The Federal Diet, whether in the ordinary session of
seventeen delegates, or in the plenum of sixty-nine repre-
sentatives in which every sovereign State was represented,
?
seventeen delegates, or in the plenum of sixty-nine repre-
sentatives in which every sovereign State was represented,
?
Robertson - Bismarck
.
.
116
? 1. The Constitutional Conflict, the Polish
Question, and the German Problem . . 116
? 2. Schleswig-Holstein, the Treaty of Vienna,
and the Convention of Gastein, 1863-1865 156
? 3. The Rupture with Austria--The Treaty of
Prague, 1865-1866 . . . . 190
V. The Chancellor of the North German Con-
federation . . . . . . . 222
The Making of the North German Confederation--
The War with France, 1866-1870 --The
Treaty of Frankfurt--The Unification of
Germany, 1870-1871.
si
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? xii CONTENTS
VI. The Imperial Chancellor, 1871-1890 . . . 289
? I. The Empire, the System, and the Chancellor,
1871-1878 289
? 2. The Kulturkampf, 1871-1878 . . . 309
? 3. Foreign Policy, 1871-1879 . . . . 327
? 4. The New Era--Home Policy, 1878-1888 . 352
? 5. Foreign Policy--The Triple Alliance--The
Colonial Problem--France and Russia, 1879-
1888 394
? 6. The Last Phase--Bismarck's Resignation,
March 1888-March 1890 . . . . 454
Conclusion . . . . . . . . 475
Appendix A. The Ems Dispatch . . . . 496
Appendix B. The Reinsurance Treaties of 1884 and 1887 498
Bibliography . . . . . . 506
Chronological Table . . . . . . 5*3
Index . . . . . . . . . 516
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? BISMARCK
CHAPTER I
GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM, iSi5-1848
Bismarck was born on April 1, 1815, and died on July
30, 1898. His life and political career, therefore, cover
the nineteenth century proper, reckoned from the final
act of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic drama, with its
consummation in the Congress and Treaties of Vienna.
Bismarck as a figure in history has a twofold significance:
by the accomplishment of German unification and the
foundation of a German Empire under Prussian hegemony
he succeeded, where so many had failed, in solving the
German problem of the nineteenth century; he altered
the fundamental framework of the State system, as well
as the map, of Europe. In 1871 the political capital of
Continental Europe, hitherto either Paris or Vienna, was
established beyond dispute at Berlin, and the European
State system was remodelled by the creation of a Central
German Empire expressed in the supremacy of a mili-
tarist and industrialised Prussia over a Germany unified
on a federal basis. Each of these two results was a re-
volution. In combination they made a new Europe and
a new world of political relations, thoughc and action.
Bismarck's life and statesmanship, therefore, provide a
study of the origins, principles, methods and consequences
of this double revolution.
The nature of the historical problem is the essence of
the story. It is easy to see the solution stamped on
Europe in 1871, and to draw out its manifold moral. It is
no less easy, and probably more tempting, to emphasise
the logical character of each stage in the evolution, and
B. A
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? 2
BISMARCK
the inevitability of the final result. Our generation forgets
that, until Sedan had been fought and won, until the
dramatic scene in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles on
January 18, 1871, had been played out and the German
Reichstag with a German Emperor and an Imperial Chan-
cellor had met at Berlin, no one, even twenty years before
1871, foresaw or could hive foreseen, no one predicted or
could have predicted, the precise form of the final result.
It is easy to ignore the plain truth that the Germany of
1815 or 1848 or 1861 might have been unified at a different
time in a different way with different objects, and with very
different results, both for Germany and for Europe. The
Bismarckian solution was not a predetermined and in-
evitable event in world history. The earnest and high-
minded Germans of so many conflicting schools of thought,
who from 1815 onwards worked so hard and sacrificed so
much to achieve a German unity in fundamental contra-
diction to that established in 1871, no less than Bis-
marck himself, were aware that it was not the inevitable,
but rather the unexpected, which ultimately came to pass.
Bismarck's career, indeed, illustrates throughout the
truth, not too familiar even to historical students, that
the chief difficulty of a scientific interpretation of events
does not lie in an analysis of the solution, but in a recon-
struction of the successive phases of the problem. In
Bismarck's statesmanship, the man and the problem, and
their subtle and continuous reaction each on the other--
these are the marrow of the matter. And by non-German
students who have not inherited the categories of thought
and feeling, the traditions and outlook on life intuitive
in the German mind, or experienced the political con-
ditions in which the German people from 1815 onwards
lived and aspired, the German problem of the nineteenth
century has to be laboriously reconstructed. The lament-
able absence of knowledge of the real Germany and the
obsession of preconceived ideas in the France of the
Bourbon Restoration, of the Orleanist Monarchy and the
Second Empire, brought disaster to France. The no less
lamentable ignorance of English statesmen, of our press
that made public opinion, and of the British nation that
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 3
did not wish to be instructed, if the instruction required
a painful readjustment of accepted beliefs, was responsible
for repeated humiliations, the misuse or loss of unrivalled
opportunities and ultimately for a situation fraught with
peril.
The British people, indeed, blind to the unperceived
foundation of the British Empire in the intellectual toil
of its best minds, and to the continuous influence of ideas
on its political evolution, is impatient of all invitations to
correlate, even in outline, the salient features of German
political and philosophical speculation to the political
history of nineteenth-century Germany. Fichte and
Hegel, Humboldt, Savigny and Clausewitz, Novalis,
Schelling and Schopenhauer, Haller, Ranke and Stahl,
the Kreuzzeitung and the men of 1848, Dahlmann, Ger-
vinus, Gneist, Bliintschli, von der Goltz and the young
Treitschke--that vast and repellent mass of ' dead ' meta-
physics, law, ethics and political philosophy so copiously
produced by German minds and explored with the
patience and zeal of national science by German erudition,
the British mind instinctively feels has little bearing on Bis-
marck, the man of action, the apostle of ' blood and iron,'
who solved by the sword a problem that would have been
simple but for the metaphysicians, the professors and the
pamphleteers. Bismarck, we are continually reminded,
shared with Napoleon a supreme contempt for 'idealogues,'
who darkened counsel by their nebulous fantasies--children
in politics, fitted for academic class-rooms and the
editorial camera obscura, incapable of governing or making
the policy of States. Yet no one knew better than Bis-
marck that the theories and ideals of the aristocracy of
intellect, the political programme of the university chair
and the cry of the class-room made the Germany and the
Germans of his day. The transition from the junker of
1849 to the statesman of 1862 lay in his discovery that the
new Germany was the Germany that counted, and the
new Germany was the Germany somehow to be unified.
The master of a Realpolitik reckoned amongst the realities
--the true ponderabilia of each successive situation--the
German mind, as political speculation had made it and as a
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? 4
BISMARCK
statesman responding to the ideals could exploit it. His
debt to the ' idealogues' was greater than he ever publicly
admitted. Meinecke, for example, in his Weltburgertutn
und Nationalstaat--an illuminating study of the evolution
of German political thought from Fichte to the new era
of William n. --has proved how much of the alleged
originality of Bismarck's federal solution in 1866 and 1871
was an adaptation from principles suggested by the despised
Liberal leaders of 1848, and how impossible the Bismarckian
adaptation would have been but for this intellectual
travail of the' idealogues' between i848andl87i. Count-
less memoirs, hundreds of pages of reports, the serried
phalanx of Bismarck's letters and speeches, furnish proofs.
From the spring of his irresponsible Junkertum to the
magisterial utterances in the autumn of his Chancellorship
--in the Landtag at Berlin, the Diet at Frankfurt, the
Memoranda from the Embassies at Paris and St. Peters-
burg, the Reichstag of the North German Confederation
and the Empire--Bismarck fought, dagger out of sheath,
a truceless battle of ideas and of political and constitutional
principles. He fought impartially with the Jacobins of
the German Revolution, with Liberals, Unitarians and
Federalists, with the conservative cosmopolitanism of the
Holy Alliance and with the Prussianism of his dearest
friends, with Catholic ultramontanism, secular liberalism
and social democracy, with the conception of political
parochialism (Kleinstaaterei) and local dynasticism, with
Pan - German nationalism, and anti - German cosmo-
politanism. These titanic collisions of ideas with ideas,
the contests of informed wills with informed wills, the
fifty years' struggle for the soul and mind of the German
people, cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant battle of blood-
less shades for bloodless shadows, nor blown to an empty
air by the trumpets of Rezonville. The German mind
had to be made and remade in a prolonged intellectual
travail and an unending political duel before the foundations
of the solid house that Bismarck's Germany acknowledged
he had built for the German nation could be well and
surely laid. Tantae molts erat, indeed. The picture of
Bismarck as simply the demonic man of action is false
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 5
and unjust--unjust because it dwarfs the man and elim-
inates much that is most significant in his conception of
life and in his work--false because it unduly simplifies the
magnitude and complexity of his task. It is no less false
and unjust to the ideals of the defeated and to the con-
quered causes which pleased neither Bismarck nor, in the
end, the high gods.
The German problem, in short, was as much consti-
tutional as political--and in the constitutional labyrinth
lurked theories, ideals and formulae more formidable and
intractable than the institution and machinery which
made the Germany of 1815.
In 1815 Germany was constituted as a loose confedera-
tion (a Staaten-Bund) of thirty-nine States of very different
sizes, strength and system of government. The Federal
Act which defined the constitution was the result of, and
imposed by, the European Congress of Vienna. The
Settlement was a defeat alike of the unitarian and federalist
schemes of the Nationalists, either Prussian or in close
sympathy with Prussia. Its object was to provide the
Germany of 1815 with an organisation which would com-
bine the preservation of the individual sovereignty,
independence and inviolability of each of the partici-
pating States with a guarantee of external and internal
peace for the confederation as a whole. The framework
of the Settlement of 1815 proved that the authors were
more influenced by the desire to provide securities against
the dangers of the past than to anticipate the evolu-
tion of the future. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic
period had proved the complete failure of the defunct
Holy Roman Empire to maintain the security and in-
tegrity of that Empire against foreign aggression, to prevent
its members from making war on each other, or from
entering into alliances with foreign Powers, detrimental
to the interests of Germany as a whole. It had per-
mitted leagues such as the Napoleonic Confederation of the
Rhine, by which two-thirds of Germany passed under the
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? 6
BISMARCK
organised control of a foreign sovereign and placed its
military and economic resources at the disposal of a foreign
dictator. Hence, in the new confederation the Member-
States were forbidden to make war on each other, to con-
clude separate alliances with foreign Powers, while their
membership was conditioned by mutual guarantees of the
several territorial possessions included in the Union.
The Federal Act and the Federal Constitution implied
the existence of a common German interest, and the duty
of Germany organised in the League of Thirty-Nine
States to promote and defend it. It was not only a
German but a European duty. The interest of Europe
required the organisation of the German States for
certain common purposes; the settlement arrived at in
a European congress recognised the interest of Europe in
providing the organisation and maintaining it.
There has always been a German problem. There
always will be. In 1815 the heart of the matter is reached
by two questions: How far did the new confederation
meet the requirements of Germany and of Europe?
What provision, if any, was made for adaptation to future
and unforeseen needs or demands, either specifically German
or more generally European?
It is easy to pile up a formidable indictment against the
German work of the Congress of Vienna, particularly from
the relentless criticism of a later generation, which reckons
the Settlement of 1815 as one of the injuriae temporum
inflicted by heartless diplomatists and malevolent European
Powers on a hapless and helpless Germany--and to show
that it had every imaginable defect.
It is not difficult to prove that the Settlement was a
galling disappointment to ardent Nationalists so different
as Stein, Humboldt and Arndt, and a cause of rage to
fierce Prussian Particularists such as Blucher. All these
things and much else--are they not written in the
chronicles of great and small German historians? It is more
relevant to the purpose in hand to analyse than to indict.
The Federal Diet, whether in the ordinary session of
seventeen delegates, or in the plenum of sixty-nine repre-
sentatives in which every sovereign State was represented,
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 7
was the one effective federal institution. The Diet was
not a parliament but a congress of diplomatic represen-
tatives whose votes as defined by the mandates of their
governments alone could alter the fundamental laws. It
was presided over by the Austrian representative, who
had a casting vote. Austria, therefore, was recognised
as the head of the confederation.
We must further note that: (1) There was no federal
executive to execute the Diet's decrees, a duty which fell
on each Member-State; (2) no federal military force existed
except on paper, and all efforts, notably by Prussia after
1815, to make a federal army a reality, broke down, not
only in detail but in principle: for the question of the
supreme command raised the insoluble dualism of Austria
and Prussia; (3) no alteration in fundamental laws, or-
ganic institutions, individual rights or religious affairs,
could be made except by a unanimous vote, i. e. a liberum
veto to block change was vested in every State, however
petty; (4) the governments of the States were alone
represented- and the governments meant the ruling
dynasties. The German people were not directly repre-
sented, nor, unless they could influence the several govern-
ments, had they any voice in federal decisions and policy.
The complete failure of the Federal Diet to realise even
the most modest aspirations of nascent German national-
ism and a growing liberalism, was due as much to the
policy of the German governments as to the inherent
defects of the constitution. Had those governments been
ready to utilise the powers provided in the Federal Act,
the thirty years between 1815 and the Revolution of 1848
might have witnessed a progressive series of moderate
reforms, which would probably have averted that revo-
lution with all its disastrous consequences. In their
anxiety to avert revolution, the governments of Germany
after 1815 stored up the forces which made revolution
inevitable. The Diet fell under the control of Austria,
which meant under the control of Metternich. It came
to be a machine for either doing nothing or dutifully
registering the decree of a reactionary system, based on a
particular interpretation of German, Austrian and Faro-
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? 8
BISMARCK
pean interests. The suspension or mutilation of liberal
constitutions in the German States, the denial of a free
press, the interference with individual liberty and with
the freedom of thought and teaching in the universities,
the hostility to all change as necessarily democratic and
revolutionary, have damned the Diet with a double dose
of the original sin of Metternich himself. But Metter-
nich, who imposed this policy on a willing Emperor and
a despotically governed Austria, could not have imposed
it on the Federal Diet without the ready complicity of
the German governments.
The Federal Constitution did not make those govern-
ments what they were; but it provided them with an
effective machinery for carrying out a reactionary, centri-
fugal and particularist policy. Popular representation and
control were on principle excluded. But had the Federal
Act set up a truly Federal Parliament and a truly Federal
Ministry, it is practically certain that the quarrels between
1815 and 1848 would have been continuous and irrecon-
cilable. So deep was the antagonism between the prin-
ciples of the dynasties and the popular conception of
government, so profound the economic and constitutional
differences between the several States, so keen the jealousies
and fears of the dynasties--so disunited were the nationalist
or popular parties in political principles and ends--that
Germany would have been rent by secessions or plunged
into a civil war from which France, Russia and Great
Britain could not have held aloof.
Federalism, as a system of political organisation, it must
be remembered, and as a political solution for the ad-
ministrative difficulties of modern States, was in 1815
in its infancy; Europe in 1815 had neither thought out
the theory and principles, nor acquired the political ex-
perience required for its successful establishment. The
literature and experience of 1917 are relatively rich in
both respects; but even in 1917 there are obvious gaps
which the political life of the United States, of the
modern German Empire, of the Dominions of Canada
and Australia, and the Swiss Republic do not auto-
matically fill. And the Germany of 1815 was not only
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 9
and necessarily poor in the philosophy, literature and
experience of federalism: it had but recently revived its
education in political philosophy and speculation. The
new Germany was henceforward asking with increasing
earnestness and thoroughness fundamental questions:
What under modern conditions is a State? What is its
basis? What are its rights? Whence does it derive
its authority, and over whom, and to what extent?
What are the relations of a State with other States? What
are the laws or principles of the evolution of States?
What is nationality? What are the respective values of
States based on civilisation (Kulturstaat), States based on
political or governmental unity (Etnhtitsstaat), States based
on nationality (Nationalstaat)? What is the ethical and
political import of citizenship based on cosmopolitan
ideals (Weltburgertum) as opposed to citizenship con-
ditioned and restricted by the claims of race, the terri-
torial State and the individual as such? Hard questions,
indeed, the answering of which might well tax the best
brains and the ripest political experience of Germany for
two generations to come.
The worst defect of the Federal Constitution was not
its failure to realise conceptions of German unity, im-
mature and limited by the exceptional experience of the'
Napoleonic and Revolutionary era, nor its curtailment
of freedom of thought and political liberty, but its com-
plete failure to provide a sobering and stimulating political
education for the educated middle class of a loosely
united German nation. The Germany of 1815 had
passed through an abnormal ordeal since 1789. But the
men of 1848, intellectually able, of a high sincerity and
purpose, fired by an inspiring idealism without which no
nation has ever achieved what endures, were as fettered
by political inexperience as were the men who made the
French Revolution. They had not learned what govern-
ment demands, because all means for learning the lesson
had been denied them, both on principle and as a fact.
The Germany which produced scholars such as Savigny,
Boeckh, Lachmann, Bopp, the two Schlegels, the two
Humboldts, the brothers Grimm, and Gesenius; in science,
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? 10
BISMARCK
Ritter, von Baer, Gauss, Oersted, Liebig, Virchow and
Helmholtz; in history, Niebuhr, Ranke, Waitz, Pertz and
Bohmer; in theology, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Baur and
Dollinger; in art, Rauch, Cornelius and Kaulbach; in
music, Schubert, Schumann, Spohr, Mendelssohn and
Meyerbeer; and in philosophical thought, minds so
powerful and original as those of Hegel, Schelling,
Schopenhauer, Herbart, Clausewitz and List--the Ger-
many that witnessed the zenith and sunset of Goethe's
genius and the career of Heine, was singularly deficient
in statesmen of the first order and in the literature, as
distinct from the philosophy, of politics. It was a mar-
vellous spring in a nation's intellectual growth, with the
pageant of its intellectual summer to come after 1848--
but the sources and masters of its political wisdom were
English or French.
It is no less striking how German statesmen from
Metternich to Bismarck and von Bulow, while extolling
the supremacy of German intellect, have denied to the
mass of their countrymen political capacity--forgetting
that the development of political capacity in a nation is
as much a question of opportunity as of ability. The
science and art of government are more exacting even
than the science and arts of the intellectual and imagina-
tive life. If ability is a necessary condition, a free field
for its exercise, the remorseless tests of criticism, failure and
responsibility are even more indispensable for citizenship
than for thinkers, scholars and artists. The worst of all
schools for a nation's political life are irresponsible politi-
cians appealing to a disfranchised, uninstructed, irrespon-
sible and alienated public opinion. Nations generally pay
a heavier price for their sins of omission than for their
sins of commission. For the Germany of 1815-48 the
exclusion of its educated middle-class from an active and
corporate share in political life is the gravest indictment
that Metternich and the system of Metternich incur. 1
1 Hohenlohe {Mem. , i. 109) wrote: 'In south-western Germany the idea
of unity is regarded as a matter of life and death, and is the unceasing object of
anxious thought to politicians and eager excitement to the masses . . . the
true cause lies in the fact--more or less consciously recognised--that the greater
portion of the German nation has no voice in determining its destinies. ' (1847. )
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM n
The political problems and difficulties of the German
Confederation after 1815 were further complicated by
the peculiar character of its'component members. Luxem-
burg united to the ruling house of the new Netherlands
kingdom was a member of the confederation: the King
of Denmark as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein was repre-
sented for Holstein but not for Schleswig: Hanover until
1837 was united to the British Crown, and after 1837,
though the personal union of the Hanoverian and British
Crowns was severed, the connection with' the British
royal house was of the closest: Oldenburg was dynas-
tically connected with the reigning house of Russia: the
house of Saxe-Coburg in 1830 provided the new kingdom
of Belgium with its sovereign, and in 1840 the British
Queen with a Prince-Consort, reinforcing the British
interest in and influence on German affairs: the whole
of the kingdom of Prussia was not included in the con-
federation: and the Empire of Austria was only repre-
sented for ' the German ' parts of the Empire. -
The Federal Diet, in consequence, was composed of
diplomatic representatives from States purely Germanic
and from States only partially so, the interests of which
were frequently determined by non-German, or anti-
German, considerations. The Diet, therefore, directly
or indirectly, was brought into close relation with the most
delicate and difficult problems of European policy.
Apart from the European origin of the Federal Consti-
tution, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, the Nether-
lands, and Denmark had the right and the interest to
intervene effectively in the deliberations and actions of the
Diet, and such intervention would not spring from purely
Germanic considerations. The history of the problems
of Poland, Schleswig-Holstein, Luxemburg, of Slavonic,
or Magyar, or Italian Austria, are a continuous commen-
tary on this anomalous situation. In short, it was im-
possible to. solve these problems either by the Federal Diet
alone or without its co-operation.
One great European State alone, France, was excluded
from all share--and its exclusion pointed unmistakably
to a fresh phase of the historic struggle for the control of
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? 12
BISMARCK
the Rhine. The creation of the German Confederation
registered 'a Germany unredeemed' and a France un-
satisfied. The refusal of the Prussian demand in 1814
for 'the restoration' of Alsace and Lorraine had been
balanced by the removal of France from the Rhenish
Provinces occupied since 1795. But the French flag on
Strasburg and Metz, the federal flag on the fortress of
Mainz, and the Prussian flag at Coblenz, signalised baffled
ambition and inextinguishable ideals for French and
German patriots. Neither France nor Germany could
regard the Treaties and Settlement of 1815 as the last
word. Any remodelling, therefore, of the Federal Con-
stitution of 1815, any alteration of the composition or
powers of the German Confederation, touched every live
wire in the European State system.
The Settlement of 1815 had made the German problem
an international problem. The unification of Germany,
even more than the unification of Italy, could not be
effected without a revolution -in the European State
system defined by the Vienna treaties.
No less could it be accomplished without an internal
revolution in Germany and the formation of a new German
mind. The system of Metternich had the merit of clearly
conceived principles adapted to secure precise ends. The
maintenance, moreover, of a status quo has all the advan-
tages of the defensive in war. On the side of the con-
servative forces were vested interests, historic traditions,
established institutions, the dynasties, and a bitter ex-
perience of revolution. Everywhere in Europe from the
Neva to the Seine, from the Tagus to Copenhagen, fire and
sword had done their fell work. Since 1789, the horror
of war was subtly interlaced with the horror of re-
volution. A Europe emaciated in spirit and resources
by twenty-five years of unbroken struggle, felt that
peace was worth having at any price, and that liberty
could be purchased too dearly. And Europe (ex-
cluding the Ottoman Empire) had peace for nearly forty
years.
The succeeding thirty years accomplished much in
formulating demands, and clothing them with precision
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 13
and clear objectives, which it is easier to appreciate to-day
than in 1848. The horror of war and the fear of re-
volution had slowly evaporated. The young generation
was open to persuasion that there were far worse things
than war: that peace could be purchased by sacrifices
too costly for individual, State and nation, and that when
other means were unavailable or futile, revolution was
justifiable and necessary. The solid achievements of
German brains in every department of human activity
had implanted in the educated German mind certain
potent convictions: that what had already been accom-
plished by German brains in philosophy, classical scholar-
ship, in philology, literature, history, the physical sciences
and the aesthetic arts, was as nothing to what could be
accomplished in all these departments if German brains
could have a freer field and a purer air to work in; that
in political no less than in the intellectual life, German
brains would show their creative powers; that the future
lay open to the highest' kultur' nation, true to its mission
and the obligation to realise its civilised self; that the
primacy in science and civilisation, once Italian, French
or British, was unmistakably passing to the German
nation; and fourthly, that there was a causal relation
between the efficacy of a nation's form of government and
its efficacy in national science (Wissenschafi) in its finest
and broadest sense. No less significant, the renaissance
of the German universities were both cause and effect
of the renaissance of the German people. Prussia, in its
hour of humiliation after Jena, founded the University
of Berlin. The firm belief of the Prussian reformers,
building greater than they knew, was that the moral re-
generation of the kingdom demanded no less imperatively
an intellectual regeneration; Breslau in Silesia was made
a university town in 1815, and the re-hoisting of the
Prussian flag in the enlarged Rhenish Provinces was
emphasised by the reconstitution of the University of
Bonn. The foundation of universities as a memorial of
victory in the field and as indispensable organs of national
strength and unification, remains a remarkable element in
Prussian statecraft.
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? >>4
BISMARCK
Outside Prussia, Heidelberg, Gottingen, Jena, Leipzig,
Munich, Tubingen, were especially distinguished. A
full generation before the Zollverein accomplished in 1868
the economic unity of Germany, the universities had
achieved a unity of culture impressive as much for the
solidarity of its foundations as for the tenacity of its grip
on the German mind.
The brotherhood of German learning brought about
the brotherhood of German learners. The Bavarian
who came to Berlin to attend the courses of a Ranke or a
Savigny, the Prussian who had heard Dahlmann at
Gottingen or Droysen at Kiel, the Saxon who went to
Strauss or Baur at Tubingen or Dollinger at Munich had
realised that Germany was not a geographical expression,
and that there were spiritual and intellectual bonds uniting
all Germans which kings, diplomatists and treaties could
not mar or destroy. In any young generation a settled
conviction that ideas are power, the most potent because
the most pervasive of all realities, will always develop
a high-explosive political force. Epigrams on professors
are as easy as they are popular; and the German pro-
fessoriate is the unfailing butt of the Philistine of every
nation; but in an epoch when young Germany was
dreaming dreams and seeing visions, it was an inestimable
service to the German mind that in the class-rooms of the
universities German youth was taught by men who had
a right to be heard the value of knowledge for know-
ledge's sake, and learned the lesson that national supre-
macy in science, whether of language, literature, history,
or the physical world, could only be acquired by the
severest self-discipline and the most exacting thoroughness
--by toil, silence and endurance. The German pro-
fessor had a German audience, outside his class-room, fit
and certainly not few. Savigny's and Ranke's pam-
phlets, France and Germany, the Division and Unity of
Germany, The Great Powers, are examples of the ferment-
ing influences that could distil from an academic pen.
And they could be multiplied at will. Carlyle said that
the skins of the French aristocracy bound the second
edition of Rousseau's works: it was not only the skins of
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 15
French aristocrats which bound the later editions of
many German works of learning.
Through historical research, above all, the German
nation rediscovered its past and read in it a guarantee
of the future. The German people learned from the path-
making science of the Grimms, Bopp, Pertz, Waitz, Giese-
brecht, von Maurer, Gervinus and Dahlmann, how deep
were their roots in the past, and what great intellectual
and political achievements the German race had wrought.
From the dim centuries of warring tribalism emerged
the illumination of the Teutonic genius of Charles the
Great, who combined the Central Empire, which formed
the legacy of Imperial Rome, with the gifts of the Teutonic
mind. Germany was bidden to march through the cycle
of the Middle Ages, illustrious with imperial rulers--
Carolingian, Saxon, Franconian, Hohenstaufen, Luxem-
burg, Habsburg--and to note how a Holy Roman Empire
of the German nation had preserved for civilisation the
religious, moral, political and intellectual unity of Europe
under the wings of the Teutonic Eagle; to recall the
winning for Christ and the German conception of civili-
sation from Lithuanian, Wend, Slav and Avar of the Baltic
lands almost to the banks of the Neva; to ponder on
Vienna and the marches of the East--barriers against
Magyar and Turk. It was re-taught the inexhaustible
services of the German Reformation and German Pro-
testantism to the free and critical spirit of man; it was
invited to contrast the two centuries of internecine strife
and political degradation ushered in by the Thirty Years'
War and the bondage of the German nation to foreign
masters, until Lessing and Winckelmann in the sphere of
mind, Frederick the Great in the sphere of facts, pointed
the way to a promised land beyond the wilderness in
which they had wandered. Poetry, philology, comparative
mythology and folk-lore, the comparative study of insti-
tutions, palaeography and the archives, the philosophy of
law--history in its widest streams, explored and mapped
by the severest science--were exhibited to enforce a single
moral--the greatness of the German contribution to the
civilisation of the past, a greatness in proportion to its
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? I6
BISMARCK
fidelity to its racial and national character, and the cer-
tainty that a similar fidelity in the future would produce
no less momentous results for Germany and humanity.
Arndt could proclaim that the healing of the world would
be found in the German spirit.
The grandeur and unity of the German race sank deep
into the hearts of a disillusioned generation. The German
mind, it concluded, had been at its best when Europe
had been politically organised round a German Empire,
with West and East duly subordinated to the central
framework. The 'natural frontiers' claimed by France
were a denial of geography, and an insolent outrage on
the natural rights of the indivisible German nation. Did
not the renaissance of the German spirit require the racial
unity of the German people to be expressed once more in
a national and central political organisation? Slowly
but surely the mind of the new Germany became imbued
with the doctrine and ideas of nationalism, rooted in the
reinforced concrete of racial origins and the laws of political
evolution, imposing as a corollary the duty of freeing
all Germans from the servitude of non-German political
or intellectual domination. Wherever Germans of a com-
mon speech, race, and literature lived, whether in the
artificial Confederation of 1815 or outside it, wherever
such Germans were prevented from realising their national
and racial self--that was unredeemed Germany. The
ideal of a national State in a free nation was thus built up,
line upon line, precept upon precept. The doctrine of
political salvation by fidelity to racial unity--the creed of
the Nationalists--had its complement in the doctrine of
salvation through political rights and personal freedom--
the creed of the Liberals.
In its origins, liberalism and the liberal movement
were separate from, and anterior to, the intellectual re-
naissance. French and English formative influences were
jointly mingled. The theory of natural rights, intrinsic
and superior to any other rights, however acquired, demo-
cratic government, the basis of the Stats not in authority,
custom or prescription, but in the indivisible and inalien-
able sovereignty of the nation, law as the expression of an
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 17
infallible general will--these and kindred basic ideas were
mainly derived from the French Revolution and the
principles of 1789. The study of English history and the
English Constitution--the development of a kindred
Teutonic race--provided a practical programme:--Limited
State authority, representative institutions, a popular and
statutory suffrage, ministerial responsibility, financial
control of the executive by the representative chamber,
government in accordance with the will of a majority,
free to choose, a system of local self-government linked
with the central government, an unfettered press, an
independent judiciary and statutory guarantees for the
liberty of the individual citizen against executive abuse
of power. The liberal movement exhibited many forms
and combinations from the extreme radicalism of the
theoretical Republicans to the moderate programme of
a limited monarchy of the English type.
? 1. The Constitutional Conflict, the Polish
Question, and the German Problem . . 116
? 2. Schleswig-Holstein, the Treaty of Vienna,
and the Convention of Gastein, 1863-1865 156
? 3. The Rupture with Austria--The Treaty of
Prague, 1865-1866 . . . . 190
V. The Chancellor of the North German Con-
federation . . . . . . . 222
The Making of the North German Confederation--
The War with France, 1866-1870 --The
Treaty of Frankfurt--The Unification of
Germany, 1870-1871.
si
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? xii CONTENTS
VI. The Imperial Chancellor, 1871-1890 . . . 289
? I. The Empire, the System, and the Chancellor,
1871-1878 289
? 2. The Kulturkampf, 1871-1878 . . . 309
? 3. Foreign Policy, 1871-1879 . . . . 327
? 4. The New Era--Home Policy, 1878-1888 . 352
? 5. Foreign Policy--The Triple Alliance--The
Colonial Problem--France and Russia, 1879-
1888 394
? 6. The Last Phase--Bismarck's Resignation,
March 1888-March 1890 . . . . 454
Conclusion . . . . . . . . 475
Appendix A. The Ems Dispatch . . . . 496
Appendix B. The Reinsurance Treaties of 1884 and 1887 498
Bibliography . . . . . . 506
Chronological Table . . . . . . 5*3
Index . . . . . . . . . 516
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? BISMARCK
CHAPTER I
GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM, iSi5-1848
Bismarck was born on April 1, 1815, and died on July
30, 1898. His life and political career, therefore, cover
the nineteenth century proper, reckoned from the final
act of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic drama, with its
consummation in the Congress and Treaties of Vienna.
Bismarck as a figure in history has a twofold significance:
by the accomplishment of German unification and the
foundation of a German Empire under Prussian hegemony
he succeeded, where so many had failed, in solving the
German problem of the nineteenth century; he altered
the fundamental framework of the State system, as well
as the map, of Europe. In 1871 the political capital of
Continental Europe, hitherto either Paris or Vienna, was
established beyond dispute at Berlin, and the European
State system was remodelled by the creation of a Central
German Empire expressed in the supremacy of a mili-
tarist and industrialised Prussia over a Germany unified
on a federal basis. Each of these two results was a re-
volution. In combination they made a new Europe and
a new world of political relations, thoughc and action.
Bismarck's life and statesmanship, therefore, provide a
study of the origins, principles, methods and consequences
of this double revolution.
The nature of the historical problem is the essence of
the story. It is easy to see the solution stamped on
Europe in 1871, and to draw out its manifold moral. It is
no less easy, and probably more tempting, to emphasise
the logical character of each stage in the evolution, and
B. A
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? 2
BISMARCK
the inevitability of the final result. Our generation forgets
that, until Sedan had been fought and won, until the
dramatic scene in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles on
January 18, 1871, had been played out and the German
Reichstag with a German Emperor and an Imperial Chan-
cellor had met at Berlin, no one, even twenty years before
1871, foresaw or could hive foreseen, no one predicted or
could have predicted, the precise form of the final result.
It is easy to ignore the plain truth that the Germany of
1815 or 1848 or 1861 might have been unified at a different
time in a different way with different objects, and with very
different results, both for Germany and for Europe. The
Bismarckian solution was not a predetermined and in-
evitable event in world history. The earnest and high-
minded Germans of so many conflicting schools of thought,
who from 1815 onwards worked so hard and sacrificed so
much to achieve a German unity in fundamental contra-
diction to that established in 1871, no less than Bis-
marck himself, were aware that it was not the inevitable,
but rather the unexpected, which ultimately came to pass.
Bismarck's career, indeed, illustrates throughout the
truth, not too familiar even to historical students, that
the chief difficulty of a scientific interpretation of events
does not lie in an analysis of the solution, but in a recon-
struction of the successive phases of the problem. In
Bismarck's statesmanship, the man and the problem, and
their subtle and continuous reaction each on the other--
these are the marrow of the matter. And by non-German
students who have not inherited the categories of thought
and feeling, the traditions and outlook on life intuitive
in the German mind, or experienced the political con-
ditions in which the German people from 1815 onwards
lived and aspired, the German problem of the nineteenth
century has to be laboriously reconstructed. The lament-
able absence of knowledge of the real Germany and the
obsession of preconceived ideas in the France of the
Bourbon Restoration, of the Orleanist Monarchy and the
Second Empire, brought disaster to France. The no less
lamentable ignorance of English statesmen, of our press
that made public opinion, and of the British nation that
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 3
did not wish to be instructed, if the instruction required
a painful readjustment of accepted beliefs, was responsible
for repeated humiliations, the misuse or loss of unrivalled
opportunities and ultimately for a situation fraught with
peril.
The British people, indeed, blind to the unperceived
foundation of the British Empire in the intellectual toil
of its best minds, and to the continuous influence of ideas
on its political evolution, is impatient of all invitations to
correlate, even in outline, the salient features of German
political and philosophical speculation to the political
history of nineteenth-century Germany. Fichte and
Hegel, Humboldt, Savigny and Clausewitz, Novalis,
Schelling and Schopenhauer, Haller, Ranke and Stahl,
the Kreuzzeitung and the men of 1848, Dahlmann, Ger-
vinus, Gneist, Bliintschli, von der Goltz and the young
Treitschke--that vast and repellent mass of ' dead ' meta-
physics, law, ethics and political philosophy so copiously
produced by German minds and explored with the
patience and zeal of national science by German erudition,
the British mind instinctively feels has little bearing on Bis-
marck, the man of action, the apostle of ' blood and iron,'
who solved by the sword a problem that would have been
simple but for the metaphysicians, the professors and the
pamphleteers. Bismarck, we are continually reminded,
shared with Napoleon a supreme contempt for 'idealogues,'
who darkened counsel by their nebulous fantasies--children
in politics, fitted for academic class-rooms and the
editorial camera obscura, incapable of governing or making
the policy of States. Yet no one knew better than Bis-
marck that the theories and ideals of the aristocracy of
intellect, the political programme of the university chair
and the cry of the class-room made the Germany and the
Germans of his day. The transition from the junker of
1849 to the statesman of 1862 lay in his discovery that the
new Germany was the Germany that counted, and the
new Germany was the Germany somehow to be unified.
The master of a Realpolitik reckoned amongst the realities
--the true ponderabilia of each successive situation--the
German mind, as political speculation had made it and as a
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? 4
BISMARCK
statesman responding to the ideals could exploit it. His
debt to the ' idealogues' was greater than he ever publicly
admitted. Meinecke, for example, in his Weltburgertutn
und Nationalstaat--an illuminating study of the evolution
of German political thought from Fichte to the new era
of William n. --has proved how much of the alleged
originality of Bismarck's federal solution in 1866 and 1871
was an adaptation from principles suggested by the despised
Liberal leaders of 1848, and how impossible the Bismarckian
adaptation would have been but for this intellectual
travail of the' idealogues' between i848andl87i. Count-
less memoirs, hundreds of pages of reports, the serried
phalanx of Bismarck's letters and speeches, furnish proofs.
From the spring of his irresponsible Junkertum to the
magisterial utterances in the autumn of his Chancellorship
--in the Landtag at Berlin, the Diet at Frankfurt, the
Memoranda from the Embassies at Paris and St. Peters-
burg, the Reichstag of the North German Confederation
and the Empire--Bismarck fought, dagger out of sheath,
a truceless battle of ideas and of political and constitutional
principles. He fought impartially with the Jacobins of
the German Revolution, with Liberals, Unitarians and
Federalists, with the conservative cosmopolitanism of the
Holy Alliance and with the Prussianism of his dearest
friends, with Catholic ultramontanism, secular liberalism
and social democracy, with the conception of political
parochialism (Kleinstaaterei) and local dynasticism, with
Pan - German nationalism, and anti - German cosmo-
politanism. These titanic collisions of ideas with ideas,
the contests of informed wills with informed wills, the
fifty years' struggle for the soul and mind of the German
people, cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant battle of blood-
less shades for bloodless shadows, nor blown to an empty
air by the trumpets of Rezonville. The German mind
had to be made and remade in a prolonged intellectual
travail and an unending political duel before the foundations
of the solid house that Bismarck's Germany acknowledged
he had built for the German nation could be well and
surely laid. Tantae molts erat, indeed. The picture of
Bismarck as simply the demonic man of action is false
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 5
and unjust--unjust because it dwarfs the man and elim-
inates much that is most significant in his conception of
life and in his work--false because it unduly simplifies the
magnitude and complexity of his task. It is no less false
and unjust to the ideals of the defeated and to the con-
quered causes which pleased neither Bismarck nor, in the
end, the high gods.
The German problem, in short, was as much consti-
tutional as political--and in the constitutional labyrinth
lurked theories, ideals and formulae more formidable and
intractable than the institution and machinery which
made the Germany of 1815.
In 1815 Germany was constituted as a loose confedera-
tion (a Staaten-Bund) of thirty-nine States of very different
sizes, strength and system of government. The Federal
Act which defined the constitution was the result of, and
imposed by, the European Congress of Vienna. The
Settlement was a defeat alike of the unitarian and federalist
schemes of the Nationalists, either Prussian or in close
sympathy with Prussia. Its object was to provide the
Germany of 1815 with an organisation which would com-
bine the preservation of the individual sovereignty,
independence and inviolability of each of the partici-
pating States with a guarantee of external and internal
peace for the confederation as a whole. The framework
of the Settlement of 1815 proved that the authors were
more influenced by the desire to provide securities against
the dangers of the past than to anticipate the evolu-
tion of the future. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic
period had proved the complete failure of the defunct
Holy Roman Empire to maintain the security and in-
tegrity of that Empire against foreign aggression, to prevent
its members from making war on each other, or from
entering into alliances with foreign Powers, detrimental
to the interests of Germany as a whole. It had per-
mitted leagues such as the Napoleonic Confederation of the
Rhine, by which two-thirds of Germany passed under the
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? 6
BISMARCK
organised control of a foreign sovereign and placed its
military and economic resources at the disposal of a foreign
dictator. Hence, in the new confederation the Member-
States were forbidden to make war on each other, to con-
clude separate alliances with foreign Powers, while their
membership was conditioned by mutual guarantees of the
several territorial possessions included in the Union.
The Federal Act and the Federal Constitution implied
the existence of a common German interest, and the duty
of Germany organised in the League of Thirty-Nine
States to promote and defend it. It was not only a
German but a European duty. The interest of Europe
required the organisation of the German States for
certain common purposes; the settlement arrived at in
a European congress recognised the interest of Europe in
providing the organisation and maintaining it.
There has always been a German problem. There
always will be. In 1815 the heart of the matter is reached
by two questions: How far did the new confederation
meet the requirements of Germany and of Europe?
What provision, if any, was made for adaptation to future
and unforeseen needs or demands, either specifically German
or more generally European?
It is easy to pile up a formidable indictment against the
German work of the Congress of Vienna, particularly from
the relentless criticism of a later generation, which reckons
the Settlement of 1815 as one of the injuriae temporum
inflicted by heartless diplomatists and malevolent European
Powers on a hapless and helpless Germany--and to show
that it had every imaginable defect.
It is not difficult to prove that the Settlement was a
galling disappointment to ardent Nationalists so different
as Stein, Humboldt and Arndt, and a cause of rage to
fierce Prussian Particularists such as Blucher. All these
things and much else--are they not written in the
chronicles of great and small German historians? It is more
relevant to the purpose in hand to analyse than to indict.
The Federal Diet, whether in the ordinary session of
seventeen delegates, or in the plenum of sixty-nine repre-
sentatives in which every sovereign State was represented,
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 7
was the one effective federal institution. The Diet was
not a parliament but a congress of diplomatic represen-
tatives whose votes as defined by the mandates of their
governments alone could alter the fundamental laws. It
was presided over by the Austrian representative, who
had a casting vote. Austria, therefore, was recognised
as the head of the confederation.
We must further note that: (1) There was no federal
executive to execute the Diet's decrees, a duty which fell
on each Member-State; (2) no federal military force existed
except on paper, and all efforts, notably by Prussia after
1815, to make a federal army a reality, broke down, not
only in detail but in principle: for the question of the
supreme command raised the insoluble dualism of Austria
and Prussia; (3) no alteration in fundamental laws, or-
ganic institutions, individual rights or religious affairs,
could be made except by a unanimous vote, i. e. a liberum
veto to block change was vested in every State, however
petty; (4) the governments of the States were alone
represented- and the governments meant the ruling
dynasties. The German people were not directly repre-
sented, nor, unless they could influence the several govern-
ments, had they any voice in federal decisions and policy.
The complete failure of the Federal Diet to realise even
the most modest aspirations of nascent German national-
ism and a growing liberalism, was due as much to the
policy of the German governments as to the inherent
defects of the constitution. Had those governments been
ready to utilise the powers provided in the Federal Act,
the thirty years between 1815 and the Revolution of 1848
might have witnessed a progressive series of moderate
reforms, which would probably have averted that revo-
lution with all its disastrous consequences. In their
anxiety to avert revolution, the governments of Germany
after 1815 stored up the forces which made revolution
inevitable. The Diet fell under the control of Austria,
which meant under the control of Metternich. It came
to be a machine for either doing nothing or dutifully
registering the decree of a reactionary system, based on a
particular interpretation of German, Austrian and Faro-
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? 8
BISMARCK
pean interests. The suspension or mutilation of liberal
constitutions in the German States, the denial of a free
press, the interference with individual liberty and with
the freedom of thought and teaching in the universities,
the hostility to all change as necessarily democratic and
revolutionary, have damned the Diet with a double dose
of the original sin of Metternich himself. But Metter-
nich, who imposed this policy on a willing Emperor and
a despotically governed Austria, could not have imposed
it on the Federal Diet without the ready complicity of
the German governments.
The Federal Constitution did not make those govern-
ments what they were; but it provided them with an
effective machinery for carrying out a reactionary, centri-
fugal and particularist policy. Popular representation and
control were on principle excluded. But had the Federal
Act set up a truly Federal Parliament and a truly Federal
Ministry, it is practically certain that the quarrels between
1815 and 1848 would have been continuous and irrecon-
cilable. So deep was the antagonism between the prin-
ciples of the dynasties and the popular conception of
government, so profound the economic and constitutional
differences between the several States, so keen the jealousies
and fears of the dynasties--so disunited were the nationalist
or popular parties in political principles and ends--that
Germany would have been rent by secessions or plunged
into a civil war from which France, Russia and Great
Britain could not have held aloof.
Federalism, as a system of political organisation, it must
be remembered, and as a political solution for the ad-
ministrative difficulties of modern States, was in 1815
in its infancy; Europe in 1815 had neither thought out
the theory and principles, nor acquired the political ex-
perience required for its successful establishment. The
literature and experience of 1917 are relatively rich in
both respects; but even in 1917 there are obvious gaps
which the political life of the United States, of the
modern German Empire, of the Dominions of Canada
and Australia, and the Swiss Republic do not auto-
matically fill. And the Germany of 1815 was not only
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 9
and necessarily poor in the philosophy, literature and
experience of federalism: it had but recently revived its
education in political philosophy and speculation. The
new Germany was henceforward asking with increasing
earnestness and thoroughness fundamental questions:
What under modern conditions is a State? What is its
basis? What are its rights? Whence does it derive
its authority, and over whom, and to what extent?
What are the relations of a State with other States? What
are the laws or principles of the evolution of States?
What is nationality? What are the respective values of
States based on civilisation (Kulturstaat), States based on
political or governmental unity (Etnhtitsstaat), States based
on nationality (Nationalstaat)? What is the ethical and
political import of citizenship based on cosmopolitan
ideals (Weltburgertum) as opposed to citizenship con-
ditioned and restricted by the claims of race, the terri-
torial State and the individual as such? Hard questions,
indeed, the answering of which might well tax the best
brains and the ripest political experience of Germany for
two generations to come.
The worst defect of the Federal Constitution was not
its failure to realise conceptions of German unity, im-
mature and limited by the exceptional experience of the'
Napoleonic and Revolutionary era, nor its curtailment
of freedom of thought and political liberty, but its com-
plete failure to provide a sobering and stimulating political
education for the educated middle class of a loosely
united German nation. The Germany of 1815 had
passed through an abnormal ordeal since 1789. But the
men of 1848, intellectually able, of a high sincerity and
purpose, fired by an inspiring idealism without which no
nation has ever achieved what endures, were as fettered
by political inexperience as were the men who made the
French Revolution. They had not learned what govern-
ment demands, because all means for learning the lesson
had been denied them, both on principle and as a fact.
The Germany which produced scholars such as Savigny,
Boeckh, Lachmann, Bopp, the two Schlegels, the two
Humboldts, the brothers Grimm, and Gesenius; in science,
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? 10
BISMARCK
Ritter, von Baer, Gauss, Oersted, Liebig, Virchow and
Helmholtz; in history, Niebuhr, Ranke, Waitz, Pertz and
Bohmer; in theology, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Baur and
Dollinger; in art, Rauch, Cornelius and Kaulbach; in
music, Schubert, Schumann, Spohr, Mendelssohn and
Meyerbeer; and in philosophical thought, minds so
powerful and original as those of Hegel, Schelling,
Schopenhauer, Herbart, Clausewitz and List--the Ger-
many that witnessed the zenith and sunset of Goethe's
genius and the career of Heine, was singularly deficient
in statesmen of the first order and in the literature, as
distinct from the philosophy, of politics. It was a mar-
vellous spring in a nation's intellectual growth, with the
pageant of its intellectual summer to come after 1848--
but the sources and masters of its political wisdom were
English or French.
It is no less striking how German statesmen from
Metternich to Bismarck and von Bulow, while extolling
the supremacy of German intellect, have denied to the
mass of their countrymen political capacity--forgetting
that the development of political capacity in a nation is
as much a question of opportunity as of ability. The
science and art of government are more exacting even
than the science and arts of the intellectual and imagina-
tive life. If ability is a necessary condition, a free field
for its exercise, the remorseless tests of criticism, failure and
responsibility are even more indispensable for citizenship
than for thinkers, scholars and artists. The worst of all
schools for a nation's political life are irresponsible politi-
cians appealing to a disfranchised, uninstructed, irrespon-
sible and alienated public opinion. Nations generally pay
a heavier price for their sins of omission than for their
sins of commission. For the Germany of 1815-48 the
exclusion of its educated middle-class from an active and
corporate share in political life is the gravest indictment
that Metternich and the system of Metternich incur. 1
1 Hohenlohe {Mem. , i. 109) wrote: 'In south-western Germany the idea
of unity is regarded as a matter of life and death, and is the unceasing object of
anxious thought to politicians and eager excitement to the masses . . . the
true cause lies in the fact--more or less consciously recognised--that the greater
portion of the German nation has no voice in determining its destinies. ' (1847. )
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM n
The political problems and difficulties of the German
Confederation after 1815 were further complicated by
the peculiar character of its'component members. Luxem-
burg united to the ruling house of the new Netherlands
kingdom was a member of the confederation: the King
of Denmark as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein was repre-
sented for Holstein but not for Schleswig: Hanover until
1837 was united to the British Crown, and after 1837,
though the personal union of the Hanoverian and British
Crowns was severed, the connection with' the British
royal house was of the closest: Oldenburg was dynas-
tically connected with the reigning house of Russia: the
house of Saxe-Coburg in 1830 provided the new kingdom
of Belgium with its sovereign, and in 1840 the British
Queen with a Prince-Consort, reinforcing the British
interest in and influence on German affairs: the whole
of the kingdom of Prussia was not included in the con-
federation: and the Empire of Austria was only repre-
sented for ' the German ' parts of the Empire. -
The Federal Diet, in consequence, was composed of
diplomatic representatives from States purely Germanic
and from States only partially so, the interests of which
were frequently determined by non-German, or anti-
German, considerations. The Diet, therefore, directly
or indirectly, was brought into close relation with the most
delicate and difficult problems of European policy.
Apart from the European origin of the Federal Consti-
tution, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, the Nether-
lands, and Denmark had the right and the interest to
intervene effectively in the deliberations and actions of the
Diet, and such intervention would not spring from purely
Germanic considerations. The history of the problems
of Poland, Schleswig-Holstein, Luxemburg, of Slavonic,
or Magyar, or Italian Austria, are a continuous commen-
tary on this anomalous situation. In short, it was im-
possible to. solve these problems either by the Federal Diet
alone or without its co-operation.
One great European State alone, France, was excluded
from all share--and its exclusion pointed unmistakably
to a fresh phase of the historic struggle for the control of
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? 12
BISMARCK
the Rhine. The creation of the German Confederation
registered 'a Germany unredeemed' and a France un-
satisfied. The refusal of the Prussian demand in 1814
for 'the restoration' of Alsace and Lorraine had been
balanced by the removal of France from the Rhenish
Provinces occupied since 1795. But the French flag on
Strasburg and Metz, the federal flag on the fortress of
Mainz, and the Prussian flag at Coblenz, signalised baffled
ambition and inextinguishable ideals for French and
German patriots. Neither France nor Germany could
regard the Treaties and Settlement of 1815 as the last
word. Any remodelling, therefore, of the Federal Con-
stitution of 1815, any alteration of the composition or
powers of the German Confederation, touched every live
wire in the European State system.
The Settlement of 1815 had made the German problem
an international problem. The unification of Germany,
even more than the unification of Italy, could not be
effected without a revolution -in the European State
system defined by the Vienna treaties.
No less could it be accomplished without an internal
revolution in Germany and the formation of a new German
mind. The system of Metternich had the merit of clearly
conceived principles adapted to secure precise ends. The
maintenance, moreover, of a status quo has all the advan-
tages of the defensive in war. On the side of the con-
servative forces were vested interests, historic traditions,
established institutions, the dynasties, and a bitter ex-
perience of revolution. Everywhere in Europe from the
Neva to the Seine, from the Tagus to Copenhagen, fire and
sword had done their fell work. Since 1789, the horror
of war was subtly interlaced with the horror of re-
volution. A Europe emaciated in spirit and resources
by twenty-five years of unbroken struggle, felt that
peace was worth having at any price, and that liberty
could be purchased too dearly. And Europe (ex-
cluding the Ottoman Empire) had peace for nearly forty
years.
The succeeding thirty years accomplished much in
formulating demands, and clothing them with precision
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 13
and clear objectives, which it is easier to appreciate to-day
than in 1848. The horror of war and the fear of re-
volution had slowly evaporated. The young generation
was open to persuasion that there were far worse things
than war: that peace could be purchased by sacrifices
too costly for individual, State and nation, and that when
other means were unavailable or futile, revolution was
justifiable and necessary. The solid achievements of
German brains in every department of human activity
had implanted in the educated German mind certain
potent convictions: that what had already been accom-
plished by German brains in philosophy, classical scholar-
ship, in philology, literature, history, the physical sciences
and the aesthetic arts, was as nothing to what could be
accomplished in all these departments if German brains
could have a freer field and a purer air to work in; that
in political no less than in the intellectual life, German
brains would show their creative powers; that the future
lay open to the highest' kultur' nation, true to its mission
and the obligation to realise its civilised self; that the
primacy in science and civilisation, once Italian, French
or British, was unmistakably passing to the German
nation; and fourthly, that there was a causal relation
between the efficacy of a nation's form of government and
its efficacy in national science (Wissenschafi) in its finest
and broadest sense. No less significant, the renaissance
of the German universities were both cause and effect
of the renaissance of the German people. Prussia, in its
hour of humiliation after Jena, founded the University
of Berlin. The firm belief of the Prussian reformers,
building greater than they knew, was that the moral re-
generation of the kingdom demanded no less imperatively
an intellectual regeneration; Breslau in Silesia was made
a university town in 1815, and the re-hoisting of the
Prussian flag in the enlarged Rhenish Provinces was
emphasised by the reconstitution of the University of
Bonn. The foundation of universities as a memorial of
victory in the field and as indispensable organs of national
strength and unification, remains a remarkable element in
Prussian statecraft.
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? >>4
BISMARCK
Outside Prussia, Heidelberg, Gottingen, Jena, Leipzig,
Munich, Tubingen, were especially distinguished. A
full generation before the Zollverein accomplished in 1868
the economic unity of Germany, the universities had
achieved a unity of culture impressive as much for the
solidarity of its foundations as for the tenacity of its grip
on the German mind.
The brotherhood of German learning brought about
the brotherhood of German learners. The Bavarian
who came to Berlin to attend the courses of a Ranke or a
Savigny, the Prussian who had heard Dahlmann at
Gottingen or Droysen at Kiel, the Saxon who went to
Strauss or Baur at Tubingen or Dollinger at Munich had
realised that Germany was not a geographical expression,
and that there were spiritual and intellectual bonds uniting
all Germans which kings, diplomatists and treaties could
not mar or destroy. In any young generation a settled
conviction that ideas are power, the most potent because
the most pervasive of all realities, will always develop
a high-explosive political force. Epigrams on professors
are as easy as they are popular; and the German pro-
fessoriate is the unfailing butt of the Philistine of every
nation; but in an epoch when young Germany was
dreaming dreams and seeing visions, it was an inestimable
service to the German mind that in the class-rooms of the
universities German youth was taught by men who had
a right to be heard the value of knowledge for know-
ledge's sake, and learned the lesson that national supre-
macy in science, whether of language, literature, history,
or the physical world, could only be acquired by the
severest self-discipline and the most exacting thoroughness
--by toil, silence and endurance. The German pro-
fessor had a German audience, outside his class-room, fit
and certainly not few. Savigny's and Ranke's pam-
phlets, France and Germany, the Division and Unity of
Germany, The Great Powers, are examples of the ferment-
ing influences that could distil from an academic pen.
And they could be multiplied at will. Carlyle said that
the skins of the French aristocracy bound the second
edition of Rousseau's works: it was not only the skins of
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 15
French aristocrats which bound the later editions of
many German works of learning.
Through historical research, above all, the German
nation rediscovered its past and read in it a guarantee
of the future. The German people learned from the path-
making science of the Grimms, Bopp, Pertz, Waitz, Giese-
brecht, von Maurer, Gervinus and Dahlmann, how deep
were their roots in the past, and what great intellectual
and political achievements the German race had wrought.
From the dim centuries of warring tribalism emerged
the illumination of the Teutonic genius of Charles the
Great, who combined the Central Empire, which formed
the legacy of Imperial Rome, with the gifts of the Teutonic
mind. Germany was bidden to march through the cycle
of the Middle Ages, illustrious with imperial rulers--
Carolingian, Saxon, Franconian, Hohenstaufen, Luxem-
burg, Habsburg--and to note how a Holy Roman Empire
of the German nation had preserved for civilisation the
religious, moral, political and intellectual unity of Europe
under the wings of the Teutonic Eagle; to recall the
winning for Christ and the German conception of civili-
sation from Lithuanian, Wend, Slav and Avar of the Baltic
lands almost to the banks of the Neva; to ponder on
Vienna and the marches of the East--barriers against
Magyar and Turk. It was re-taught the inexhaustible
services of the German Reformation and German Pro-
testantism to the free and critical spirit of man; it was
invited to contrast the two centuries of internecine strife
and political degradation ushered in by the Thirty Years'
War and the bondage of the German nation to foreign
masters, until Lessing and Winckelmann in the sphere of
mind, Frederick the Great in the sphere of facts, pointed
the way to a promised land beyond the wilderness in
which they had wandered. Poetry, philology, comparative
mythology and folk-lore, the comparative study of insti-
tutions, palaeography and the archives, the philosophy of
law--history in its widest streams, explored and mapped
by the severest science--were exhibited to enforce a single
moral--the greatness of the German contribution to the
civilisation of the past, a greatness in proportion to its
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? I6
BISMARCK
fidelity to its racial and national character, and the cer-
tainty that a similar fidelity in the future would produce
no less momentous results for Germany and humanity.
Arndt could proclaim that the healing of the world would
be found in the German spirit.
The grandeur and unity of the German race sank deep
into the hearts of a disillusioned generation. The German
mind, it concluded, had been at its best when Europe
had been politically organised round a German Empire,
with West and East duly subordinated to the central
framework. The 'natural frontiers' claimed by France
were a denial of geography, and an insolent outrage on
the natural rights of the indivisible German nation. Did
not the renaissance of the German spirit require the racial
unity of the German people to be expressed once more in
a national and central political organisation? Slowly
but surely the mind of the new Germany became imbued
with the doctrine and ideas of nationalism, rooted in the
reinforced concrete of racial origins and the laws of political
evolution, imposing as a corollary the duty of freeing
all Germans from the servitude of non-German political
or intellectual domination. Wherever Germans of a com-
mon speech, race, and literature lived, whether in the
artificial Confederation of 1815 or outside it, wherever
such Germans were prevented from realising their national
and racial self--that was unredeemed Germany. The
ideal of a national State in a free nation was thus built up,
line upon line, precept upon precept. The doctrine of
political salvation by fidelity to racial unity--the creed of
the Nationalists--had its complement in the doctrine of
salvation through political rights and personal freedom--
the creed of the Liberals.
In its origins, liberalism and the liberal movement
were separate from, and anterior to, the intellectual re-
naissance. French and English formative influences were
jointly mingled. The theory of natural rights, intrinsic
and superior to any other rights, however acquired, demo-
cratic government, the basis of the Stats not in authority,
custom or prescription, but in the indivisible and inalien-
able sovereignty of the nation, law as the expression of an
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 17
infallible general will--these and kindred basic ideas were
mainly derived from the French Revolution and the
principles of 1789. The study of English history and the
English Constitution--the development of a kindred
Teutonic race--provided a practical programme:--Limited
State authority, representative institutions, a popular and
statutory suffrage, ministerial responsibility, financial
control of the executive by the representative chamber,
government in accordance with the will of a majority,
free to choose, a system of local self-government linked
with the central government, an unfettered press, an
independent judiciary and statutory guarantees for the
liberty of the individual citizen against executive abuse
of power. The liberal movement exhibited many forms
and combinations from the extreme radicalism of the
theoretical Republicans to the moderate programme of
a limited monarchy of the English type.
