government of the Crown must and would be carried
on, budget or no budget. The taxes would be levied
under the law of 1861 (as indeed they were from 1861-66);
the necessary legalisation of this emergency government
by prerogative could and would be procured later (as it
was in 1866), by a law of indemnity, or--as Bismarck
thought possible in 1863--by an alteration of the consti-
tution. On September 29 he gave expression in debate
to the famous sentence: 'Germany has its eyes not on
Prussia's Liberalism, but on its might. . . . Prussia must
reserve its strength for the favourable moment, which has
already more than once been missed. The great questions
of the day will not be decided by speeches and resolutions
of majorities--that was the blunder of 1848 and 1849--
but by blood and iron. '
Spoken with calm conviction, the phrase burst like a
shell in a powder magazine. It roused a hurricane of in-
dignation through Germany. No such language had been
heard from a Prussian minister since 1815, and if men
needed convincing that the Landtag was confronted with
the Junker of 1849, the proof was surely there from the
Minister-President's own lips. Later, Bismarck repeatedly
explained that all he meant was that the German problem
could be solved only by action, and the effective use at the
suitable moment of the Prussian army, and that K6nig-
gratz, St. Privat, and Sedan proved he was right; that
without 'the blood and iron' of military force neither
Austria nor France could have been overthrown and
German unity achieved. But the famous sentence in
1862 went much further, and was intended to go much
further, than this. It was a warning to Germany as well
as to the Prussian Landtag; it was a concentrated con-
demnation of all, and not merely the Liberal, methods
hitherto employed; it poured contempt on reform by
'moral penetration' and government by consent of the
governed. It was the summary of the creed that the State
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 123
stood for power, and that in political problems force, not
right, was the sovereign remedy (Macht geht vor Recht).
It was inevitable that the opposition should reject the
olive branch. Holding as they did that the general
election had given them a plain mandate, that the govern-
ment demanded more for the army than efficiency re-
quired, that the period of service could be safely reduced
from three years to two, that the levying of taxes without
the consent of the Lower House was a plain violation of the
constitution, and that a compromise involved acquiescence
in the illegal acts of the government, which would perma-
nently destroy the power of the Lower House ever again
to modify or refuse the financial demands of any ministry,
--in a word, that the future of parliamentary and constitu-
tional government was bound up with the successful
assertion of their principles, the majority could only meet
the challenge of the Minister-President by inflexible ad-
herence to their decision. A surrender in the autumn of
1862 would have been a victory for reaction and a defeat
for the principle of popular government through represen-
tative institutions throughout Germany. Accordingly,
the Lower Chamber by 251 to 36 votes condemned the
illegal expenditure incurred by the government, and de-
manded that the budget for 1863 should be submitted for
approval. When (October 10) the Upper House accepted
the condemned budget of 1862 by 114 to 44 votes, their
action was condemned unanimously by the Lower House
as ' contrary to the clear sense and text of the constitution. '
Parliament was prorogued; when it met in 1863 (January
27) an address to the Crown, accusing ministers of having
violated the constitution, was passed after a passionate
debate by 25 5 to 68 votes.
The breach was now complete. The Lower House was
in plain conflict with the Crown, the Crown's ministers
and the Upper House, and the struggle, in which feeling
outside was as violent as within Parliament, soon spread to
other issues than the reorganisation of the army and the
budget.
The struggle was no mere juristic controversy over dis-
putable and conflicting clauses in the written constitution
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? 124
BISMARCK
of 1851. It focussed in the clearest light the fundamental
and irreconcilable antagonism between the principles
and methods of policy, government, and the character of
the State represented by Bismarck and the opposition.
When Bismarck ignored the undeniable mandate of the
Prussian electorate to its representatives in Parliament,
and when he admitted that the levying of the rejected
taxes was an executive act which would require an
indemnity to bring it within the letter and spirit of the
constitution, he proclaimed that the struggle was not a
question of law, but of power. Was the Crown, as head
of the executive and of the army, to enforce its will on the
nation, and to retain a final and irresponsible judgment
in all questions of policy?
'The Prussian Monarchy,' he asserted on January 27,
1863, 'nas not 7et completed its mission; it is not yet
ready to become a purely ornamental decoration of your
constitutional Parliament House; not yet ready to be
manipulated as a piece of lifeless machinery of parlia-
mentary government. '
Bismarck was fighting with his back to the wall for an
issue more important in his eyes than the preservation of
the legal prerogatives of the Crown in Prussia. The per-
sonal monarchy, as an organ of government, was the indis-
pensable condition of success in the task he had set himself.
A constitutional sovereign, in the British sense, not only in-
volved ministers responsible to Parliament, but a legislature
the chief function of which would be to determine the
ends, the character, and the methods of policy. Hence
his unrelenting opposition now, and to the end of his life,
to government by and through representative institutions
was the subtle product of ingrained personal feeling and
a recognition of the fundamental antagonism between his
political convictions and the champions of parliamentary
government. He could be the loyal servant of a king
whose office incarnated the history and character of a
specific type of State,. but to be the servant of a Parliament,
accountable to, and holding his place at the pleasure of,
a fortuitous majority of professors, lawyers, journalists,
tradesmen and tinkers, was intolerable to his aristocratic
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
pride and independence. He would take orders from no
one save the King and God, and he served God as he served
his royal master, on terms of devotion denned and inter-
preted by himself.
On political grounds he both feared and despised his
opponents in Parliament. He told them roundly that
they were ignorant, prejudiced, unpractical--dreamers
without political sense--helpless children in affairs of
State. Had he been perfectly honest he would have added
that diplomacy, as he conceived it, could not be conducted
with the blinds up, and that no representative body of
responsible men of high character would sanction either
his principles or his methods, and that for the realisation
of his aims absolute control of all the resources of the
State and an unfettered discretion were indispensable,
and that it was easier to manipulate and hoodwink a king
than a nation and a Parliament. The reorganisation of
the army, the steady preparation for war by a militarised
bureaucracy, the budget question, the Polish problem,
the conquest of Schleswig-Holstein, the manipulation of
the European situation, the understandings with Russia
and Napoleon m. , the Italian Treaty, the breach with
Austria, the campaign and peace of 1866, and the formation
of the North German Confederation--the Bismarckian
solution of the great questions of the day--could never
have been carried out, as Bismarck carried them out, by a
minister under a system of constitutional monarchy and
responsible parliamentary government. The conscience
of Prussia and Germany in 1862 made, in Bismarck's eyes,
for political cowardice. Nor were the Germans who
created the National Union under Bennigsen as yet pre-
pared to sacrifice everything to the State as Power, and to
adopt as their sole criterion of policy the State-egoism
of an unreformed and militarised Prussia.
In 1862 Germany was ripe for great changes. Under
the pressure of the internal development, assisted by the
course of events in Europe, most notably in Italy, the
demand for the extension of political rights on Nationalist
and Liberal lines could no longer be burked or denied. It
was apparent in every quarter, and in every German State.
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? 126
BISMARCK
The dynasties and their ministers from Vienna to Liberal
Coburg or reactionary Hesse-Cassel were responding, re-
luctantly or readily, to the movement which had Germany
in its grip. The passionate manifestation of German
public opinion in the Polish problem, and the Schleswig-
Holstein question from 1863 to 1866, the execration which
Bismarck aroused in non-Prussian Germany, have an his-
toric and tragic significance. Bismarck had divined the
force and direction of the currents now reaching their
flood-tide, and he tacitly agreed with the leaders of the
National Union that the key of the future lay in Prussia.
The failure to secure Prussia in 1848 had destroyed the
Liberal revolution. A second failure to capture Prussia in
1863 would have the same wrecking result. And as in
1848, so now, success or failure would determine not merely
the fate of Germany and of Prussia, but the German mind
and the future development of Continental Europe.
The strength of the Liberal opposition in the Prussian
Parliament lay, first, in its devotion to constitutional law
and right; secondly, in a profound belief in the efficacy
of orderly self-government through representative insti-
tutions; thirdly, in the deep Prussian and German
patriotism of the leaders and the rank and file; fourthly,
in their insistence on the complete identity of Prussian
and German interests alike in home and foreign policy;
fifthly, in their recognition that the old order in Prussia
and Germany had failed, and would continue to fail, to
satisfy the deepest and most legitimate aspirations of the
German people, and that a new departure on new prin-
ciples was essential; and lastly, in their sympathy, partly
conscious, partly unconscious, with the great currents
and forces moving elsewhere than in Germany--in the
United States, in Great Britain, in Italy, in the Austrian
Empire, in south-eastern Europe and the Balkans, in
France, and even in Russia. It was a bitter duty for the
leaders of the opposition openly to challenge the King, but
they faced it because they had consciences and a deep love
of Prussia. The ignorance in England of the true char-
acter of the German movement, the blindness of our
statesmen, our press, and our public opinion to the signi-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 127
ficance for our nation and national destinies of the struggle
fought out between September 1862 and July 1867, were
more damning than. the lamentable division in our councils
and the fiasco of our statesmanship in Europe. In these
years Great Britain was given a matchless opportunity to
assert a moral and political ascendency, not based on power,
but on the qualities and elements of national development
of which the British State is the expression and the trustee,
and she threw it away, as she very nearly in the same epoch
threw away her birthright in the issues raised by the
American Civil War.
But the Liberal opposition had two fatal defects, which-
Bismarck with a demonic intuition fully realised. The
renunciation of reform by revolution, and of the right of
resistance, and the adhesion to procedure by purely consti-
tutional methods reduced his opponents to impotence.
Constitutional weapons are helpless against force: argu-
ment is futile against an opponent who derides the im-
potence of speeches and pamphlets. Bismarck could not
be driven from office by votes of the Lower House, but
only by a revolution. He calculated that opposition
would be confined to resolutions in the Lower House,
public meetings and the press, and that he would not be
driven to a coup d'fttat by refusal to pay illegal tazes or to
serve in an illegal army. We may be quite sure that he
would not have hesitated to employ shot and shell, but a
civil war in Prussia which would have involved the whole
of Germany and of Austria was the one thing that he knew
he need not fear. With consummate irony he subse-
quently utilised the reverence for law and order that in-
spired the constitutional party as the clinching proof that
German unity could not be achieved by any other methods
than his own. Had the men who overthrew Charles 1.
and James n. limited themselves to passive protests,
recorded in the Journals of the House of Commons, the
house of Stuart would have been reigning to-day in White-
hall, and the palace of Westminster would have been
replaced by a national memorial to Strafford and Father
Petre. But Strafford had to work with a Charles 1.
Bismarck had King William and the Prussia made by the
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? 128
BISMARCK
Hohenzollern sovereigns. In the second place, the oppo-
sition were not dealing with a pure reactionary, determined
to maintain, as Nicholas 1. and Schwarzenberg had been
determined in 1848 to maintain, the status quo, and to
stamp out every obstacle to its maintenance. An infuri-
ated public opinion saw in the Minister-President the
arch-enemy of unification and the champion of Junker
particularism. It was quite wrong. Bismarck was as
profoundly convinced as every Liberal that the German
problem must be solved and on Nationalist lines; and his
conviction was steeled by the knowledge that the future
of Conservatism and Prussianism would be permanently
assured by the capacity to achieve such a solution. He was
as passionately in earnest as any Liberal in Germany, and
he despised as strongly as any Liberal the rancid reaction
of the Conservatives. In men, conscious of titanic powers,
personal ambition is an immeasurable driving force, and
everything he cared for, including his own career, was at
stake in the contest to which Bismarck now deliberately
committed himself. He meant to justify himself to the
Prussia which he loved and the Germany which so heartily
hated him.
nical questions were completely overshadowed by the
constitutional controversy. The opposition did not dis-
pute the prerogative of the sovereign, as commander-in-
chief, or the duty of every Prussian male to be trained in
the army; but they put forward three claims. First,
that as the obligation of military service affected every
man in Prussia, the nation had the legal and moral right
through its representatives to decide on what conditions
that service should be performed, and if Parliament chose
to reduce the period with the Colours from three years to
two, it had the right to do so; secondly, Parliament had
the legal right to vote or to refuse the taxes required for
maintaining the army; thirdly, the army estimates were
part of the annual budget, and the representatives of the
nation had the right annually to review this budget, since
without parliamentary sanction no taxes were legal for the
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? no
BISMARCK
army or any other institution of the State. In so far as
the army was dependent on statute law and taxation for
its existence, the concurrence of Parliament was essential.
The importance of these claims did not he in their legal
validity, which was undeniable, but in the principles and
consequences they involved. The Prince Regent and
Roon quite correctly grasped that the opposition was
determined to assert, through the annual revision of the
budget, the principle of ministerial responsibility to the
Lower House; and that through the power of the purse
the establishment of ministerial responsibility would lead
inevitably to a general and unlimited control of policy and
executive ministerial action. Prussia would cease to be a
State in which the King governed through the legislature;
it would become a State in which ministers, dependent on
the legislature, governed through the King. The army
would be turned into a creation of the Landtag, and the
prerogative of the sovereign would be legislated out of
existence. In a word, the old conception of the monarchy
was in irreconcilable collision with the new conception of
parliamentary Liberalism. For the Crown, the power and
character of the monarchy were at stake; for the Liberals,
the power and character of Parliament as a national insti-
tution of government. An issue had been raised on which
compromise was impossible. Was there, or was there not,
to be parliamentary and constitutional government in
Prussia? It was recognised that the decision would
affect not merely Prussia, but the whole of Germany.
At the outset the struggle was embittered by an act of
bad faith. The opposition temporarily voted the addi-
tional money required on the understanding that the
ministerial scheme should be withdrawn and the whole
question of reorganisation reserved for future consideration.
But the War Office promptly created the new regiments;
colours were solemnly given them by the Regent; and
the revised budget assumed that the scheme had been ap-
proved. William, who had become king in 1861, peremp-
torily refused to disavow the accomplished facts. His
acts as War-Lord (Kriegesherf) were not subject to parlia-
mentary revision; the money had been voted, and it was
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN in
within his prerogative to apply it. Rejection of the
budget and a dissolution of Parliament followed, with the
result that the Conservative minority was smitten hip and
thigh. The Conservative party numbered a tiny handful
in the new Landtag. The Crown was apparently con-
fronted with surrender to the opposition or resort to a
coup cPEtat.
Bismarck rejoiced in the quarrel. He had had nothing so
far to do either with framing the scheme or the crisis that
arose out of it. In his judgment-nothing could be better
than to strengthen the army, and it was for the soldiers to
decide how most effectively to do this. But even better was
the collision between the Crown and the Liberals. The
control of the army by an irresponsible Crown and ministers
responsible to the Crown alone, lay in the essence of his
everything that he hated and feared--parliamentary
government, the Landtag as a government-making, policy-
making organ, and ministers under the thumb of a majority
composed of professors, lawyers, journalists, and middle-class
amateurs. Even if the scheme were wrong, the Crown
must be supported and the opposition smashed into heel.
The King was desperately unhappy. His Liberal minis-
ters saw no solution but to yield. How could the
government continue without a budget? The country
at the general election had pronounced. The Crown
Prince had the gravest misgivings about a policy which
threatened to destroy national confidence in the sovereign,
perhaps even shatter the throne. Prussia was at this
moment insisting that the incurable autocrat of Hesse-
Cassel must obey his constitution and his legislature, yet
at home was defying the plain rights of the Landtag to vote
taxes and determine their application laid down in the
Prussian law of the land. Roon and the soldiers daily
reminded his Majesty that the army as a monarchical
institution was at stake, and a Hohenzollern who betrayed
the army betrayed himself. Surrender? Civil war? A
coup d fitat? Abdication? Which was King William to
choose? Roon also suggested that if his Majesty's
ministers refused to do their plain duty and defy Parlia-
programme. The demands of the
implied
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? 112
BISMARCK
ment, there was at Petersburg an experienced diplo-
matist who could be trusted to do the King's business.
But William shrank at the thought. Bismarck would be
loyal, but he would Insist on carrying out his foreign
policy, an entente with France and opposition to Austria.
His appointment was burning the bridges and blowing
up the magazines. The opposition might still be brought
to an honourable compromise, but not by Bismarck.
The 'Baden Memorial' (Denkschrift), drawn up by
Bismarck for King William in July 1861, repeated the
familiar analysis of the reasons why the existing federal
system was ruinous to Prussia--the continuous deadlock,
Austrian jealousy, the subordination of Prussian initiative
and independence to the votes of petty States, organised by
a non-German Empire at Vienna. Bismarck urged the
King to put Prussia at the head of the unitary movement
and lay before the Federal Diet a proposal to create a
national Parliament, chosen by direct suffrage from all
Germany, which would give Prussia the political direction
that it had already in the Tariff Union. Skilfully devised,
such a Parliament would enlist for Prussia popular sym-
pathy throughout Germany and largely heal the internal
strife in Prussia itself. The 'Baden Memorial' marks an
important stage in the evolution of Bismarck's thought.
It assumed the existence of a strong Prussian army, and
the will to employ it at the right moment in imposing a.
Prussian solution on all recalcitrants. 'Make me,' he said,
with reference to the Hesse-Cassel affair, 'an Under-
Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and I will produce for you
in three weeks a civil war of the first quality. '
Throughout 1861 and the spring of 1862 gossip in the
capital was rife with reports that the ambassador at
Petersburg was to be given ministerial office. Roon
kept Bismarck closely informed of all that was passing.
More than once he was brought' on sick leave ' to Berlin,
to be ready, but nothing came of it. The King was fas-
cinated and repelled by the idea. Audiences between
Bismarck and his sovereign improved their personal but not
their political relations. William felt that in this strong,
frank, masterful man's hands he would be dragged whither
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 113
he knew not. 'He goes furthest who knows not whither
he is going,' pronounced the practical mysticism of Crom-
well, And in Bismarck's surveys of the future there was
always a grand and indefinable atmosphere, a conscious-
ness of the vastness of life, and the illimitable potencies of
the future floating over the concrete directness of his grip
on realities. He knew not whither he was going--he did
not wish to know. Forces beyond human calculation
were driving Prussia, and he must march with them. The
Time-spirit would provide the golden opportunities and
reveal how they could be used.
Bismarck concluded that his transference (May 29,
1862) to the embassy at Paris signified a definitive refusal
of a ministerial portfolio at Berlin. He had learned much
at Petersburg: sounded and charted the European
situation; established a personal friendship with the
Tsar; and by meekly sitting at the feet of the vain Gort-
schakov had created a credit on which in good time he
intended to draw. 'The hatred of Austria here,' he
wrote from Petersburg, 'exceeds everything I had
believed possible. ' Paris was the political centre of
Europe, and a pleasanter place than Petersburg. The
Court of the Second Empire was at the zenith of its social
brilliance. The Empress Eugenie and her galaxy of frail
butterflies--fetes, balls, fashions, and opera--would be
an agreeable background to the serious political work of
exploiting Napoleon. On June 1 he was presenting his
credentials to the Man of Sin at the Tuileries, and before
long intimately discussing the higher statecraft with the
Emperor and his ministers, and suggesting with a delicious
audacity that a tyro in diplomacy would be grateful for
all the instructions he could receive from the French ex-
perts--Bismarck instructed by a Persigny, a Drouyn de
Lhuys, a Walewski, or a De Morny! He was also scrib-
bling notes to Roon on the iniquities of the Liberal majority
in the Landtag, and letters to his wife and sister describ-
ing the Parisian fashions, with touches on the vanity of
French ministers, and the beauty of the Champs Elysees
in a Paris midsummer. He dashed off to London to see
the great Exhibition and met Palmerston and Disraeli at
B. II
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? H4
BISMARCK
the Russian Embassy. An amusing fellow this Prussian
Ambassador, every one agreed. His verve and racy reck-
lessness delighted the company, and his sketch of how in
a few years he would settle Europe and Germany was more
exhilarating than, and quite as evanescent as, champagne.
Disraeli judged more correctly. 'Take care of that man;
he means what he says,' was a verdict no less accurate and
prophetic than Bismarck's scribbled comment to Roon.
'I am just back from London. People there are much
better informed about China and Turkey than about
Prussia. Loftus (the English Ambassador in Berlin) must
write to his minister much more nonsense than I imagine. '
It was tragically true. Neither at the Foreign Office,
nor in Parliament, not even in the office of The Times, or in
the exalted circles of the Court, did they know the truth
about Prussia and Germany, and it is doubtful whether
they wished to know.
From Paris Bismarck visited Trouville, and then, rest-
less and dissatisfied, went on a tour to the south' Not
even ' the Lafitte, Mouton Rothschild, Pichon, Laroze,
Latour, Margaux, St. Julien, Beaune, Armillac, and other
wines'--the ' other ' is a pretty touch--which he noted as
having drunk at Bordeaux, nor the beauty of dawn on the
seashore and of sunset in the Pyrenees, described in letters
to his wife, could appease his feeling that Paris after all
was exile; that the world of action lay in Berlin, and that
he was shut out from it. Life was slipping away. Was
he to'be an ambassador all his days, and never have the
great political levers in his hands i Ministerial office
was hateful, yet he could not be happy without it. 'My
furniture,' he wrote on September 12, 1862, 'is still at
Petersburg and will freeze there; my carriages are at
Stettin, my horses at grass near Berlin, my family in
Pomerania, and I am on the streets. '
Three days later came a telegram from Roon: 'Come.
The pear is ripe. Periculum in mora. ' He plucked an
olive branch as he hurried through Avignon on his way to
Paris, and was in Berlin on the morning of September 20.
In the forenoon of September 22 he had a memorable
interview with the King at Schloss Babelsberg. He per-
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 115
suaded William 1. to tear up the abdication he had drafted,
put himself unreservedly at his sovereign's disposal, and
declared his readiness to fight for the rights of the Crown
and the royal scheme of reorganisation of the army to the
last. There could be no surrender. This was a fight for
honour and existence and must be fought to a finish.
Next day (September 23) the Gazette announced the
appointment of Herr von Bismarck-Schonhausen to office
as temporary Minister-President. On the same day the
budget for 1862, providing for the army in accordance with
the royal scheme of reorganisation, was decisively rejected
in the Lower House of the Landtag by 273 to 68 votes.
September 23,1862, is a red-letter day in the Hohenzollern
calendar; it opened a new chapter, or rather a new
volume, in the history of Prussia and of Europe.
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? CHAPTER IV
THE M1NJSTER-PRES1DENT, 1S62-1867
? I. 1'he Constitutional Conflict, the Polish Question, and
the German Problem
On October 8, 1862, Bismarck's provisional appointment
as Minister-President was definitely ratified. He took up
his residence in the Wilhelmstrasse, which was to be his
official abode for twenty-eight years. The new minister
was in his forty-eighth year, and he had passed, without
any ministerial experience, direct from an embassy to the
highest office in the State. Both in Prussia and outside it
men naturally asked, What did it mean? What would
happen next?
Apart from the constitutional controversy and the dead-
lock created by the overwhelming vote of September 23
--a situation grave enough to demand the undivided
energies of the government--a series of critical questions
in foreign policy pressed for solution. Schleswig-Holstein,
the situation in Hesse-Cassel, Poland, the renewal of the
Zollverein, the proposed commercial treaty with France,
the German problem--each and all of these in combination
threatened to become acute. They involved the relations
of Prussia as a German Power with the middle and petty
States in Germany, and her relations as a European Power
with Austria, France, Great Britain, Russia, and the new
but incomplete kingdom of Italy. Public opinion in Ger-
many recognised the gravity of the crisis, and was aware
that a false step in foreign policy would create an inter-
national situation which would leave Prussia isolated and
confronted with a hostile coalition that would reduce her
to a humiliating impotence.
Bismarck's appointment was clearly a challenge. It
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
117
provoked in different quarters indignation, amazement,
contempt, amusement. As we look back to-day and deli-
berately forget the knowledge of what happened between
1862 and 1871, it is instructive to read in contemporary
literature--the newspapers, memoirs, letters, pamphlets,
caricatures and dispatches--the judgments and inter-
pretations expressed in these critical years of 1862-66.
Rechberg at Vienna in 1862 described Bismarck to
Gramont as 'incapable de sacrifier une idee preconcue, un
prejuge, une idee de parti, a n'importe quelle raison d'un
ordre superieur; il n'a pas le sens pratique de la politique,
c'est un homme de parti dans la force du mot,' adding
truly enough, 'ce n'est pas un ami que nous aurons la. '
The new appointment was so clearly either a jest four rire
to cover a deliberate ride for a fall, a surrender to the oppo-
sition, and perhaps the King's abdication, or it was the
gambler's last throw, the discovery of a Prussian Polignac
which proclaimed a coming coup d'lttat. Capitulation or
revolution? What else could it mean, when the King
selected this Junker diplomatist, known only too well for
his violent, reckless, and impenitent championship of Prus-
sian Conservatism in its most particularist form? The
constitutional crisis and the international situation de-
manded a cool, conciliatory, and experienced statesman.
The King replied by appointing a red reactionary. In the
chancelleries of Europe the statesmen du vieux panialon
shrugged their shoulders and made bets whether Bismarck
would last three weeks or three months. To the Liberals,
above all, in Prussia the King's action was a stinging affront,
and a summons either to make a revolution or to capitulate.
Such judgments--and they could be cited by the page
? --were natural under the circumstances, for neither the
official world at London, Paris, Vienna, Dresden, and
Munich, nor the superheated public in Berlin knew the
real Bismarck. They simply saw in him the Junker of
1848-51. When he had practically disappeared at Frank-
furt from the public gaze the little that had emerged since
1852 confirmed the assumption that he had not altered,
indeed, that he was more than ever the sworn foe of the
causes he had opposed with such fiery audacity. The
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? n8
BISMARCK
profound change in his views and the breadth and variety
of his experience were unknown to most, and were even
misinterpreted by the few who had the material for
framing a correct judgment. In September 1862 no one
had divined the intellectual power, the cool and calculating
brain, the intensity of conviction, the political nerve, and
the extraordinary strength of character and will stored up
and disciplined in that titanic frame. As with Moltke, so
with Bismarck, the revelation of the next eight years was
to astound and hypnotise Germany and Europe.
And if men did not know Bismarck they were no less
ignorant in 1862 of Prussia and Prussianism.
Since 1815
Prussia as a German state and as a European Power had done
nothing to justify her claim to parity with the other great
Powers. She had produced competent internal adminis-
trators, distinguished professors, and ardent but ineffective
politicians. Her statesmen for fifty years were mediocrities;
her policy continuously tarnished by prejudice, timidity,
and irresolution--reaction ruined by spasmodic and in-
sincere repentance. The material and economic strength
of the country had been enormously increased since 1815;
in her organised civil service and her army, no less than
her system of education, Prussia was in 1862 far ahead of
every other German state, and superior not merely to
Austria and Russia but to France and Great Britain. The
generation born in the Napoleonic epoch, under the
shadows of Jena and the sunlight of the great age of reform
--the age of Scharnhorst, Stein, and the War of Liberation
--had been patiently moulded and tempered in the chill
school of work and disappointment to a capacity for sus-
tained sacrifice and effort which only required leadership
--a man and a cause--to . evoke a single-minded co-opera-
tion. Here lay the secret of the strength of the opposition
in Parliament, for it represented a Prussia which had
broken with the historic tradition because the organs of
that tradition--monarchy, ministers, and the executive--
seemed blind to the greatness of the German renaissance,
and ignorant of the moral and intellectual forces that com-
Eelled the true German mind to be Liberal and Nationalist.
>eaf to the call of the future, Prussia had frittered for
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
forty years the vigour of the nation on a parochial
prosperity or the ignoble scuffles of the dynasties in the
Federal Diet.
Bismarck was a child of the age that had produced 1848
and the constitutional crisis of 1862--lived, learned, and
inwardly digested. Like the Liberals whom he detested
he had divined the strength of Prussia, but, unlike the
Liberals, he diagnosed the cause of Prussia's failure in one
vital and fatal omission. The Frederician tradition had
been successfully followed in domestic administration, but
had been neglected or betrayed in policy, above all, foreign
policy. The time had come at last--and not too late--
to prove what a strong Prussia could do, when her policy
was shaped and directed by a minister to whom nothing
was sacred or unclean, prepared like Frederick, the master,
to devote soul, brain and body to the service of Prussia, and
determined to concentrate unflinchingly the whole force
of the State on one end and one end alone, the greatness
of Prussia--a man to whom parties, causes, principles, con-
ventions, were either means to that end or empty phrases.
Prussia herself and Europe had forgotten the principles
and methods of Frederick the Great. The schools of
Metternich and Canning, of Palmerston, Guizot or
Nicholas 1. j lingered on in the shibboleths of the middle-
aged, who advised their governments from office desks in
the Foreign Offices; the school of Cavour had come and
gone with 1861; in the west at Paris reigned the sham
Napoleonism of the Second Empire; at London were the
statesmen of both parties who persisted in interpreting the
Continent, if they interpreted it at all, in the terms of an
obsolete continental or a complacent insular tradition, no
longer in touch with realities. By 1871 it began to dawn
on Europe that in Bismarck had come to life a reincarnation
of the Frederick who had shattered the Europe of Walpole,
Maria Theresa, and Louis xv. , a statesman controlling an
organised Prussia, far stronger relatively than the Prussia
of Frederick the Great--a statesmanship that was a re-
created gospel in action. The State as Egoism and the
State as Power, directed by the genius of the illuminated
despot, had made a new Europe and a new Prussia between
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BISMARCK
1740 and 1786; directed by the illuminated genius of
Bismarck it was to make a new Prussia, a new Germany,
and a new Europe between 1862 and 1890.
It was not therefore either the unrepentant Berserker
of Junkertum or a mere diplomatist trained in the conven-
tional manege of Frankfurt, Petersburg, and Paris, who
at Roon's bidding had promised his sovereign in the garden
of Schloss Babelberg to lead a forlorn hope. Bismarck had
studied the men both at Berlin and all over Europe with
whom he would have to deal; he was convinced that in
a test of resource, nerve, courage, and tenacity of will, or
in mastery of the realities in any situation, it would not be
he who would fail. This bitter quarrel was none of his
making, and his first step, when he met the triumphant
majority of the opposition in 'The House of Phrases,' as
he called the Landtag, was quietly to lay on the table the
olive branch that he had plucked at Avignon, with the
remark that it was a present to the progressive party, but
the time for it had apparently not yet come.
Bismarck's desire for an honourable compromise was pro-
bably sincere. He desired to be free from internal compli-
cations in order to deal with foreign policy. However, it
was a fixed principle of his system, enunciated now and fifty
times in the next twenty-five years, that government by
a monarchy through a representative assembly must rest
on compromises, and it was the function of statesmanship
to frame and work them. The external situation was
critical; foreign policy would demand for the next two
or three years sleepless vigilance, and the difficulties,
sufficiently great in themselves, would be aggravated by
an embittered controversy at home. He v/as new to
office; his position would be enormously strengthened
if he could inaugurate his minister-presidency by a reason-
able settlement. Neither now, nor at any time, was it his
habit to close the doors or drive an adversary to open war
until he was convinced that negotiation could not secure
the essentials. But he made his terms perfectly clear.
Let the controversy over rights on both sides be dismissed
as misleading juristic jargon. But the Crown must have
the money for the reorganisation of the army, and the
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 121
control of that army and of policy must rest with the King.
Co-operation with Parliament by all means, government
by a parliamentary majority--never. If the opposition
chose to make the issue not a question of right but of
might, between government by the monarchy and govern-
ment by the Lower House of the Landtag, against the'will
of the King and the Upper House, the struggle must be
fought out, and there would only be one end to it--the
defeat of the opposition which usurped the lawful authority
of the State, inalienably inherent in the Crown.
Bismarck calmly explained his interpretation of the con-
stitution, and to this he adhered through the period of
conflict. He quietly ignored the overwhelming endorse-
ment of the action taken in the previous Parliament by
the general election. The Lower House had the right, he
agreed, to vote taxes or reject the budget, but the veto of
the Lower House was not conclusive, for the budget was
expressed in a law, and laws required the assent of the
Crown and the Upper, as well as of the Lower, House.
If the consent of any one of these were withheld, a dead-
lock was created which could, under the constitution, only
be removed by the voluntary act of the organ concerned
and by no other means. Failing such, the constitution
expressly reserved to the Crown the residual right of
government. The Crown was therefore legally entitled
to carry on the administration during the emergency
created by the deadlock. Otherwise it failed in its duty
to itself as the head of the State and to the whole kingdom.
The Crown, therefore, simply was driven to avail itself of
the special powers provided to meet a temporary and ex-
ceptional situation. The King might challenge the wisdom
or patriotism of the action which had produced the
deadlock, but in exercising his special powers he was not
denying the legal rights of the Lower House, which was
similarly bound not to deny the legal rights of the Crown.
The action of the Lower House amounted to a claim to
compel the Crown to surrender its prerogative at dis-
cretion, and to make the King's government dependent on
the fiat of one chamber of the legislature, or, if the Crown
refused to give way, to make all government impossible.
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? 122
BISMARCK
Bismarck made it no less clear that as a minister he was
not appointed, nor could be dismissed, by Parliament. So
long as he had the confidence of his sovereign he would re-
main in office, no matter what Parliament said or voted.
The government of the Crown must and would be carried
on, budget or no budget. The taxes would be levied
under the law of 1861 (as indeed they were from 1861-66);
the necessary legalisation of this emergency government
by prerogative could and would be procured later (as it
was in 1866), by a law of indemnity, or--as Bismarck
thought possible in 1863--by an alteration of the consti-
tution. On September 29 he gave expression in debate
to the famous sentence: 'Germany has its eyes not on
Prussia's Liberalism, but on its might. . . . Prussia must
reserve its strength for the favourable moment, which has
already more than once been missed. The great questions
of the day will not be decided by speeches and resolutions
of majorities--that was the blunder of 1848 and 1849--
but by blood and iron. '
Spoken with calm conviction, the phrase burst like a
shell in a powder magazine. It roused a hurricane of in-
dignation through Germany. No such language had been
heard from a Prussian minister since 1815, and if men
needed convincing that the Landtag was confronted with
the Junker of 1849, the proof was surely there from the
Minister-President's own lips. Later, Bismarck repeatedly
explained that all he meant was that the German problem
could be solved only by action, and the effective use at the
suitable moment of the Prussian army, and that K6nig-
gratz, St. Privat, and Sedan proved he was right; that
without 'the blood and iron' of military force neither
Austria nor France could have been overthrown and
German unity achieved. But the famous sentence in
1862 went much further, and was intended to go much
further, than this. It was a warning to Germany as well
as to the Prussian Landtag; it was a concentrated con-
demnation of all, and not merely the Liberal, methods
hitherto employed; it poured contempt on reform by
'moral penetration' and government by consent of the
governed. It was the summary of the creed that the State
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 123
stood for power, and that in political problems force, not
right, was the sovereign remedy (Macht geht vor Recht).
It was inevitable that the opposition should reject the
olive branch. Holding as they did that the general
election had given them a plain mandate, that the govern-
ment demanded more for the army than efficiency re-
quired, that the period of service could be safely reduced
from three years to two, that the levying of taxes without
the consent of the Lower House was a plain violation of the
constitution, and that a compromise involved acquiescence
in the illegal acts of the government, which would perma-
nently destroy the power of the Lower House ever again
to modify or refuse the financial demands of any ministry,
--in a word, that the future of parliamentary and constitu-
tional government was bound up with the successful
assertion of their principles, the majority could only meet
the challenge of the Minister-President by inflexible ad-
herence to their decision. A surrender in the autumn of
1862 would have been a victory for reaction and a defeat
for the principle of popular government through represen-
tative institutions throughout Germany. Accordingly,
the Lower Chamber by 251 to 36 votes condemned the
illegal expenditure incurred by the government, and de-
manded that the budget for 1863 should be submitted for
approval. When (October 10) the Upper House accepted
the condemned budget of 1862 by 114 to 44 votes, their
action was condemned unanimously by the Lower House
as ' contrary to the clear sense and text of the constitution. '
Parliament was prorogued; when it met in 1863 (January
27) an address to the Crown, accusing ministers of having
violated the constitution, was passed after a passionate
debate by 25 5 to 68 votes.
The breach was now complete. The Lower House was
in plain conflict with the Crown, the Crown's ministers
and the Upper House, and the struggle, in which feeling
outside was as violent as within Parliament, soon spread to
other issues than the reorganisation of the army and the
budget.
The struggle was no mere juristic controversy over dis-
putable and conflicting clauses in the written constitution
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? 124
BISMARCK
of 1851. It focussed in the clearest light the fundamental
and irreconcilable antagonism between the principles
and methods of policy, government, and the character of
the State represented by Bismarck and the opposition.
When Bismarck ignored the undeniable mandate of the
Prussian electorate to its representatives in Parliament,
and when he admitted that the levying of the rejected
taxes was an executive act which would require an
indemnity to bring it within the letter and spirit of the
constitution, he proclaimed that the struggle was not a
question of law, but of power. Was the Crown, as head
of the executive and of the army, to enforce its will on the
nation, and to retain a final and irresponsible judgment
in all questions of policy?
'The Prussian Monarchy,' he asserted on January 27,
1863, 'nas not 7et completed its mission; it is not yet
ready to become a purely ornamental decoration of your
constitutional Parliament House; not yet ready to be
manipulated as a piece of lifeless machinery of parlia-
mentary government. '
Bismarck was fighting with his back to the wall for an
issue more important in his eyes than the preservation of
the legal prerogatives of the Crown in Prussia. The per-
sonal monarchy, as an organ of government, was the indis-
pensable condition of success in the task he had set himself.
A constitutional sovereign, in the British sense, not only in-
volved ministers responsible to Parliament, but a legislature
the chief function of which would be to determine the
ends, the character, and the methods of policy. Hence
his unrelenting opposition now, and to the end of his life,
to government by and through representative institutions
was the subtle product of ingrained personal feeling and
a recognition of the fundamental antagonism between his
political convictions and the champions of parliamentary
government. He could be the loyal servant of a king
whose office incarnated the history and character of a
specific type of State,. but to be the servant of a Parliament,
accountable to, and holding his place at the pleasure of,
a fortuitous majority of professors, lawyers, journalists,
tradesmen and tinkers, was intolerable to his aristocratic
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
pride and independence. He would take orders from no
one save the King and God, and he served God as he served
his royal master, on terms of devotion denned and inter-
preted by himself.
On political grounds he both feared and despised his
opponents in Parliament. He told them roundly that
they were ignorant, prejudiced, unpractical--dreamers
without political sense--helpless children in affairs of
State. Had he been perfectly honest he would have added
that diplomacy, as he conceived it, could not be conducted
with the blinds up, and that no representative body of
responsible men of high character would sanction either
his principles or his methods, and that for the realisation
of his aims absolute control of all the resources of the
State and an unfettered discretion were indispensable,
and that it was easier to manipulate and hoodwink a king
than a nation and a Parliament. The reorganisation of
the army, the steady preparation for war by a militarised
bureaucracy, the budget question, the Polish problem,
the conquest of Schleswig-Holstein, the manipulation of
the European situation, the understandings with Russia
and Napoleon m. , the Italian Treaty, the breach with
Austria, the campaign and peace of 1866, and the formation
of the North German Confederation--the Bismarckian
solution of the great questions of the day--could never
have been carried out, as Bismarck carried them out, by a
minister under a system of constitutional monarchy and
responsible parliamentary government. The conscience
of Prussia and Germany in 1862 made, in Bismarck's eyes,
for political cowardice. Nor were the Germans who
created the National Union under Bennigsen as yet pre-
pared to sacrifice everything to the State as Power, and to
adopt as their sole criterion of policy the State-egoism
of an unreformed and militarised Prussia.
In 1862 Germany was ripe for great changes. Under
the pressure of the internal development, assisted by the
course of events in Europe, most notably in Italy, the
demand for the extension of political rights on Nationalist
and Liberal lines could no longer be burked or denied. It
was apparent in every quarter, and in every German State.
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? 126
BISMARCK
The dynasties and their ministers from Vienna to Liberal
Coburg or reactionary Hesse-Cassel were responding, re-
luctantly or readily, to the movement which had Germany
in its grip. The passionate manifestation of German
public opinion in the Polish problem, and the Schleswig-
Holstein question from 1863 to 1866, the execration which
Bismarck aroused in non-Prussian Germany, have an his-
toric and tragic significance. Bismarck had divined the
force and direction of the currents now reaching their
flood-tide, and he tacitly agreed with the leaders of the
National Union that the key of the future lay in Prussia.
The failure to secure Prussia in 1848 had destroyed the
Liberal revolution. A second failure to capture Prussia in
1863 would have the same wrecking result. And as in
1848, so now, success or failure would determine not merely
the fate of Germany and of Prussia, but the German mind
and the future development of Continental Europe.
The strength of the Liberal opposition in the Prussian
Parliament lay, first, in its devotion to constitutional law
and right; secondly, in a profound belief in the efficacy
of orderly self-government through representative insti-
tutions; thirdly, in the deep Prussian and German
patriotism of the leaders and the rank and file; fourthly,
in their insistence on the complete identity of Prussian
and German interests alike in home and foreign policy;
fifthly, in their recognition that the old order in Prussia
and Germany had failed, and would continue to fail, to
satisfy the deepest and most legitimate aspirations of the
German people, and that a new departure on new prin-
ciples was essential; and lastly, in their sympathy, partly
conscious, partly unconscious, with the great currents
and forces moving elsewhere than in Germany--in the
United States, in Great Britain, in Italy, in the Austrian
Empire, in south-eastern Europe and the Balkans, in
France, and even in Russia. It was a bitter duty for the
leaders of the opposition openly to challenge the King, but
they faced it because they had consciences and a deep love
of Prussia. The ignorance in England of the true char-
acter of the German movement, the blindness of our
statesmen, our press, and our public opinion to the signi-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 127
ficance for our nation and national destinies of the struggle
fought out between September 1862 and July 1867, were
more damning than. the lamentable division in our councils
and the fiasco of our statesmanship in Europe. In these
years Great Britain was given a matchless opportunity to
assert a moral and political ascendency, not based on power,
but on the qualities and elements of national development
of which the British State is the expression and the trustee,
and she threw it away, as she very nearly in the same epoch
threw away her birthright in the issues raised by the
American Civil War.
But the Liberal opposition had two fatal defects, which-
Bismarck with a demonic intuition fully realised. The
renunciation of reform by revolution, and of the right of
resistance, and the adhesion to procedure by purely consti-
tutional methods reduced his opponents to impotence.
Constitutional weapons are helpless against force: argu-
ment is futile against an opponent who derides the im-
potence of speeches and pamphlets. Bismarck could not
be driven from office by votes of the Lower House, but
only by a revolution. He calculated that opposition
would be confined to resolutions in the Lower House,
public meetings and the press, and that he would not be
driven to a coup d'fttat by refusal to pay illegal tazes or to
serve in an illegal army. We may be quite sure that he
would not have hesitated to employ shot and shell, but a
civil war in Prussia which would have involved the whole
of Germany and of Austria was the one thing that he knew
he need not fear. With consummate irony he subse-
quently utilised the reverence for law and order that in-
spired the constitutional party as the clinching proof that
German unity could not be achieved by any other methods
than his own. Had the men who overthrew Charles 1.
and James n. limited themselves to passive protests,
recorded in the Journals of the House of Commons, the
house of Stuart would have been reigning to-day in White-
hall, and the palace of Westminster would have been
replaced by a national memorial to Strafford and Father
Petre. But Strafford had to work with a Charles 1.
Bismarck had King William and the Prussia made by the
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BISMARCK
Hohenzollern sovereigns. In the second place, the oppo-
sition were not dealing with a pure reactionary, determined
to maintain, as Nicholas 1. and Schwarzenberg had been
determined in 1848 to maintain, the status quo, and to
stamp out every obstacle to its maintenance. An infuri-
ated public opinion saw in the Minister-President the
arch-enemy of unification and the champion of Junker
particularism. It was quite wrong. Bismarck was as
profoundly convinced as every Liberal that the German
problem must be solved and on Nationalist lines; and his
conviction was steeled by the knowledge that the future
of Conservatism and Prussianism would be permanently
assured by the capacity to achieve such a solution. He was
as passionately in earnest as any Liberal in Germany, and
he despised as strongly as any Liberal the rancid reaction
of the Conservatives. In men, conscious of titanic powers,
personal ambition is an immeasurable driving force, and
everything he cared for, including his own career, was at
stake in the contest to which Bismarck now deliberately
committed himself. He meant to justify himself to the
Prussia which he loved and the Germany which so heartily
hated him.
