No More Learning

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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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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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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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. He would succeed because he must. The
one thing that divided him from the Liberals was his inter-
pretation of life, but that was vital and nothing could
bridge or obliterate it. A Prussia and a Germany such as
the Liberals desired to make, and would, unless they were
decisively defeated, succeed in making, were to Bismarck
the negation of everything that made life worth living.
At this stage in Bismarck's career two conclusions are
fairly certain. He had no cut-and-dried programme when
he came into office; his difficulties were so formidable as
to be almost insuperable. The marvellous march of
events, in which each stage seems to slip into its pre-
appointed place, stupefied not unnaturally contemporary
opinion, and has perverted both the historical and moral
judgment of German and non-German alike. The quality
and characteristics of his genius are more, not less, impres-
sive if we ignore the sequel, and endeavour patiently to
reconstruct the situation from year to year, and realise
the essential difference between an opportunism of ends
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 129
and an opportunism of means.
When he repeatedly called
himself an opportunist in politics it was the latter, not the
former, that Bismarck really meant.
No man had a clearer conception of the ends he had set
himself to achieve; no man more deliberately on principle
left the means to be determined by the conditions and
possibilities, the realities and ponderabilia, of each situation
as it arose. He was always playing for the next stroke;
but it was the stroke of the moment that exacted the con-
centration of all his powers. His freedom from scruple
was on the same titanic scale as the rest of his intellectual
gifts. His conscience never caused him one of the many
sleepless nights which the nervous torture of his brain so
abundantly produced. The fear that he had miscalcu-
lated an opponent's strength or misinterpreted the re-
sources at his disposal, that the King, the soldiers, or a
subordinate would fail him, or that he himself had let a
chance slip was with him night and day. To errors of
judgment he pleaded guilty with an engaging and disarm-
ing frankness; to the commission of wrong, never; and for
the simple reason that the ethical standards and criteria of
private life were ruled out of politics by his creed and code
of public conduct. In the sphere of statesmanship right
and wrong were decided for Bismarck by the needs and
interests of the State for whose destinies he was responsible,
and by no other considerations,-ethical or material. Hence
he did not do what he plainly regarded as wrong in order
that good might ensue; he did not salve a seared or re-
bellious conscience by the comforting illusion that ends
justify means. The methods he employed were intrin-
sically justifiable or not at all, and the appropriate tests
were drawn from the same sources as those properly appli-
cable to the ends themselves. In a dozen crucial instances
Bismarck was prouder of the methods than of the results
of his diplomacy. He scornfully rejected the white sheet
in which so many statesmen have appealed to the absolution
of a posterity, grateful for their achievements, but as per-
turbed as the statesmen themselves by the immorality of
their statecraft.
Between 1862 and 1866 . the Minister-President was a
B. 1
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BISMARCK
new man in office for the first time. As with Moltke, his
collaborator of genius, the prestige and personal ascend-
ancy which he enjoyed in increasing measure after 1867
had yet to be won. The constitutional conflict imposed
a terrible responsibility. The opposition fought neither
with small nor with great, save only with the minister who
had intervened to arrest an otherwise certain triumph.
Outside Prussia, the political relations of Berlin with the
other German governments were poisoned by the fear that
his antecedents and utterances aroused. At Paris and
Petersburg he had created credits on which he intended
to draw, but Napoleon and Gortschakov were chary of
committing themselves to this audacious adventurer, whose
fortunes were in so perilous a position. At Vienna, the
Ball-Platz had good reason to know that the new Minister-
President was no friend to Austria. To London Bismarck
was an unknown quantity: in our Court, better informed,
he stirred a deep-seated and justifiable aversion. At
Berlin, the Conservatives, routed at the elections, wel-
comed the minister as an instrument to chastise democracy,
but his principles, particularly in foreign policy, caused
the gravest misgivings, and his haughty and brusque inde-
pendence alienated and offended the phalanx of the
Kreuzzeitting. The soldiers at headquarters soon dis-
covered that to Bismarck the army was an organ of the
State, not an end in itself; soldiers, in his view, were bad
masters but good servants; he had no intention of becom-
ing a political tool of the General Staff, and he brooked
no interference with the higher political direction. The
organisation of the army was the soldiers' business, policy
was his. Indeed, in 1862, began the friction between
the civil Minister-President and the army chiefs.
In a State, saturated with militarism, such as Prussia,
in which an unbroken tradition had created an ethos that
dominated the personal monarchy, a civil minister deter-
mined to control policy was bound to offend the military
chiefs, habituated to regard the claims of the army as
paramount. In Roon he had his one staunch friend. But
Roon was a soldier first and last. He had brought Bis-
marck into power to prevent Prussia from being over-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 131
whelmed 'in the sea of mud called parliamentary govern-
ment. ' Otto's conduct of affairs sorely tried Roon's loyal
affection and simple Conservative faith. For the scope and
increasing growth of Bismarck's genius were beyond the
limited political vision of Roon. Yet the friendship of
these two, Prussian in every drop of their blood--that in-
timate 'du' in their letters--dating from the hot ambitions
of youth, weathering and deepening through all the crises
of the heroic age from 1848 onwards to the grey maturity
that has achieved, warms and illumines the stark and
gnarled loneliness of Bismarck's life. His wife, his sister,
his children, Roon and the King--outside these lies a
formal waste filled with countless figures, who belong to
Bismarck, but Bismarck does not belong to them.
In 1862, everything turned on the King. The consti-
tutional conflict had flooded the royal hearth and the steps
to the throne. The Crown Prince and his circle, in close
touch with the intellectuals of Liberalism, such as M.
Duncker, Samwer, and Bernhardi, indicated unmistakably
their disagreement with the minister's policy and methods,
and their genuine fear that a reckless gambler was im-
perilling the future of the dynasty, pledging the monarchy
to an irreconcilable breach with the nation, and destroying
the moral'primacy of Prussia in Germany.
King William was, indeed, desperately unhappy; the
pressure of contradictory counsels was almost intolerable;
adjured on one side to authorise negotiations with the
Landtag over Bismarck's head, which would save his
honour, and satisfy the opposition, on the other to stand
firm and save the Crown and army from the men who in-
sulted him by accusations of violating the constitution.
Bismarck has vividly described the King's fear that he would
end like our Charles 1. on a scaffold, erected on the wreckage
of the hereditary monarchy, and his appeal to the King that
if it needs must be so, better to die at his post than sur-
render. He, at any rate, would not desert him, for he
preferred the fate of Strafford to a craven submission. It
is one of the many penalties of service under an autocracy
that the security of tenure, assured by a representative
legislature, is dependent on a single personality, and at the
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BISMARCK
mercy of political intriguers, soldiers, courtiers, priests,
or women: doubly so, if that autocracy has broken with
a legislature that has challenged the royal authority.
Bismarck's management of his sovereign for six-and-twenty
years was perhaps his most consummate performance;
for he never stooped to sacrifice his own, nor demanded
the sacrifice of his master's, independence. His task was
to keep the King's feet firm on a path, the direction of
which he could not, and dare not, define; and never did
he so sorely and continuously need the magic mixture of
firmness and flexibility, inspired by an unerring intuition,
as in these first few years when he fought, dagger out of
sheath, for a cause and himself. The argument between
King and minister invariably left the final coercion to
William's conscience, vibrating to his deep sense of re-
sponsibility to the Divine Ruler for his royal duty to the
kingdom of Prussia.
The personal relations of these two, William and Bis-
marck, so momentous in their consequences on two
generations of civilised Europe, are an intensely and
infinitely human background to the grandeur and petti-
nesses of the drama in which they are the leading figures.
One example must suffice. When the Crown Prince at
Dantzig in 1863 was so deeply stirred as to indicate in a
public speech his disapproval of his father's ministry, the
wrath of the King as a soldier and as a father, boiled over.
His son was guilty of plain mutiny: he must be stripped
of his military rank and disgraced. The conciliator was
Bismarck, who had little reason for leniency on behalf of
one who desired his dismissal. He urged the Crown Prince
to admit a grave error of judgment; he begged the King
to be content with a severe reprimand* Sons, however
erring, had claims on a father's affection; the struggle
had embittered the feelings of every one, and an open
breach between the King and the heir to the throne would
cause a scandal so serious as irretrievably to damage the.
cause of the King and even of the monarchy. Bismarck's
courage won. Nor was the advice simply the adroit tactics
of an inhuman player with the human pawns in a great
game. Bismarck was capable of amazing meanness and
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 133
a card-sharper's trickery, but he was an intensely affectionate
father, and on critical occasions he could always remember
and rise to the dignity due from a great officer responsible
for a great kingdom.
The constitutional conflict that the opposition was con-
vinced would make the minister's grave of shame, proved
in the issue, as Bismarck utilised it, a weapon of victory.
The olive branch was put away for the happy day when
the foe had surrendered at discretion. Bismarck after
January 1863 rejected all compromise. A proposal en-
gineered in the autumn of that year by E. von Manteuffel,
the chief of the Military Cabinet, to accept the demand
for two years' service and obtain all the other essentials of
the rnilitary reorganisation, was rejected by Bismarck.
The army chiefs were ready to sacrifice the Minister-
President, he inferred, and possibly place a soldier at the
head of the government. Bismarck made it quite clear that
he would fight for the King to the end, but that between
his continuance in office with a free hand and surrender to
the opposition there was no practical alternative. His dis-
missal, however wrapped up or plastered over--and he
was right--meant hauling down the flag of the monarchy.
He kept the King steadily pinned to that. And as the poli-
tical difficulties steadily thickened and one storm-cloud
after another rolled up on a darkening horizon, William's
faith in the star of his Minister-President became clearer
and clearer. The success that Bismarck promised, not the
disaster predicted by his foes, was coming slowly but surely.
Meanwhile, Bismarck took care that the breach with
the opposition was widened, and that attacks on the pre-
rogative extended to every sphere of governmental action.
When the popular movement flagged, a press ordinance
muzzling the newspaper critics, the purging of the civil
service of all tainted with Liberal doctrines, an order to the
government officials to put pressure on the electors, a
fresh twist in the sharpness of the police administration,
inspired articles in unsuspected journals revealing indis-
creet threats and waste by military Hotspurs, the parade
of votes of confidence from manipulated town councils,
or alleged reports of reactionary remarks by Majesty itself,
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BISMARCK
and the distribution of ribbons and decorations to avowed
Absolutists could always raise the necessary steam in the
boilers of Liberalism. Foreign policy, finance, and mili-
tary administration provided inexhaustible material for
baiting the opposition into violent rhetoric and resolutions
passed by overwhelming majorities. Roon's temper was
of a military shortness when he dealt, as Minister of War,
with civilian amateurs. Bismarck allowed him to provoke
quarrels in the Landtag, and then with magisterial im-
partiality, poured vitriol on the parliamentary critics.
The Minister-President proved that the Junker of 1848,
with his vivid utterance and racy brutality, was a master
of the studied insult, the barbed innuendo, the cynical
contempt, the phrase that cut down to the bone and
stuck. Indignation vexed him as a thing that is raw.
And he could lose his temper, too, when nerves and endur-
ance cracked under the burden that he carried, virtually
alone. * The House of Phrases' simply provided loqua-
cious passengers in a coach, the driving of which without
their ignorant interference imposed an almost impossible
task on the coachman. Bismarck was as little able as
Frederick the Great or Richelieu to share government
with a representative assembly. He did not understand,
or wish or try to understand, the secrets and mechanism
of a system repugnant to his feelings and a permanent
hindrance to the achievement of his ends. The time
spent in futile debates and logic-chopping controversies
was sheer waste. Every ounce of his strength, every hour
of his overworked day, were needed for the real partner in
government--the King--and the multifarious business of
the State. Not on the floor of the Landtag, but in a
correct judgment of political realities, lay the secret of
statecraft, and for the judgment of his opponents, Conser-
vative or Radical, ignorant of the European theatre of
politics, and worshippers at the shrines of all the Idols of
the Tribe and of the Market-Place, he had a pitying con-
tempt. Salvation would come from action--the patient
manoeuvring for the strategic points, and then the decisive
stroke--the State as the incarnation of power and statecraft
as the expression of its disciplined force.
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 135
From the very outset he gave Germany a taste of the
'Bismarck touch. ' The constitutional and chronic im-
broglio at Hesse-Cassel was settled by a curt ultimatum.
The reactionary Elector recognised that the new minister
meant what was said and surrendered. Public opinion
was bewildered at this example of Satan rebuking Sin.
For here was a ruler advised by his reactionary minister,
Hassenpflug, in conflict with a rebel legislature over his
prerogative, and compelled to admit the claims of the
rebels by a minister who was a Prussian super-Hassenpflug.
It forgot that Hesse-Cassel was not Prussia, that the struggle
was in Bismarck's eyes a nuisance, the continuance of which
strengthened the Progressives in Berlin, and that surrender
on a word from Berlin was a proof of Prussian strength.
That strength was more effectively exemplified in the
matter of the French Commercial Treaty and the renewal
of the Zollverein's Tariff Treaty with Austria. . The
French Treaty was an important step in promoting a
better understanding between Prussia and the Second
Empire. Austria, as in 1851, desired either to break up
the Zollverein and thereby damage the political and
economic supremacy in non-Austrian Germany exercised
by Prussia, or to secure the inclusion of the Austrian
dominions in the Tariff Union on terms favourable to her
peculiar economic needs. The French Commercial Treaty
had stirred serious opposition within the Tariff Union, and
at Vienna there was good hope of driving one or other,
perhaps both, of the wedges into the Prussian system.
The foundations of Bismarck's system were threatened. In
Delbruck he had the coadjutor he needed, for Delbruck
had first-class ability and a complete mastery of the econ-
omic facts, and behind Delbruck stood Bismarck confident
in Prussia's strength. The French Commercial Treaty
must go through. Austria could renew with trifling
modifications the previous agreement. But her inclusion
in the Customs Union was impossible. And if the Zoll-
verein refused the Prussian proposals, then it must break
up. Prussia would go her own way and make her own
tariff arrangements, for she was strong enough to stand
by herself. She peremptorily refused to sacrifice her
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BISMARCK
economic interests to South German particularism or
Austrian selfishness. Let the middle and petty States
choose between a Prussia which desired to be their friend
and ally and an Austria that aimed at exploiting them.
They chose. Austria secured neither the rejection of
the French Treaty, nor the dissolution of the Zollverein,
nor her inclusion within the Tariff Union. She had per-
force to accept simply a renewal of the fiscal treaty with
the Zollverein, that. included the whole of non-Austrian
Germany and as a fiscal unit to stand outside the German
ring fence. There was more in this settlement than the
incompatibility of Austrian Protectionism with German
economic development, and a correct judgment that
material interests would defeat political sentiment in the
rivalry between Prussia and Austria for the economic
leadership of the middle and petty States. Bismarck had
struck for and obtained three results. First, the inde-
pendence of Prussia; secondly, the right to settle with
France on his own terms; thirdly, clear proof that Austria
was not, properly speaking, a true German State. The
essential preliminary to a settlement of the political uni-
fication of Germany on the lines of the Small and not the
Great Germany conception was the establishment of an
economic unification which drew an unmistakable frontier
line between the Austrian Empire and the rest of the
Federal organisation. The Great Germany party, as
Bismarck fully realised, was by no means dead, either at
Berlin or outside it. The first step to the final defeat of
the Great Germans was taken with the successful con-
clusion of the complicated and highly technical nego-
tiations in economics, and Bismarck took care to indicate
a helpful moral at Paris. Prussia had deliberately pre-
ferred an arrangement with France to an arrangement
with Austria. The identity of interest, he commented,
between France and Prussia was not necessarily confined
to tariff duties and the most-favoured nation clause.
At the snarling criticism on Prussia's anti-German and
unbrotherly Prussian selfishness towards Austria Bismarck
shrugged his shoulders. It was the privilege of the de-
feated to snarl. The spring of 1863 enabled the Foreign
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 137
Office in the Wilhelmstrasse to provide Germany and
Europe with another example of Prussian independence
and egoism that stirred a tempest of denunciation.
The Polish rebellion of January, 1863, precipitated a
European crisis. The sympathy of Western and Central
Europe, alike in the governments and their people, with
the Polish effort to secure national unity and adminis-
trative autonomy--freedom as a race from Russian tyranny
--is very remarkable and profoundly significant of the grip
of Liberal and Nationalist ideals on the temper of the age.
In London, Paris, Turin, and Vienna, the Polish cause was
acclaimed with enthusiasm. The Poles were fighting for
the inalienable right of a nation to work out its salvation
and establish its civilisation as a self-governing unit in the
fraternity of European National-States. The disin-
tegrated Germany of the Federal Bund and denationalised
Austria were no whit behind the new Italy, France, and
Great Britain in their Polish sympathies. The contrast,
indeed, is striking between the manifestation in 1863 of
public opinion in Prussia and non-Prussian Germany, in
support of the Poles, and in sincere reprobation of the
terrible severity with which the defeated rising was crushed
by the Russian autocracy, and the cold-blooded equan-
imity with which Germany and the Magyarised Dual
Empire of 1876 and 1896 condoned, when they did not
positively approve, the more terrible treatment of the
Balkan Slavs and the Armenians by the Ottoman auto-
cracy. Only by such a contrast can we realise the
strength of the Liberal movement and of the moral forces
behind it, with which Bismarck wrestled in 1863, and
register in 1896 the atrophy of a nation's conscience and the
withering of its ideals, when for two generations it has
been drugged by the doctrine that the great questions of
the day can be decided only by blood and iron.
Bismarck at once recognised the gravity of the Polish
issue and the opportunity that the Polish question pro-
vided. His attitude to the problem of Poland, and Prus-
sian Poland in particular, never altered since 1848, when
he first denounced the danger of Polonism to the Prussian
State, through the Kulturkampf to the anti-Polish legis-
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BISMARCK
lation of his chancellorship that he left as a wasting mort-
gage to his successors. He told General Fleuiy in De-
cember, 1863, that the question was one of life and death
to Prussia: 'I would rather die,' he said, 'than permit
our position in Posen to be discussed at a European Con-
gress: I would rather cede our Rhinelands. ' He had no' .
sympathy with the Nationalist principle, outside Prussia
and Germany; it was simply a force in a political situation,
to be exploited as such; and if a force that threatened
Prussian hegemony one to be extirpated.