He
appealed
to William's pride.
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? i44
BISMARCK
the finest and rarest, gift of the highest statesmanship.
Russia, he pronounced with customary vividness, would in
such an alliance sit on the longer arm of the lever. All
that was needed in 1863 could be distilled gradually from
the informal but close understanding already established.
Every alliance, he remarked at another time, implies a
horse and a rider. The function of diplomacy is to secure
that you are the rider and your ally the horse. Because
he correctly judged that in 1863, Gortschakov would be
the rider and he, Bismarck, the horse, he put the offer
politely and with many assurances of affection, personal
and political, on one side.
While the Polish Rebellion was still running its ap-
pointed course, the German question also had developed
a crisis. The demand that something must be done, and
done now, to reshape the indefensible travesty of a political
mechanism, called the Bund--that precious monument
the restoration of which in its anachronistic nudity had
marked the grave both of 1848 and of Conservative con-
structive statesmanship. For ten years every German
mind had been labouring with the problem and putting on
record, to the embarrassment of that age and the despair
of the seeker after truth in the next two generations, its
perplexities, fears, hopes, dreams and solutions. State-
papers, diaries, letters, pamphlets, caricatures, memorials,
note-books, and minutes of clubs, unions, leagues--the
archives of the chancelleries, the waste-paper basket of the
patriot, and the scrap-heap of the lecture-room--which
German research has by no means exhausted, testify to the
deep-seated and universal discontent. Nationalists, Radi-
cals, Clericals and Ultramontanes, Conservatives, bureau-
crats and professors, hummed like bees in the swarming
season from the frontier of Schleswig to the forelands of
the Alps. The flower of the universities, professorial and
undergraduate, linked hands and pens with the politicians
--Bennigsen, Droysen, Samwer, M. Duncker, the Coburg
group, and the unitarian enthusiasm of the Grand-Duke
of Baden. Already the trumpet of the young Treitschke
was blowing its earliest clarion calls.
When the butchers meet in conclave because something
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
must be done for the sheep, we may be sure that it is not
the sheep but the butchers who fear the future. In 1863,
the Habsburg Emperor felt the cruel coercion of a
Germany out of joint, and the unpleasant necessity of
putting it right before worse befell. The dynasties from
Dresden to Munich leaped to the suggestion from Vienna
that disinterested patriotism could be concentrated in a
Congress of Princes ready to confer benefits on their
subjects. To the adroit Beust at Dresden, as fertile in
diplomatic resource as in conversational epigram, the
opportunity was exceptional. Beust, like every one else,
had his scheme, or rather half a dozen schemes, in pigeon-
holes, and another half dozen producible if required, like
the magician's rabbits, for any audience, and from any
diplomatic bag--and Beust was by far the cleverest of all
the political conjurers in the middle States who desired
a tripartite Germany--Austria, the middle States, and
Prussia--regrouped in a new Federal structure. To Beust
and to the Triad party, the supreme merit of this solution,
the details of which were simply a drafting matter, lay in
its recognition of the equality of non-Austrian and non-
Prussian Germany as a collective unit with Austria and
Prussia. Such equality would fairly meet the Prussian
demand for parity with Austria and the Austrian reluct-
ance to surrender her historic hegemony; it would no less
fairly remove the fatal objection to all dualistic schemes
which imposed on the middle and petty States an obli-
gatory choice of being absorbed either in a Prussian or an
Austrian system, an absorption damaging to the general
interests of Germany, historically unjust, and repugnant
to the legitimist sovereignty of the dynasties.
Concessions must, of course, be made to the people as
well as to the States of Germany. Bismarck's failure was
assumed to be a practical certainty: Prussia would then
succumb to the liberal majority which would adopt the
programme of the National Union and achieve a unitary
and democratic solution under Prussian leadership. Once
the citadel in Prussia had fallen to the parliamentary
opposition, the rest of Germany would lynch its dynasties
into acceptance of the unitary and liberal plan. And
B. K
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BISMARCK
Austria, racked on a series of Procrustean beds, called con-
stitutions, with Italy on one side and Hungary on the other,
and Russia sullenly hostile, could not expect to repeat in
1864 the miracle of 1849. Now, if ever, was the moment
to drive an Austrian dynastic, anti-Prussian, and particu-
larist programme through.
The problem was first to combine the minimum of real
concession with the maximum of outward homage to
democratic demands; and secondly, to arrange the Federal
machinery in such a way as to grant in theory the Prussian
claim to parity with Austria, while refusing the substance
--an easy matter, for equal voting powers between Austria
and Prussia must always leave Prussia in a minority when
non-Prussian Germany made equal either to Austria or
Prussia voted (as it would) with Austria. The Austrian
government accordingly produced its specious plan. A
new Directorate of six States (Austria, Prussia, Bavaria,
and three others chosen in rotation) under Austrian presi-
dency was to be created, together with a Federal Council
of 21 votes, a Federal Tribunal of Law, and a Federal
Assembly of 302 Delegates elected, not by direct suffrage,
but by the various parliaments of the Federated States.
Rebellious German democracy was, in short, to be re-
manacled in a new Federal cage, and Prussia was, through
her King, to mediatise herself for the benefit of Germany
on the altars of dynasticism. The Emperor Francis
Joseph met King William at Gastein. The crises of
German history always begin or end at a bathing resort.
The two sovereigns talked and agreed that the business
could be settled by a Congress of Princes at Frankfurt.
It was fitting that the rulers, by personal negotiations,
should settle the affairs of-Germany in a royal and family
conference; and their ministers were to be in close attend-
ance, but take no part in the august deliberations. While
their princely masters worked, they could copy letters,
dine, dance, and arrange for the exchange of decorations.
On August 16 the Congress met; only one important
sovereign (and his minister) was absent. The surprise and
dismay were universal, for the absentee was the King of
Prussia. They sent to fetch him. The King of Saxony
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 147
was the courier chosen to remind King William that a
Congress of Princes, headed by Csesarean Majesty from
Vienna, begged the honour of his company. Delay and
much anxiety. Then the King of Saxony came back.
The King of Prussia regretted his inability to accept the
invitation. Indignation, expostulation, consternation, pre-
vailed: then after a few days, the Congress ruefully broke
up. All that it accomplished was to repeat the invitation
(by letter this time) to Prussia and to 'leave open' the
question of the Presidency ' for further discussion. ' The
proposal to proceed, without Prussia, was indeed suggested,
but crumbled into pieces at once. 'We will have no con-
federation without Austria,' said the Bavarian minister,
'but likewise none without Prussia. ' A reorganisation of
Germany which omitted Prussia was ridiculous. The
coercion of Prussia would, in the state of public opinion,
probably end in the revolution with the Prussian army at
its disposal. And when the Prussian government officially
published its reasons for abstention--the patent inade-
quacy of the proposals of the Princes to meet the rights of
Prussia and the needs of Germany was glaringly and pain-
fully evident. 'A national Parliament,' said the Prussian
memorandum of September 15, 'was an essential of any
Federal reform. The interests and claims of the Prussian
people are intrinsically and inseparably identical with those
of the German people. ' The argument was repeated in the
Note of September 22, sent to all the members of the Con-
gress of Princes. Prussia laid it down that: (1) She, as
well as Austria, must have a right to veto a declaration of
war by the Confederation; (2) her position in the Con-
federation must be equal to that of Austria; (3) she could
not accept an enlargement of the functions of the Con-
federation limiting Prussian independence; (4) there must
be a German Parliament, representative of the German
nation, and elected directly by it.
At a word from Prussia the Austrian plan and all others
of the same kind went, unhouseled, unanointed, and
unannealed into the limbo reserved for the acrobatics of
pseudo-statesmanship. The Congress of Princes sum-
moned to consecrate the consummation of a new German
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BISMARCK
Confederation, was suddenly turned into the funeral of
the . Greater Germany party.
Henceforward, there were only three possible alter-
natives--a unification under Austria imposed on a defeated
Prussia, a unification under Prussia imposed on a defeated
Austria, or the unitary Empire of the National Union, in
which Prussia was dissolved in a Germany, from which
Austria was excluded, a unification to be imposed on Ger-
many by the triumph of National Liberalism. In the
autumn of 1863, though we to-day find it hard to believe
it, and before the year 1864 had revolutionised the Euro-
pean situation and German public opinion, the last of the
three alternatives seemed far the most probable. One
conclusion, however, is certain. The author of the fiasco
of the Congress of Princes, the man who administered the
coup de gr&ce to the Greater Germany party, was Bismarck.
'Lord ! ' says Puck,' what fools these mortals be. ' The
sacred simplicity of the diplomatic or royal ostrich pro-
vokes a deeper laughter of Jove than the perjuries of lovers.
The supposition of Rechberg and Beust and all the sham
and pigmy Machiavellians, princely or ministerial, that the
Minister-President at Berlin, who had served seven gruel-
ling years of apprenticeship at Frankfurt, would not see
through the patent trap of the Austrian plan must have
provoked the grimmest humour of Bismarck. The idea
that the Prussian monarchy was meekly to strip to the skin
in the imperial. city of Frankfurt, and put on a Nessus shirt
patched up by kings and grand-dukes in the workhouse at
Vienna was too delicious even for the grand diplomacy.
Did Rechberg, Beust, and their company seriously imagine
that the Minister-President was risking all in the struggle
with the Landtag to sacrifice the cause of Prussianism
at the bidding of a mob of princes? Their action proves
that if they knew themselves and their tricks, at least they
did not know the Minister-President at Berlin. 'Stripped
of its coat,' Bismarck said, 'the Austrian poodle is dis-
tinctly meagre. '
Yet the reality of the German situation was profoundly
disquieting to Bismarck. National Liberalism was, and
remained, a tremendous and dangerous force. The time
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 149
had long passed when the German people could be fobbed
off with a hollow sham and be manipulated in blinkers. in to
a series of dynastic pens, renamed a Unified Germany.
The essence of the problem lay in the demand in all parts
of Germany for the nation to be included in the task of
government, so that legislation, taxation, policy would be
expressive of a nation's will, character and ideals--a Ger-
many for the Germans by the Germans. Hence any
reconstruction to be practical politics, must be organic.
The Austrian and princely programme was the old Diet
and Federation, with a few new and useless wheels added,
some of the old grit and rust cleaned out, and the whole
recoloured with a thin coat of democratic paint, intended
to fade.
For Bismarck, the problem was not how to combine a
minimum of concession to democracy with a maximum of
princely and particularist independence and autocracy,
but how to combine a maximum of concession to the
demand for self-government with the unity of an efficient
and irresponsible executive. Bismarck had here pene-
trated to an abiding reality in the German heart. If the
Germans passionately desired a share in the government
of a unified Germany, they no less passionately desired
power. The National Union and National Liberalism were
the outcome of both desires. The old system satisfied
neither. Germany was impotent in the world. It was
simply shameful, every German felt, that a great country
could not, or would not, prevent a third-rate State like
Denmark from violating its obligations, defined in the
public law of Europe, and could not protect Germans in
Holstein from illegal oppression, and the reason was that
poKcy was determined by a group of conflicting dynasties,
and power was dissipated in an antiquated and contemptible
political mechanism. Ending, not mending, that system
would alone meet the demand for power--the power of the
National State--and provide the organs of power. The
foreign observer can indeed see in the evolution of National
Liberalism the Nationalism, fierce, deep, and continuous.
It is the Liberalism or the absence of it that puzzles him.
Bennigsen's speech in 1867 on the Luxemburg question,
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? i5o
BISMARCK
applauded from one end of Germany to the other, is
saturated with the doctrine of, and demand for, power,
the German National State as the expression of German
power. Yet in 1863 Bennigsen was Bismarck's most for-
midable opponent, because Bennigsen was a Liberal as
well as a Nationalist.
The explanation is really simple. National Liberalism
grew to its strength as a movement for self-government
through representative institutions, and as a national pro-
test against the inertia and apathy of the dynastic sove-
reignties that ruled Germany. Up till 1861 no German
government had evinced any sincere desire to subordinate
dynastic or particularist interests to the cause of Germany
as a whole. The homage of the dynastic and diplomatic
lip in all the Courts to the cause of Germany was copious;
but when it came to action, Austria, Prussia, Bavaria,
placed Austrian, Prussian or Bavarian selfishness first, and
Germany was forgotten. Hence the Liberals were con-
vinced that, while self-government was intrinsically
desirable, a unification of Germany on a democratic basis,
that swept away the State sovereignties, alone would
provide for the realisation of what the German people
demanded--a single German State, playing its part as a
European Power in the European system. Such a State
would represent the totality of German brains, wills,
ideals, and material resources; and it would pursue a
German policy made by the German people. Nothing but
real representative institutions, with a Parliament that made
policy because it was a government-making organ, would
enable the Germans to be a single nation, with a national
will working through organs automatically effective.
Hence the stronger the Nationalist passion, the stronger
with the Liberals was the insistence on the necessity of
democratic self-government. Power through represen-
tative institutions was the complement to parliamentary
self-government as the instrument of National power.
Bismarck might have said in 1863, 'Almost thou
persuadest me to be a National Liberal. ' He did not,
however, believe, on principle, in the efficiency of consti-
tutional monarchy and responsible parliamentary govern-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 151
ment. He was convinced that ' the English system' was
wholly inapplicable to the German character and the his-
torical conditions in which it had been developed through
many centuries. And the closer he studied Great Britain
the more strongly he inferred that parliamentary govern-
ment did not make for executive efficiency, continuity of
policy and strong administration. The correctness of this
judgment is not the question. That Bismarck thought so
there can be no doubt. Unity achieved by moral penetra-
tion and persuasion he regarded as. a pure delusion. Neither
the dynasties nor the Liberals would give him the army
that would smash Austria, nor the time, uninterrupted by
party strife, to devise a foreign policy and prepare in
secret for the day of decision. He did not doubt the-
German patriotism of the German people. He trusted it
indeed far more than he did the dynasties, as his proposal
for a National Parliament as an essential part of Federal
reform proved; but what he did doubt most gravely was
the readiness of the Sybels, the Gneists, the Twestens,
Virchows, Laskers, Dunckers, and Bennigsens to will the
means no less than the ends of national unity. They
aimed at power, but they shrank from force. They were,
in his judgment, political cowards, and therefore in his
view lacked the higher statesmanship.
The one system that would give him what he wanted
existed already in Prussia. It was being tested now, and
it was standing the test. Its retention, therefore, as the
nucleus of the new Germany was indispensable. Just as
in foreign policy Bismarck's system pivoted on an under-
standing with Russia, so in the German problem his solu-
tion pivoted on the Prussian monarchy, the irresponsible
director of the Prussian nation in arms.
The National Liberals would mutilate or destroy the
executive nucleus of a policy of power. But Bismarck was
ready now to foreshadow the lines of his own programme.
Once the Congress of Princes was killed, the publication
of the official statement of Prussian policy, already cited,
was a tactical move in the higher strategy; for Bismarck
often acted on Palmerston's dictum:'I tell ambassadors the
truth, because I know they won't believe it. ' The Prussian
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BISMARCK
memoranda of September 15 and September 22, 1863, were
the last nail in the coffin of Austrian Greater Germanism.
They were also intended to be the first in the coffin of
the National Liberals.
Bismarck's victory over William 1. when he refused the
invitation to Frankfurt, was a signal personal triumph
greater even than the ratification in 1879 of the alliance
with Austria. Of the many struggles with his sovereign,
these two in 1863 and 1879 were the most critical and de-
cisive, for in each case the central principle of his system
was in jeopardy; and in 1863 Bismarck had yet to win,
not as in 1879 simply to retain, his ascendancy. William
wished to go to Frankfurt. Heart and brain, combined
in favour of accepting the invitation. All his relatives,
male and female, urged him strongly to accept. Indeed,
how could he as the King of Prussia refuse to meet his
brother sovereigns when refusal meant personal discourtesy,
and the rejection of the unique chance of demonstrating
to the German world the unity and patriotism of the
German dynasties, and their earnest desire to make a free
gift of Federal Reform from their united prerogative.
The dynasties as the initiators and executors of Reform!
'Thirty princes,' cried William,' sending an invitation and
the courier a king! How can one refuse? ' Bismarck
guessed that William would be argued or trapped in
that tainted company into fatal concessions; his royal
honour would be pledged. A counter demonstration of
the independence of Prussia and the power of the Minister-
President was imperatively required in the summer of 1863.
He appealed to William's pride. It was for Prussia to lead,
not to follow, to impose her own, not to accept the dan-
gerous plans of others. The mediatisation of Prussia
would be the result of the Frankfort Congress, brought
about by Prussia's sovereign. But if the King went to
Frankfurt his Minister could not accept the responsi-
bility and must retire to SchOnhausen. The conflict of
wills, which lasted several days, exhausted ruler and minister.
Bismarck won. His secretary found him after the final
interview with the King, and after he had handed the
letter of refusal to the King of Saxony, alone in his room.
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 153
In reply to a question he hurled a plate and some glasses
to pieces against the wall. 'I felt,' he said to the aston-
ished subordinate, 'that I must smash something. Now
I can breathe again. '
Germany busied itself in the autumn of 1863 with
feverish activities and plans for unification. Negotiations
arising out of the abortive Congress dragged on between
Berlin, Vienna, and the German Courts. The National
Verein and the Reform Verein discussed with unabated
energy the scheme of the Congress of Princes and the
Prussian memorandum of September 22; the honesty of
the latter was contested by all reformers whether of the
Great or the Small Germany camps. The Prussian Land-
tag was dissolved; no budget had been voted, and the
'constitutional conflict' was quite unsolved; but despite
the severity of the recent Press ordinance and the electoral
efforts of the bureaucracy the Conservative party could
only increase their numbers from eleven to thirty-eight.
The new Landtag was as solidly hostile in foreign and
home policy to the government as the old, that had
rejected the Army Budget; and the unpopularity of
Bismarck was greater than ever. 'Men spat,' he said,
'on the place where I trod in the streets. '
A graver crisis than any Germany had faced since 1848
was at hand, the problem of Schleswig-Holstein entangled
in all the barbed wire of a complicated international situa-
tion. On March 30, 1863, King Frederick vn. separated
Holstein from Schleswig by granting it a separate legis-
lature, budget and army. Schleswig was subsequently to
be united by a common constitution with Denmark. This
policy, the work of an overwhelming Radical majority at
Copenhagen, angered the Duchies, which claimed to be
autonomous and inseparable, and infuriated Germany,
which saw in it the Danish determination to absorb
Schleswig in the Danish kingdom. The Federal Diet,
which was not a party to the London Convention of 1852,
that regulated the succession to the Danish throne and the
relations of the Duchies to the Danish Crown, passed a
resolution (July 9) calling on King Frederick to rescind
the ' March charter' and restore the conditions defined in
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? 154
BISMARCK
the Convention. The Danes ignored the resolution, and
the Danish General Council passed the Joint-Constitution
for Denmark and Schleswig on November 13, 1863.
Frederick vn. declined to sign the Patent, bringing the
constitution into operation, on the ground that he was a
dying man and could not fairly prejudge the action or tie
the hands of his successor in a matter of such gravity. On
November 15 Frederick died. His heir, under the Pro-
tocol of 1852, was Christian ix. of Sonderburg-Gliickstein,
who now succeeded to the Danish Crown and to the
dukedom of Schleswig and Holstein, integrally united to
Denmark under the terms of the London Convention.
Christian, threatened by the Danish ministry that refusal
to sign the Patent would cause a Danish revolution and
endanger his throne, signed the Patent (November 15).
At once the Duchies and Germany were in an uproar.
Frederick, Duke of Augustenburg, the son of the claimant
of 1852 whose claims had been ruled out by the Conven-
tion, appeared in the Duchies and. proclaimed himself at
Kiel as the lawful duke. His claim was supported with
enthusiasm by the Duchies and by all Germany. The
National Union--the organisation of Liberalism--and the
Reform Union--the organisation of the ' Great Germany'
party--combined to promote the Augustenburg claims.
The Federal Diet ordered a Federal execution, in the duke's
support, and Hanover and Saxony were commissioned to
carry it out.
All eyes were turned on Prussia. Germany would now
see whether Prussian declarations of the identity of her
interests with those of Germany were a reality or a sham;
whether the reactionary Bismarck, who had publicly laid
it down that the German people had a right to be repre-
sented in German affairs, was a hypocrite or a German
statesman. Action at once was required, and action
would reveal this Bismarck in his true colours. Bismarck
probably agreed. Action was required, and it would reveal
himself and a good many others in their true colours. The
sharper the challenge the more coolly and confidently he
braced himself to pick up the gauntlet flung in his face by
fate. He did not know what Prince Hohenlohe was writ-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 155
ing in his diary at this time: 'Every one in Germany is
conscious of the profound significance the Schleswig-
Holstein question must have for our internal policy.
Every one knows that with that question the German
question, too, will be decided. . . . The Schleswig-Hol-
stein question is therefore to the people a question of
rights, a question of power to the governments, and a
question of existence to the Confederation, that is the
middle and petty States. ' But he would have agreed,
heart and soul, with the judgment. We may be sure also
that another conclusion was recorded with Bismarckian
satisfaction. Fortune had decided that Frederick vn.
should die three months too late for Austria. Had the
unhappy King of Denmark, who had escaped from the
deluge which now threatened to submerge his no less
unhappy successor, died in August 1863 when the Congress
of Princes was in full conclave, Francis Joseph, the kings,
and the princelets would have had such a chance as comes
to a vaulting ambition but once. Not all the king's horses
and all the king's men could have kept William x. from going
to Frankfurt, and from concurring either in compulsion on
Christian ix. to refuse his signature to the Patent or in the
adoption by the Congress of the Duke of Augustenburg,
William's relative^ a Coburg Liberal of the circle of the
Crown Prince of Prussia, as the lawful heir to the Duchies
amid the tumultuous applause of dynastic, Conservative,
Liberal, Particularist, and Ultramontane Germany, and the
probable assent of Great Britain and France--perhaps
Russia too. The Austrian programme of Federal Reform
would have slipped into existence as a by-issue in the
enthusiasm of that happy day. 'What an escape! ' as
Victor Emmanuel ejaculated, when the warning victories
of Worth and Spicheren cancelled the intention to throw
in his lot with Napoleon in. in 1870. What an escape!
Bismarck's luck became proverbial. In 1863 the stars
in their courses saw the Congress of Princes killed and
buried before they released poor Frederick vn. at the right
moment for Bismarck and the wrong one for Austria.
Whom the gods love do not die young. They live to
thank the loving gods for the gift of action in the summer
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? i56
BISMARCK
of their powers, and to meet in the golden autumn of
fame the inevitable summons with the serenity that
achievement alone can bestow.
? 2. Schleswig-Holstein, the Treaty of Vienna, and the
Convention of Gastein, 1863-1865
The labyrinth of the historical, legal, and ethical con-
troversies buried in the slag-heaps of four centuries has
resulted in a formidable library on Schleswig-Holstein.
Palmerston said with more wit than accuracy that only
three persons in Europe were completely acquainted with
the truth, the Prince Consort who was dead, a German
professor who was in a lunatic asylum, and himself--and he
had forgotten it. Bismarck justly regarded his diplomacy
and achievement in 'the Schleswig-Holstein campaign'
as perhaps his most masterly performance. Genius, mili-
tary, political, scientific, or imaginative, as the judge of
its own efforts is always instructive, though not infal-
lible. But certainly no other episode in Bismarck's career
more convincingly summarises the pith and marrow of
Bismarckian principles and methods, the union of personal
character and intellectual gifts, the fixity of aim, and the
inexhaustible opportunism of means, ending in a dramatic
and unexpected triumph than his conduct of Prussian
J)olicy from November 1863 to August 1865. Working on a
arger scale in a grander manner for greater ends, Bismarck
achieved elsewhere and later grander results. But as a
finished model of Bismarckian statecraft it was and remains
a masterpiece, and in the evolution of his career and the
perfecting of his technique the Schleswig-Holstein cam-
paign was to Bismarck what the Polish campaigns were
to Gustavus Adolphus, the Silesian wars to Frederick
the Great, and the Egyptian campaign to Napoleon--the
apprenticeship of genius in the service of its profession.
Stripped of irrelevant detail, the problem of 1863 was
comparatively simple, but it raised issues of far-reaching
consequences and a baffling complexity. The Duchies of
Schleswig and Holstein had been united since 1460 by a
personal union through the Crown of Denmark with the
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 157
Danish kingdom. . The King of Denmark was the king-
duke who united in his person the hereditary right to the
Danish Crown and the succession to the combined Duchies.
Europe and Denmark had come to regard the Duchies in
fact as an integral part of the Danish kingdom, while re-
cognising, if it was reminded, that the two provinces had
an autonomy and rights arising from an historic existence
independent of Denmark. The dukedom was, in short, a
separate principality contained and governed within a
larger whole. But the prerogative of the king-duke was
conditioned in these Duchies by his authority as duke, and
the Duchies accepted his rule as their duke, not as King of
Denmark. Hence the system of government for Den-
mark was determined by the Crown in the Danish Riksdag,
for the Duchies by the duke in the Estates of the Provinces.
The law of Denmark would only be binding if accepted
by the Provincial Estates.
The desirability of a complete incorporation--the
abolition of the personal union and the fusion of the
Duchies with Denmark under a single ruler and a single
parliament--was obvious. But the Duchies clung to their
historic autonomy with tenacity; the law of succession to
the Danish Crown was not the same as the law of succession
to the dukedom. The underlying cause of this rooted
objection to the extinction of their autonomy was racial.
Holstein was predominantly German, Schleswig probably
(here an insoluble controversy is opened up), though not
so predominantly, Danish. To Holstein incorporation
with Denmark meant de-Germanisation and Danisation,
and, in addition, while the autonomy of Holstein was for
four centuries connected with that of its partner Schleswig
--the two together made the unity of the Duchy--Holstein
had always been part of the Holy Roman Empire of the
German nation, Schleswig had not. This historic anomaly
was confirmed in 1815. The King of Denmark, as Duke
of Schleswig-Holstein was a member of the German Con-
federation for Holstein (but not for Schleswig) over which,
therefore, the Federal Diet had a limited Federal juris-
diction. So long as the dynastic problem was not reopened,
and so long as the Nationalist principle was not inflaming
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BISMARCK
sentiment, this anomalous tangle of cross purposes and
contradictory allegiances would work, just because it was
customary. Its maintenance turned on the equipoise of
forces, balanced by the inconsistencies of tradition and
habit.
Fate and the developments in Europe after 1815 de-
stroyed the equipoise. Fate decided that the male succes-
sion in the direct line to the Crown of Denmark should
fail; the growth of the principle of nationality steadily
accentuated the ambition of the German and the Dane to
secure the Duchies for the German or the Danish race.
The incorporation of the Duchies, so long associated
with Denmark, was opposed by the German ambition to
sever them from Danish assimilation, and establish them
as an autonomous German principality under a German
duke, and weld them into the unified Germany of the
future. But the ' unredeemed Germany' was also an ' un-
redeemed Denmark. ' The dynastic problem was solved
by the Protocol of 1852. The Duke of Augustenburg, re-
garded by Germany and the Provincial Estates as the heir
de jure to the Duchies, was compelled with the other
claimants to surrender his claims in favour of Christian,
later the ixth, who was chosen by the Powers to maintain
the integrity of the Danish kingdom and continue, as Hng-
duke, the historic association of Schleswig and Holstein
with the Danish Crown. Had the European Powers been
wise, they would have repeated the lesson of Belgium in
1839: severed then and there German Holstein from
Schleswig, and incorporated the former with Germany
and the latter with Denmark. In all probability, when
Christian succeeded in 1863 the fifteen years of separation
would have habituated both Germany and Denmark to
the situation, and there would have been no further trouble.
But it was the age of Nicholas 1. , who regarded the
Schleswig-Holsteiners as rebels; and the severance of
Holstein from its legal duke (who was also the legal King
of Denmark) would have required more unity and greater
prevision in the Concert of Europe than the statesmen of
1852 were endowed with.
The maintenance of the historic integrity of the king-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 159
dom of Denmark was deemed of the greatest importance in
the balance of European power, and the collapse of the
Revolution of 1848, with the reaction that followed, seemed
to the short-sighted diplomacy of Conservatism to destroy
the forces that had made a crisis out of Schleswig-Holstein.
The Convention of London, by placing the settlement
under the collective guarantee of the European Powers,
was held to provide an indisputable authority for its
maintenance.
But that convention, like the Treaty of Paris of 1856,
had the flaw fatal to all such solemn manifestations of the
public law and will of the Powers. It assumed that the
men and the States responsible for its maintenance would
continue to be of the same disposition as those who origin-
ally made it--a-large and historically unjustifiable assump-
tion. It had also the defect that it was imposed on the
Estates of Holstein and Schleswig, who were not parties
to it; that the German Diet was not a party to it and
retained its Federal rights in Holstein; that the son of the
Duke of Augustenburg was not a party to his father's re-
nunciation of his rights. It made no allowance for a more
Nationalist and Radical Denmark Or a more Nationalist and
Liberal Germany coming into existence; it created no
automatic and effective machinery to prevent provisions,
so solemnly defined, from being broken before the vacancy
to the Danish throne, filled by Christian's succession to
Danish Crown and the Duchies, occurred. It left Den-
mark a sovereign State, yet with a mortgage on its sove-
reignty. It provided neither for the removal of a
Nicholas 1. nor the emergence of a Bismarck.
Two conclusions are fairly clear in 1863. The Conven-
tion of London required Denmark to observe the historic
status quo in the Duchies. Dispassionate examination
cannot avoid the verdict that the acts of the Danish
government from 1852 to 1863 were a breach of the Con-
vention--certainly of its spirit, and probably of its letter.
They constituted a cumulative effort to separate the
Duchies and incorporate one of them in the kingdom, and
to present Europe with a fait accompli before the acces-
sion of Christian ix. This might have succeeded had
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? i6o
BISMARCK
Frederick vn. lived six months longer. Frederick's death
before his signature as the sovereign who was incontestably
dejure king and also dejure duke could be obtained wrecked
the attempt. Secondly, Christian ix. , the new King, had
on the day of his succession to decide at a moment's notice
either to provoke a revolution at Copenhagen or a revo-
lution at Kiel. Had he been wiser, he would have referred
the issue to the concert of the Powers signatory to the
Convention of London, and invited their decision and
their support, if need be, to carry out that decision. He
was their nominee; they were bound either to tear up
their own convention or loyally to see he did not suffer for
being the instrument of their policy. The coercion of
Copenhagen or of Kiel was the moral duty of the concert.
Christian, unhappily for himself and for Europe, did not at
once throw the responsibility on the Powers. In his
excuse it must fairly be said that the rejection by Great
Britain of Napoleon's proposal for a Congress made it very
difficult for him to do so.
It is not possible here to write the history of Europe nor
to discuss the policy of all the European States in this com-
plicated controversy. We are concerned primarily with
Bismarck and his policy. But it must not be forgotten
that the Danes and King Christian had a case, for which a
good deal can be urged. In 1852 the Concert of Europe
had decided, on broad grounds, that the integrity of the
historic kingdom of Denmark was an essential element in
the Balance of Power. The severance of the Duchies from
Denmark--apart from the juristic problem in the disputed
succession--was a grave violation of that Balance, for the
strategic position of the Duchies was of immense value.
Schleswig had a large Danish population, and there were
many Danes also in Holstein. If there was a danger that
the Germans might be oppressed by the Danes, there was
no less a danger--which events fully bore out--that the
Danes would be oppressed by the Germans. The forcible
Danisation of Holstein was less likely than the forcible
Germanisation of Schleswig. Schleswig had never beea
part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and
the attempt to annex it to the Germany of 1863--with
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? i44
BISMARCK
the finest and rarest, gift of the highest statesmanship.
Russia, he pronounced with customary vividness, would in
such an alliance sit on the longer arm of the lever. All
that was needed in 1863 could be distilled gradually from
the informal but close understanding already established.
Every alliance, he remarked at another time, implies a
horse and a rider. The function of diplomacy is to secure
that you are the rider and your ally the horse. Because
he correctly judged that in 1863, Gortschakov would be
the rider and he, Bismarck, the horse, he put the offer
politely and with many assurances of affection, personal
and political, on one side.
While the Polish Rebellion was still running its ap-
pointed course, the German question also had developed
a crisis. The demand that something must be done, and
done now, to reshape the indefensible travesty of a political
mechanism, called the Bund--that precious monument
the restoration of which in its anachronistic nudity had
marked the grave both of 1848 and of Conservative con-
structive statesmanship. For ten years every German
mind had been labouring with the problem and putting on
record, to the embarrassment of that age and the despair
of the seeker after truth in the next two generations, its
perplexities, fears, hopes, dreams and solutions. State-
papers, diaries, letters, pamphlets, caricatures, memorials,
note-books, and minutes of clubs, unions, leagues--the
archives of the chancelleries, the waste-paper basket of the
patriot, and the scrap-heap of the lecture-room--which
German research has by no means exhausted, testify to the
deep-seated and universal discontent. Nationalists, Radi-
cals, Clericals and Ultramontanes, Conservatives, bureau-
crats and professors, hummed like bees in the swarming
season from the frontier of Schleswig to the forelands of
the Alps. The flower of the universities, professorial and
undergraduate, linked hands and pens with the politicians
--Bennigsen, Droysen, Samwer, M. Duncker, the Coburg
group, and the unitarian enthusiasm of the Grand-Duke
of Baden. Already the trumpet of the young Treitschke
was blowing its earliest clarion calls.
When the butchers meet in conclave because something
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
must be done for the sheep, we may be sure that it is not
the sheep but the butchers who fear the future. In 1863,
the Habsburg Emperor felt the cruel coercion of a
Germany out of joint, and the unpleasant necessity of
putting it right before worse befell. The dynasties from
Dresden to Munich leaped to the suggestion from Vienna
that disinterested patriotism could be concentrated in a
Congress of Princes ready to confer benefits on their
subjects. To the adroit Beust at Dresden, as fertile in
diplomatic resource as in conversational epigram, the
opportunity was exceptional. Beust, like every one else,
had his scheme, or rather half a dozen schemes, in pigeon-
holes, and another half dozen producible if required, like
the magician's rabbits, for any audience, and from any
diplomatic bag--and Beust was by far the cleverest of all
the political conjurers in the middle States who desired
a tripartite Germany--Austria, the middle States, and
Prussia--regrouped in a new Federal structure. To Beust
and to the Triad party, the supreme merit of this solution,
the details of which were simply a drafting matter, lay in
its recognition of the equality of non-Austrian and non-
Prussian Germany as a collective unit with Austria and
Prussia. Such equality would fairly meet the Prussian
demand for parity with Austria and the Austrian reluct-
ance to surrender her historic hegemony; it would no less
fairly remove the fatal objection to all dualistic schemes
which imposed on the middle and petty States an obli-
gatory choice of being absorbed either in a Prussian or an
Austrian system, an absorption damaging to the general
interests of Germany, historically unjust, and repugnant
to the legitimist sovereignty of the dynasties.
Concessions must, of course, be made to the people as
well as to the States of Germany. Bismarck's failure was
assumed to be a practical certainty: Prussia would then
succumb to the liberal majority which would adopt the
programme of the National Union and achieve a unitary
and democratic solution under Prussian leadership. Once
the citadel in Prussia had fallen to the parliamentary
opposition, the rest of Germany would lynch its dynasties
into acceptance of the unitary and liberal plan. And
B. K
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? 146
BISMARCK
Austria, racked on a series of Procrustean beds, called con-
stitutions, with Italy on one side and Hungary on the other,
and Russia sullenly hostile, could not expect to repeat in
1864 the miracle of 1849. Now, if ever, was the moment
to drive an Austrian dynastic, anti-Prussian, and particu-
larist programme through.
The problem was first to combine the minimum of real
concession with the maximum of outward homage to
democratic demands; and secondly, to arrange the Federal
machinery in such a way as to grant in theory the Prussian
claim to parity with Austria, while refusing the substance
--an easy matter, for equal voting powers between Austria
and Prussia must always leave Prussia in a minority when
non-Prussian Germany made equal either to Austria or
Prussia voted (as it would) with Austria. The Austrian
government accordingly produced its specious plan. A
new Directorate of six States (Austria, Prussia, Bavaria,
and three others chosen in rotation) under Austrian presi-
dency was to be created, together with a Federal Council
of 21 votes, a Federal Tribunal of Law, and a Federal
Assembly of 302 Delegates elected, not by direct suffrage,
but by the various parliaments of the Federated States.
Rebellious German democracy was, in short, to be re-
manacled in a new Federal cage, and Prussia was, through
her King, to mediatise herself for the benefit of Germany
on the altars of dynasticism. The Emperor Francis
Joseph met King William at Gastein. The crises of
German history always begin or end at a bathing resort.
The two sovereigns talked and agreed that the business
could be settled by a Congress of Princes at Frankfurt.
It was fitting that the rulers, by personal negotiations,
should settle the affairs of-Germany in a royal and family
conference; and their ministers were to be in close attend-
ance, but take no part in the august deliberations. While
their princely masters worked, they could copy letters,
dine, dance, and arrange for the exchange of decorations.
On August 16 the Congress met; only one important
sovereign (and his minister) was absent. The surprise and
dismay were universal, for the absentee was the King of
Prussia. They sent to fetch him. The King of Saxony
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 147
was the courier chosen to remind King William that a
Congress of Princes, headed by Csesarean Majesty from
Vienna, begged the honour of his company. Delay and
much anxiety. Then the King of Saxony came back.
The King of Prussia regretted his inability to accept the
invitation. Indignation, expostulation, consternation, pre-
vailed: then after a few days, the Congress ruefully broke
up. All that it accomplished was to repeat the invitation
(by letter this time) to Prussia and to 'leave open' the
question of the Presidency ' for further discussion. ' The
proposal to proceed, without Prussia, was indeed suggested,
but crumbled into pieces at once. 'We will have no con-
federation without Austria,' said the Bavarian minister,
'but likewise none without Prussia. ' A reorganisation of
Germany which omitted Prussia was ridiculous. The
coercion of Prussia would, in the state of public opinion,
probably end in the revolution with the Prussian army at
its disposal. And when the Prussian government officially
published its reasons for abstention--the patent inade-
quacy of the proposals of the Princes to meet the rights of
Prussia and the needs of Germany was glaringly and pain-
fully evident. 'A national Parliament,' said the Prussian
memorandum of September 15, 'was an essential of any
Federal reform. The interests and claims of the Prussian
people are intrinsically and inseparably identical with those
of the German people. ' The argument was repeated in the
Note of September 22, sent to all the members of the Con-
gress of Princes. Prussia laid it down that: (1) She, as
well as Austria, must have a right to veto a declaration of
war by the Confederation; (2) her position in the Con-
federation must be equal to that of Austria; (3) she could
not accept an enlargement of the functions of the Con-
federation limiting Prussian independence; (4) there must
be a German Parliament, representative of the German
nation, and elected directly by it.
At a word from Prussia the Austrian plan and all others
of the same kind went, unhouseled, unanointed, and
unannealed into the limbo reserved for the acrobatics of
pseudo-statesmanship. The Congress of Princes sum-
moned to consecrate the consummation of a new German
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? 148
BISMARCK
Confederation, was suddenly turned into the funeral of
the . Greater Germany party.
Henceforward, there were only three possible alter-
natives--a unification under Austria imposed on a defeated
Prussia, a unification under Prussia imposed on a defeated
Austria, or the unitary Empire of the National Union, in
which Prussia was dissolved in a Germany, from which
Austria was excluded, a unification to be imposed on Ger-
many by the triumph of National Liberalism. In the
autumn of 1863, though we to-day find it hard to believe
it, and before the year 1864 had revolutionised the Euro-
pean situation and German public opinion, the last of the
three alternatives seemed far the most probable. One
conclusion, however, is certain. The author of the fiasco
of the Congress of Princes, the man who administered the
coup de gr&ce to the Greater Germany party, was Bismarck.
'Lord ! ' says Puck,' what fools these mortals be. ' The
sacred simplicity of the diplomatic or royal ostrich pro-
vokes a deeper laughter of Jove than the perjuries of lovers.
The supposition of Rechberg and Beust and all the sham
and pigmy Machiavellians, princely or ministerial, that the
Minister-President at Berlin, who had served seven gruel-
ling years of apprenticeship at Frankfurt, would not see
through the patent trap of the Austrian plan must have
provoked the grimmest humour of Bismarck. The idea
that the Prussian monarchy was meekly to strip to the skin
in the imperial. city of Frankfurt, and put on a Nessus shirt
patched up by kings and grand-dukes in the workhouse at
Vienna was too delicious even for the grand diplomacy.
Did Rechberg, Beust, and their company seriously imagine
that the Minister-President was risking all in the struggle
with the Landtag to sacrifice the cause of Prussianism
at the bidding of a mob of princes? Their action proves
that if they knew themselves and their tricks, at least they
did not know the Minister-President at Berlin. 'Stripped
of its coat,' Bismarck said, 'the Austrian poodle is dis-
tinctly meagre. '
Yet the reality of the German situation was profoundly
disquieting to Bismarck. National Liberalism was, and
remained, a tremendous and dangerous force. The time
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 149
had long passed when the German people could be fobbed
off with a hollow sham and be manipulated in blinkers. in to
a series of dynastic pens, renamed a Unified Germany.
The essence of the problem lay in the demand in all parts
of Germany for the nation to be included in the task of
government, so that legislation, taxation, policy would be
expressive of a nation's will, character and ideals--a Ger-
many for the Germans by the Germans. Hence any
reconstruction to be practical politics, must be organic.
The Austrian and princely programme was the old Diet
and Federation, with a few new and useless wheels added,
some of the old grit and rust cleaned out, and the whole
recoloured with a thin coat of democratic paint, intended
to fade.
For Bismarck, the problem was not how to combine a
minimum of concession to democracy with a maximum of
princely and particularist independence and autocracy,
but how to combine a maximum of concession to the
demand for self-government with the unity of an efficient
and irresponsible executive. Bismarck had here pene-
trated to an abiding reality in the German heart. If the
Germans passionately desired a share in the government
of a unified Germany, they no less passionately desired
power. The National Union and National Liberalism were
the outcome of both desires. The old system satisfied
neither. Germany was impotent in the world. It was
simply shameful, every German felt, that a great country
could not, or would not, prevent a third-rate State like
Denmark from violating its obligations, defined in the
public law of Europe, and could not protect Germans in
Holstein from illegal oppression, and the reason was that
poKcy was determined by a group of conflicting dynasties,
and power was dissipated in an antiquated and contemptible
political mechanism. Ending, not mending, that system
would alone meet the demand for power--the power of the
National State--and provide the organs of power. The
foreign observer can indeed see in the evolution of National
Liberalism the Nationalism, fierce, deep, and continuous.
It is the Liberalism or the absence of it that puzzles him.
Bennigsen's speech in 1867 on the Luxemburg question,
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? i5o
BISMARCK
applauded from one end of Germany to the other, is
saturated with the doctrine of, and demand for, power,
the German National State as the expression of German
power. Yet in 1863 Bennigsen was Bismarck's most for-
midable opponent, because Bennigsen was a Liberal as
well as a Nationalist.
The explanation is really simple. National Liberalism
grew to its strength as a movement for self-government
through representative institutions, and as a national pro-
test against the inertia and apathy of the dynastic sove-
reignties that ruled Germany. Up till 1861 no German
government had evinced any sincere desire to subordinate
dynastic or particularist interests to the cause of Germany
as a whole. The homage of the dynastic and diplomatic
lip in all the Courts to the cause of Germany was copious;
but when it came to action, Austria, Prussia, Bavaria,
placed Austrian, Prussian or Bavarian selfishness first, and
Germany was forgotten. Hence the Liberals were con-
vinced that, while self-government was intrinsically
desirable, a unification of Germany on a democratic basis,
that swept away the State sovereignties, alone would
provide for the realisation of what the German people
demanded--a single German State, playing its part as a
European Power in the European system. Such a State
would represent the totality of German brains, wills,
ideals, and material resources; and it would pursue a
German policy made by the German people. Nothing but
real representative institutions, with a Parliament that made
policy because it was a government-making organ, would
enable the Germans to be a single nation, with a national
will working through organs automatically effective.
Hence the stronger the Nationalist passion, the stronger
with the Liberals was the insistence on the necessity of
democratic self-government. Power through represen-
tative institutions was the complement to parliamentary
self-government as the instrument of National power.
Bismarck might have said in 1863, 'Almost thou
persuadest me to be a National Liberal. ' He did not,
however, believe, on principle, in the efficiency of consti-
tutional monarchy and responsible parliamentary govern-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 151
ment. He was convinced that ' the English system' was
wholly inapplicable to the German character and the his-
torical conditions in which it had been developed through
many centuries. And the closer he studied Great Britain
the more strongly he inferred that parliamentary govern-
ment did not make for executive efficiency, continuity of
policy and strong administration. The correctness of this
judgment is not the question. That Bismarck thought so
there can be no doubt. Unity achieved by moral penetra-
tion and persuasion he regarded as. a pure delusion. Neither
the dynasties nor the Liberals would give him the army
that would smash Austria, nor the time, uninterrupted by
party strife, to devise a foreign policy and prepare in
secret for the day of decision. He did not doubt the-
German patriotism of the German people. He trusted it
indeed far more than he did the dynasties, as his proposal
for a National Parliament as an essential part of Federal
reform proved; but what he did doubt most gravely was
the readiness of the Sybels, the Gneists, the Twestens,
Virchows, Laskers, Dunckers, and Bennigsens to will the
means no less than the ends of national unity. They
aimed at power, but they shrank from force. They were,
in his judgment, political cowards, and therefore in his
view lacked the higher statesmanship.
The one system that would give him what he wanted
existed already in Prussia. It was being tested now, and
it was standing the test. Its retention, therefore, as the
nucleus of the new Germany was indispensable. Just as
in foreign policy Bismarck's system pivoted on an under-
standing with Russia, so in the German problem his solu-
tion pivoted on the Prussian monarchy, the irresponsible
director of the Prussian nation in arms.
The National Liberals would mutilate or destroy the
executive nucleus of a policy of power. But Bismarck was
ready now to foreshadow the lines of his own programme.
Once the Congress of Princes was killed, the publication
of the official statement of Prussian policy, already cited,
was a tactical move in the higher strategy; for Bismarck
often acted on Palmerston's dictum:'I tell ambassadors the
truth, because I know they won't believe it. ' The Prussian
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BISMARCK
memoranda of September 15 and September 22, 1863, were
the last nail in the coffin of Austrian Greater Germanism.
They were also intended to be the first in the coffin of
the National Liberals.
Bismarck's victory over William 1. when he refused the
invitation to Frankfurt, was a signal personal triumph
greater even than the ratification in 1879 of the alliance
with Austria. Of the many struggles with his sovereign,
these two in 1863 and 1879 were the most critical and de-
cisive, for in each case the central principle of his system
was in jeopardy; and in 1863 Bismarck had yet to win,
not as in 1879 simply to retain, his ascendancy. William
wished to go to Frankfurt. Heart and brain, combined
in favour of accepting the invitation. All his relatives,
male and female, urged him strongly to accept. Indeed,
how could he as the King of Prussia refuse to meet his
brother sovereigns when refusal meant personal discourtesy,
and the rejection of the unique chance of demonstrating
to the German world the unity and patriotism of the
German dynasties, and their earnest desire to make a free
gift of Federal Reform from their united prerogative.
The dynasties as the initiators and executors of Reform!
'Thirty princes,' cried William,' sending an invitation and
the courier a king! How can one refuse? ' Bismarck
guessed that William would be argued or trapped in
that tainted company into fatal concessions; his royal
honour would be pledged. A counter demonstration of
the independence of Prussia and the power of the Minister-
President was imperatively required in the summer of 1863.
He appealed to William's pride. It was for Prussia to lead,
not to follow, to impose her own, not to accept the dan-
gerous plans of others. The mediatisation of Prussia
would be the result of the Frankfort Congress, brought
about by Prussia's sovereign. But if the King went to
Frankfurt his Minister could not accept the responsi-
bility and must retire to SchOnhausen. The conflict of
wills, which lasted several days, exhausted ruler and minister.
Bismarck won. His secretary found him after the final
interview with the King, and after he had handed the
letter of refusal to the King of Saxony, alone in his room.
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 153
In reply to a question he hurled a plate and some glasses
to pieces against the wall. 'I felt,' he said to the aston-
ished subordinate, 'that I must smash something. Now
I can breathe again. '
Germany busied itself in the autumn of 1863 with
feverish activities and plans for unification. Negotiations
arising out of the abortive Congress dragged on between
Berlin, Vienna, and the German Courts. The National
Verein and the Reform Verein discussed with unabated
energy the scheme of the Congress of Princes and the
Prussian memorandum of September 22; the honesty of
the latter was contested by all reformers whether of the
Great or the Small Germany camps. The Prussian Land-
tag was dissolved; no budget had been voted, and the
'constitutional conflict' was quite unsolved; but despite
the severity of the recent Press ordinance and the electoral
efforts of the bureaucracy the Conservative party could
only increase their numbers from eleven to thirty-eight.
The new Landtag was as solidly hostile in foreign and
home policy to the government as the old, that had
rejected the Army Budget; and the unpopularity of
Bismarck was greater than ever. 'Men spat,' he said,
'on the place where I trod in the streets. '
A graver crisis than any Germany had faced since 1848
was at hand, the problem of Schleswig-Holstein entangled
in all the barbed wire of a complicated international situa-
tion. On March 30, 1863, King Frederick vn. separated
Holstein from Schleswig by granting it a separate legis-
lature, budget and army. Schleswig was subsequently to
be united by a common constitution with Denmark. This
policy, the work of an overwhelming Radical majority at
Copenhagen, angered the Duchies, which claimed to be
autonomous and inseparable, and infuriated Germany,
which saw in it the Danish determination to absorb
Schleswig in the Danish kingdom. The Federal Diet,
which was not a party to the London Convention of 1852,
that regulated the succession to the Danish throne and the
relations of the Duchies to the Danish Crown, passed a
resolution (July 9) calling on King Frederick to rescind
the ' March charter' and restore the conditions defined in
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? 154
BISMARCK
the Convention. The Danes ignored the resolution, and
the Danish General Council passed the Joint-Constitution
for Denmark and Schleswig on November 13, 1863.
Frederick vn. declined to sign the Patent, bringing the
constitution into operation, on the ground that he was a
dying man and could not fairly prejudge the action or tie
the hands of his successor in a matter of such gravity. On
November 15 Frederick died. His heir, under the Pro-
tocol of 1852, was Christian ix. of Sonderburg-Gliickstein,
who now succeeded to the Danish Crown and to the
dukedom of Schleswig and Holstein, integrally united to
Denmark under the terms of the London Convention.
Christian, threatened by the Danish ministry that refusal
to sign the Patent would cause a Danish revolution and
endanger his throne, signed the Patent (November 15).
At once the Duchies and Germany were in an uproar.
Frederick, Duke of Augustenburg, the son of the claimant
of 1852 whose claims had been ruled out by the Conven-
tion, appeared in the Duchies and. proclaimed himself at
Kiel as the lawful duke. His claim was supported with
enthusiasm by the Duchies and by all Germany. The
National Union--the organisation of Liberalism--and the
Reform Union--the organisation of the ' Great Germany'
party--combined to promote the Augustenburg claims.
The Federal Diet ordered a Federal execution, in the duke's
support, and Hanover and Saxony were commissioned to
carry it out.
All eyes were turned on Prussia. Germany would now
see whether Prussian declarations of the identity of her
interests with those of Germany were a reality or a sham;
whether the reactionary Bismarck, who had publicly laid
it down that the German people had a right to be repre-
sented in German affairs, was a hypocrite or a German
statesman. Action at once was required, and action
would reveal this Bismarck in his true colours. Bismarck
probably agreed. Action was required, and it would reveal
himself and a good many others in their true colours. The
sharper the challenge the more coolly and confidently he
braced himself to pick up the gauntlet flung in his face by
fate. He did not know what Prince Hohenlohe was writ-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 155
ing in his diary at this time: 'Every one in Germany is
conscious of the profound significance the Schleswig-
Holstein question must have for our internal policy.
Every one knows that with that question the German
question, too, will be decided. . . . The Schleswig-Hol-
stein question is therefore to the people a question of
rights, a question of power to the governments, and a
question of existence to the Confederation, that is the
middle and petty States. ' But he would have agreed,
heart and soul, with the judgment. We may be sure also
that another conclusion was recorded with Bismarckian
satisfaction. Fortune had decided that Frederick vn.
should die three months too late for Austria. Had the
unhappy King of Denmark, who had escaped from the
deluge which now threatened to submerge his no less
unhappy successor, died in August 1863 when the Congress
of Princes was in full conclave, Francis Joseph, the kings,
and the princelets would have had such a chance as comes
to a vaulting ambition but once. Not all the king's horses
and all the king's men could have kept William x. from going
to Frankfurt, and from concurring either in compulsion on
Christian ix. to refuse his signature to the Patent or in the
adoption by the Congress of the Duke of Augustenburg,
William's relative^ a Coburg Liberal of the circle of the
Crown Prince of Prussia, as the lawful heir to the Duchies
amid the tumultuous applause of dynastic, Conservative,
Liberal, Particularist, and Ultramontane Germany, and the
probable assent of Great Britain and France--perhaps
Russia too. The Austrian programme of Federal Reform
would have slipped into existence as a by-issue in the
enthusiasm of that happy day. 'What an escape! ' as
Victor Emmanuel ejaculated, when the warning victories
of Worth and Spicheren cancelled the intention to throw
in his lot with Napoleon in. in 1870. What an escape!
Bismarck's luck became proverbial. In 1863 the stars
in their courses saw the Congress of Princes killed and
buried before they released poor Frederick vn. at the right
moment for Bismarck and the wrong one for Austria.
Whom the gods love do not die young. They live to
thank the loving gods for the gift of action in the summer
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? i56
BISMARCK
of their powers, and to meet in the golden autumn of
fame the inevitable summons with the serenity that
achievement alone can bestow.
? 2. Schleswig-Holstein, the Treaty of Vienna, and the
Convention of Gastein, 1863-1865
The labyrinth of the historical, legal, and ethical con-
troversies buried in the slag-heaps of four centuries has
resulted in a formidable library on Schleswig-Holstein.
Palmerston said with more wit than accuracy that only
three persons in Europe were completely acquainted with
the truth, the Prince Consort who was dead, a German
professor who was in a lunatic asylum, and himself--and he
had forgotten it. Bismarck justly regarded his diplomacy
and achievement in 'the Schleswig-Holstein campaign'
as perhaps his most masterly performance. Genius, mili-
tary, political, scientific, or imaginative, as the judge of
its own efforts is always instructive, though not infal-
lible. But certainly no other episode in Bismarck's career
more convincingly summarises the pith and marrow of
Bismarckian principles and methods, the union of personal
character and intellectual gifts, the fixity of aim, and the
inexhaustible opportunism of means, ending in a dramatic
and unexpected triumph than his conduct of Prussian
J)olicy from November 1863 to August 1865. Working on a
arger scale in a grander manner for greater ends, Bismarck
achieved elsewhere and later grander results. But as a
finished model of Bismarckian statecraft it was and remains
a masterpiece, and in the evolution of his career and the
perfecting of his technique the Schleswig-Holstein cam-
paign was to Bismarck what the Polish campaigns were
to Gustavus Adolphus, the Silesian wars to Frederick
the Great, and the Egyptian campaign to Napoleon--the
apprenticeship of genius in the service of its profession.
Stripped of irrelevant detail, the problem of 1863 was
comparatively simple, but it raised issues of far-reaching
consequences and a baffling complexity. The Duchies of
Schleswig and Holstein had been united since 1460 by a
personal union through the Crown of Denmark with the
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 157
Danish kingdom. . The King of Denmark was the king-
duke who united in his person the hereditary right to the
Danish Crown and the succession to the combined Duchies.
Europe and Denmark had come to regard the Duchies in
fact as an integral part of the Danish kingdom, while re-
cognising, if it was reminded, that the two provinces had
an autonomy and rights arising from an historic existence
independent of Denmark. The dukedom was, in short, a
separate principality contained and governed within a
larger whole. But the prerogative of the king-duke was
conditioned in these Duchies by his authority as duke, and
the Duchies accepted his rule as their duke, not as King of
Denmark. Hence the system of government for Den-
mark was determined by the Crown in the Danish Riksdag,
for the Duchies by the duke in the Estates of the Provinces.
The law of Denmark would only be binding if accepted
by the Provincial Estates.
The desirability of a complete incorporation--the
abolition of the personal union and the fusion of the
Duchies with Denmark under a single ruler and a single
parliament--was obvious. But the Duchies clung to their
historic autonomy with tenacity; the law of succession to
the Danish Crown was not the same as the law of succession
to the dukedom. The underlying cause of this rooted
objection to the extinction of their autonomy was racial.
Holstein was predominantly German, Schleswig probably
(here an insoluble controversy is opened up), though not
so predominantly, Danish. To Holstein incorporation
with Denmark meant de-Germanisation and Danisation,
and, in addition, while the autonomy of Holstein was for
four centuries connected with that of its partner Schleswig
--the two together made the unity of the Duchy--Holstein
had always been part of the Holy Roman Empire of the
German nation, Schleswig had not. This historic anomaly
was confirmed in 1815. The King of Denmark, as Duke
of Schleswig-Holstein was a member of the German Con-
federation for Holstein (but not for Schleswig) over which,
therefore, the Federal Diet had a limited Federal juris-
diction. So long as the dynastic problem was not reopened,
and so long as the Nationalist principle was not inflaming
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? i58
BISMARCK
sentiment, this anomalous tangle of cross purposes and
contradictory allegiances would work, just because it was
customary. Its maintenance turned on the equipoise of
forces, balanced by the inconsistencies of tradition and
habit.
Fate and the developments in Europe after 1815 de-
stroyed the equipoise. Fate decided that the male succes-
sion in the direct line to the Crown of Denmark should
fail; the growth of the principle of nationality steadily
accentuated the ambition of the German and the Dane to
secure the Duchies for the German or the Danish race.
The incorporation of the Duchies, so long associated
with Denmark, was opposed by the German ambition to
sever them from Danish assimilation, and establish them
as an autonomous German principality under a German
duke, and weld them into the unified Germany of the
future. But the ' unredeemed Germany' was also an ' un-
redeemed Denmark. ' The dynastic problem was solved
by the Protocol of 1852. The Duke of Augustenburg, re-
garded by Germany and the Provincial Estates as the heir
de jure to the Duchies, was compelled with the other
claimants to surrender his claims in favour of Christian,
later the ixth, who was chosen by the Powers to maintain
the integrity of the Danish kingdom and continue, as Hng-
duke, the historic association of Schleswig and Holstein
with the Danish Crown. Had the European Powers been
wise, they would have repeated the lesson of Belgium in
1839: severed then and there German Holstein from
Schleswig, and incorporated the former with Germany
and the latter with Denmark. In all probability, when
Christian succeeded in 1863 the fifteen years of separation
would have habituated both Germany and Denmark to
the situation, and there would have been no further trouble.
But it was the age of Nicholas 1. , who regarded the
Schleswig-Holsteiners as rebels; and the severance of
Holstein from its legal duke (who was also the legal King
of Denmark) would have required more unity and greater
prevision in the Concert of Europe than the statesmen of
1852 were endowed with.
The maintenance of the historic integrity of the king-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 159
dom of Denmark was deemed of the greatest importance in
the balance of European power, and the collapse of the
Revolution of 1848, with the reaction that followed, seemed
to the short-sighted diplomacy of Conservatism to destroy
the forces that had made a crisis out of Schleswig-Holstein.
The Convention of London, by placing the settlement
under the collective guarantee of the European Powers,
was held to provide an indisputable authority for its
maintenance.
But that convention, like the Treaty of Paris of 1856,
had the flaw fatal to all such solemn manifestations of the
public law and will of the Powers. It assumed that the
men and the States responsible for its maintenance would
continue to be of the same disposition as those who origin-
ally made it--a-large and historically unjustifiable assump-
tion. It had also the defect that it was imposed on the
Estates of Holstein and Schleswig, who were not parties
to it; that the German Diet was not a party to it and
retained its Federal rights in Holstein; that the son of the
Duke of Augustenburg was not a party to his father's re-
nunciation of his rights. It made no allowance for a more
Nationalist and Radical Denmark Or a more Nationalist and
Liberal Germany coming into existence; it created no
automatic and effective machinery to prevent provisions,
so solemnly defined, from being broken before the vacancy
to the Danish throne, filled by Christian's succession to
Danish Crown and the Duchies, occurred. It left Den-
mark a sovereign State, yet with a mortgage on its sove-
reignty. It provided neither for the removal of a
Nicholas 1. nor the emergence of a Bismarck.
Two conclusions are fairly clear in 1863. The Conven-
tion of London required Denmark to observe the historic
status quo in the Duchies. Dispassionate examination
cannot avoid the verdict that the acts of the Danish
government from 1852 to 1863 were a breach of the Con-
vention--certainly of its spirit, and probably of its letter.
They constituted a cumulative effort to separate the
Duchies and incorporate one of them in the kingdom, and
to present Europe with a fait accompli before the acces-
sion of Christian ix. This might have succeeded had
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? i6o
BISMARCK
Frederick vn. lived six months longer. Frederick's death
before his signature as the sovereign who was incontestably
dejure king and also dejure duke could be obtained wrecked
the attempt. Secondly, Christian ix. , the new King, had
on the day of his succession to decide at a moment's notice
either to provoke a revolution at Copenhagen or a revo-
lution at Kiel. Had he been wiser, he would have referred
the issue to the concert of the Powers signatory to the
Convention of London, and invited their decision and
their support, if need be, to carry out that decision. He
was their nominee; they were bound either to tear up
their own convention or loyally to see he did not suffer for
being the instrument of their policy. The coercion of
Copenhagen or of Kiel was the moral duty of the concert.
Christian, unhappily for himself and for Europe, did not at
once throw the responsibility on the Powers. In his
excuse it must fairly be said that the rejection by Great
Britain of Napoleon's proposal for a Congress made it very
difficult for him to do so.
It is not possible here to write the history of Europe nor
to discuss the policy of all the European States in this com-
plicated controversy. We are concerned primarily with
Bismarck and his policy. But it must not be forgotten
that the Danes and King Christian had a case, for which a
good deal can be urged. In 1852 the Concert of Europe
had decided, on broad grounds, that the integrity of the
historic kingdom of Denmark was an essential element in
the Balance of Power. The severance of the Duchies from
Denmark--apart from the juristic problem in the disputed
succession--was a grave violation of that Balance, for the
strategic position of the Duchies was of immense value.
Schleswig had a large Danish population, and there were
many Danes also in Holstein. If there was a danger that
the Germans might be oppressed by the Danes, there was
no less a danger--which events fully bore out--that the
Danes would be oppressed by the Germans. The forcible
Danisation of Holstein was less likely than the forcible
Germanisation of Schleswig. Schleswig had never beea
part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and
the attempt to annex it to the Germany of 1863--with
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