Bennigsen
then refused
for himself and the others.
for himself and the others.
Robertson - Bismarck
org/access_use#pd-us-google
? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 317
momentous. 1 After 1878 he argued that he was not
responsible for the policy of the Kulturkampf, nor for the
May Laws and their execution. The argument will not
stand the test of facts nor of probability. In 1872, 1873,
and 1875 ne spoke repeatedly both in the Reichstag and
the Prussian Landtag in defence of the coercive legislation
and of the general policy of Prussia and the Empire in the
controversy. He complained bitterly in private letters
to Roon of the desertion of the Conservative party in
the 'Catholic controversy'; he was responsible for the
appointment of Falk, and supported him until 1878 against
the attacks in Court circles. It is, in the absence of all
corroborative evidence to the contrary, impossible to
believe that Bismarck as Chancellor and Minister-President
would have allowed a subordinate colleague to embark
Prussia and the Empire by legislation and administrative
action in a life-and-death struggle, which involved the most
delicate and fundamental issues of high policy at home and
abroad, without his complete concurrence. It is demon-
strable that the correspondence between the Emperor and
the Pope, which stated very tersely the Prussian attitude,
was on the Emperor's side drafted by Bismarck; the with-
drawal of the German mission from the Curia--the rupture,
in fact, of diplomatic relations--was Bismarck's act, and in
the negotiations after 1878 Bismarck assumed that the
May Laws would not be withdrawn unless the Vatican
made substantial concessions. The later assertion (in 1878
and repeated in his Memoirs) that he regarded the struggle
as mainly a recrudescence of the chronic problem of
Poland was an afterthought, and the blame subsequently
laid on Falk, as the author of the mischief and the failure,
was a characteristic trait of ingratitude. A scapegoat had
to be found, and Falk, the hero of the National Liberals
and Radicals, served the convenient purpose of exculpating
the Chancellor and affronting the parties with which
Bismarck broke between 1878 and 1879.
In 1874 Bismarck told the Reichstag that since 1862 his
1 Under-Secretary von Thile told Lord Odo Russell in 1872 'that Bismarck's
determination to raise the storm and fight the Church was so sudden that he
and Bismarck's private secretaries could mark the day and hour of 4the change
that came over him like an inspiration. '
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? BISMARCK
previsions and forecasts in all the great issues had been
wonderfully accurate. The remark had a side reference
to the KulturkampJ. But in 1871 Bismarck plainly mis-1
calculated. The diplomacy with which he had hitherto
crossed swords successfully had not had the traditions,
skill, fertility in resource, and pertinacity of the Vatican.
The Roman Curia could and did pull many wires through-
out Europe, and it could afford to wait. It had no capital
that could be stormed, leaving the defence impotent. Its
capital was everywhere, planted in the consciences of
millions of its communion. Heads can be cut off, but the
obedience of heart and will cannot be enforced by prison
or the guillotine. Bullets or wristcuffs cannot kill ideas.
The extermination of the faithful is not the same thing as
the extirpation of a faith. Indeed, the seven years from
1871 to 1878 were an instructive object-lesson in the limits
of power even when exercised by a State with the executive
strength of Prussia. In the constitutional conflict in 1862
Bismarck had rightly assumed that the Liberals would not
raise barricades, defy the laws, or refuse to pay taxes, and
that, if they did, the whiff of grapeshot would settle the
first outbreak. In 1872 he apparently calculated that the
Catholics would either not resist, or, if they did, would soon
surrender to a rigorous coercion. He was completely
mistaken. When Cardinal Archbishops, with the applause
of their congregations, defied the law and went to prison,
the State as Power could only, as Windthorst remarked,
bring in the guillotine--if it dared. For when a State by
its own action converts law-breakers into martyrs for con-
science it loses the sympathy of the law-abiding. The
average German began to think as Pepys did when he saw
oppressed Dissenters going to prison under the Clarendon
code: 'I would to God they would conform or not be so
well catch'd. ' Universal suffrage proved a terrible weapon
in the hands of the Centre party. At the general election
of 1874 the National Liberals increased their numbers to
over one hundred and fifty, but the Clericals polled
a million and a half votes and returned not sixty but
ninety-one members. Bismarck therefore had to face a
National Liberal party stronger than ever and more
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 319
indispensable to the government, and a Centre opposi-
tion enormously encouraged by its success.
It was in the nature of things that on both sides the
struggle should extend far beyond the limits foreseen in
1871: and the simple original issue, whether the Vatican
should or should not constrain opponents of the Decrees
to obedience, was by 1876 converted into an illimitable
controversy on the functions, basis, character, and ends of
civil government and its relation to ecclesiastical authority;
it threatened to divide Germany into two great con-
fessional camps, Protestant and Catholic, and to throw
back the newly born Empire of 1871 into the maelstrom
of Charles v. and the epoch of the Reformation, with the
passions of mediaeval Guelph and Ghibelline, and of Empire
and Papacy superimposed. In the welter of conflict the
secession and formation of the 'Old Catholics,' a tiny hand-
ful of the combatants, became a neglected by-issue. The
fiery support of religious and political Protestantism, and
of die powerful secularist intellectuals who desired to see a
complete separation of Church and State in every German
State, and the extirpation of denominational endowment
and teaching, was fatal to Liberal Catholicism. The issues
raised by Vaticanism became an assault in many quarters
on the Roman Catholic Church: and the cry of ' Los von
Rom ' and the establishment of a German national Catholic
Church on Febronian lines, independent of the Papacy,
aided the Papal effort to represent 'the May Laws' as a
Diocletian persecution, led by Bismarck into whom Satan
had entered.
To the Papacy, indeed, the Kulturkampf proved to
be an unqualified blessing. In 1871 and 1872 the anti-
infallibility movement within the Roman Communion was
a grave danger. But with an unerring eye the directors of
Vatican policy seized the weapon of their adversaries and
turned it against them. They closed the Roman Catholic
ranks as far as possible, and shifted the issue from the
narrower field of ' the May Laws' to a trial of strength
between the Roman Church as a whole and its opponents
spiritual or secular. The more eagerly did those oppo-
nents mass for attacks on a broad front, the broader the
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BISMARCK
front on which the Vatican deployed its counter-attacks.
Windthorst proved himself a consummate tactician and a
polished debater. He placed large issues in sonorous
phrases before the electorate in the programmes of the
Clerical Centre--freedom of conscience, the independence
of religion, the liberty of the individual German to worship
as reason led him, an Empire based on justice (Justitia funda-
mentum regnorum), taken from the mediaeval law books--and
by provocative taunts he understood how to seduce Con-
servatives, Liberals, Radicals, and Progressives into violent
indiscretions. It required courage to stand up to Bismarck,
but Windthorst smilingly removed the gloves and took and
gave telling punishment with a finished equanimity.
The results by 1878 were disquieting. Lord Odo
Russell's dispatches from 1873-77 indicate Bismarck's de-
pression, irritation, and anxiety. The Clericals had built
up a powerful and extraordinarily well-organised party;
they had ample funds, an influential press, and a network of
local machinery. It was the Kulturkampf which enabled
the Centre to become in Bismarck's lifetime the best
drilled, most obedient, and strongest single party in
Germany. They drew their strength from every class--
from cardinals and Polish magnates to the industrial
democracy in the old ecclesiastical principalities. The
stronger the executive action against them, the stronger
they reacted against it. The disciplining of Germany for
two generations told immensely in their favour. The
Clericals, and later the Social Democrats, had in the
German voter a man who had been drilled in a great mili-
tary machine, to whom obedience to command was life.
Given an organiser, a party with a real cause had organis-
able material ready to hand in the German electorate.
The Roman Church was an organisation already made.
Windthorst enjoyed its matchless and unlimited support.
The decadence of National Liberalism after 1878 is largely
accounted for by the absence of an intelligible cause, the
halting and contradictory language of its spokesmen, and
its dependence on a reservoir in a single social stratum, the
middle class. The Clerical party had none of these patent
defects.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 321
The ministerial conduct of the fight was vitiated also by
serious blunders. The punitive measures against the
inferior clergy--the hard-working priest of the village and
small town--threw hundreds of parishes, ignorant of the
deeper issues of Vaticanism, into opposition. The govern-
ment made no effort to enlist the sympathy of educated
Catholicism with the cause of freedom of opinion. Instead
of concentrating on the narrower issue of Vaticanism and
assisting the German hierarchy, placed in a grave perplexity
between two allegiances and influenced by a genuine anti-
pathy to the more profound consequences in the Decrees
and by a patriotic reluctance to defy the law binding on
German citizens; instead of trying to find a compromise for
the bishops coerced by Rome and menaced by the State;
instead of rallying the Catholic laity to the support of its
episcopate in the struggle with the Curia, the government
struck right and left at high and low with the indiscrimina-
tion of brute strength. Falk fought with the ability of a
trained lawyer who assumes that a juristic answer, expressed
in well-drafted legislation, and backed by executive action,
can settle every problem of life and conduct. Bismarck left
the law to Falk, the administration to the Home Office,
and thought of the higher politics alone. The limitations
in his statecraft were at once exposed. This was not a
case where ' one hand could wash the other. ' The subtle
yet deep intellectual and moral implications in the contro-
versy did not interest him, nor had he the time, the inclina-
tion, or the accumulated knowledge to master them. And,
as with Napoleon 1. in his struggle with the Papacy, the
ingrained contempt for ideas as ideas, for 'ideologues,' and
for men to whom ideas have a more inspiring import than
material force warped his judgment and blinded his in-
tuition. To Bismarck, as to Napoleon, the Church was a
necessity of an ordered life, but its action and position must
be strictly correlated to the ends prescribed by reasons of
State. In the Kulturkampf Bismarck found himself in
deeper water than his strength and skill could manage.
He was to repeat the experience in the struggle with
Social Democracy.
The shrewd Thiers predicted in 1873 that 'the iron
B. X
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? $22
BISMARCK
Chancellor' would find himself in the position described
in a story of Napoleon 1. 'Sire,' said a wag,' the enemy
has lost thousands of men. ' 'Yes,' replied Napoleon,' but
I have lost the battle. ' At Varzin in 1877 Bismarck was
ruefully reflecting that hundreds of priests had been driven
from their altars, but that he was on the point of losing the
battle.
For twelve months in the solitude of his estate the
Chancellor calculated and probed. The Emperor was
very unhappy, for he was at war with a third of his Empire.
'We have made enough concessions to Liberalism,' he
kept on fretfully repeating. The Empress, the powerful
Radziwills who represented at Court the Polish cause, the
Crown Prince's circle, and the Conservatives who after
1876 had closed their split, were in different ways and for
different reasons pressing for a cessation of the struggle.
Strong Protestants argued that the State as Power might
apply to the Lutheran Church the Erastian control applied
to the Roman Catholics. The Conservatives hated the
alliance with National Liberalism. The Centre might be
intolerant and superstitious, but it stood for authority and
social order, for religion and the Christian State, and not
for secularism and a godless education. Bismarck's sup-
port of the law imposing civil marriage in the Empire--a
recantation of the principles he had laid down from 1847-
51--was denounced as a lamentable apostasy, forced on him
by Liberalism. The governing class pressed for a return
to a Conservative policy. In a word, the pressure in all
the quarters most influential with the Crown was exerted
against the Bismarckian regime from 1871 to 1877.
Bismarck felt the pressure, and lashed out perpetually at
the insolence of the critics. But he recognised that the
whole internal and parliamentary situation was crumbling
into chaos. The financial position was critical. The
unified Empire was proving to be very costly. The system
of 'matricular contributions' to the Imperial revenue
from the federated States was a burden that aggravated
Particularism. The failure to nationalise the raflways cut
off a valuable Imperial revenue. New taxation was im-
peratively needed. The government required a large
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 323
expanding income, removed as far as possible from the
control of the Reichstag. There was only one method
available--indirect taxation by a tariff. Failure to provide
the necessary Imperial revenue, except by trenching on the
funds of the federated States, would inevitably cause a
demand for a reduction of military expenditure. Yet, a
comprehensive tariff meant a complete departure from
the Free-Trade system. Would the Liberals--would
Germany--agree to that?
Since 1873 a series of commercial crises, aided by a wave
of speculation and ' bubble companies' and the artificial
inflation caused by the milliards of the French indemnity
swept over Germany. Bankruptcies became as familiar
as funerals. German industry was hard pressed by inter-
national, and especially British, competition. The manu-
facturing interests cried out for protection, and the for-
mation in 1876 of a ' central union of German Industrials'
(Central Verband deutscher Industrieller) on a Protectionist
basis was a significant symptom. The industrial revolu-
tion, that had been coming for a generation, developed
after 1871 with impressive rapidity. It was to convert
Germany in thirty years into a second workshop of the
world, in which the need of raw material and of expanding
export markets, the rise of an industrial ' proletariat,' in-
creasing with every decade at a remarkable rate, and the
establishment of ' the grand industry,' were to be the de-
cisive characteristics. The middle class was throwing up
an industrial aristocracy drawn from the captains of in-
dustry--the financier, the manufacturer, the director of
interlocking syndicates, cartels and companies--whose
interests were those of a capitalistic society, freed from
the interference of Parliament. Could not this new
Schlotjunkertum--'theJunkers of the chimneys' that turned
the romantic banks of the fabled Rhine into the Lancashire
and Midlands of Germany-- be allied with the old agrarian
Junkertum in the struggle with individualist Liberalism
inspired by Cobden, Mill, and the British? With 1877
agricultural depression set in all over Europe, caused by the
raising of the European margin of cultivation in conse-
quence of competition in agricultural produce from the
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? 3H
BISMARCK
two Americas and the cheapness and facilities of oceanic
transit. Rents fell as prices fell. Agrarian Junkertum
was being hard hit; no less serious was the future of
German agriculture, on which the structure of Prussian
society was based and the supply of the best recruits for
the army depended. Had Bismarck read Adam Smith he
would have agreed that for Germany defence was more
important than opulence, and defence meant the whole
system of government and the governing class.
The Kulturkampf had thrown much more than Vatican-
ism into the crucible. Socialist Democracy, fed by the
industrial revolution, and watered by the political con-
fusion, was reproducing itself in the tissues, fibres, and
blood stream of the social and political organism with the
rapidity of the anthrax bacillus in an appropriate culture.
The Gotha programme of Social Democracy in 1875 re-
wrote the Eisenach programme of 1869 in italics: the
realisation of its aims was as deadly to the agrarian Junkers
as to the capitalist class; its secularism menaced Catholic
Clericals, Lutherans, and Calvinists with complete impar-
tiality. In 1874 the two Socialist members of the Reichstag
of 1871 had become 9, in 1877 12, representing half a million
votes, a third of the Centre vote. If it were not crushed,
what would Socialist Democracy be in 1887? Bismarck's
survey in short--the survey of a statesman who based his
policy on 'ponderable' realities--suggested a complete
change of system; and already in 1876 Roon, so often the
conservative periscope, hinted from his retirement that con-
servatives could begin to fatten the calf for the prodigal son
of Junkertum, emaciated by the husks of Liberalism.
It was not only in foreign policy that Bismarck's pro-
longed silences caused apprehension. From the woods
and glades of Varzin came rumours that rippled from the
lobbies of the Reichstag to the portico of the Vatican. Two
obstacles--the Kulturkampf and the National Liberals--
barred a bold bid for the governing classes of a future,
rather than the present, Germany, by a new, comprehen-
sive and constructive policy--a policy of pourboires and
power. To Bismarck more than any man the road to
Canossa, the white shirt and shivering in the snow of
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 325
Henry iv. , were hateful. But if the Papacy would share
the shirt, forgo the snow and trudge half-way to meet
him, a joint Canossa might be found at Kissingen or some
other resort where foreign diplomatists cured their souls
while they washed their bodies. If the Centre could be
secured it would vote solidly and manoeuvre at command
like a regiment. As for ' the May Laws' and Falk, 'we
can always,' as Bismarck said to Augustenburg in 1864,
'wring the necks of the chickens we have ourselves hatched. '
The National Liberals were tremendously powerful--
one hundred and fifty votes in the Reichstag--and they
could rely in Liberal issues on the Progressives and
Radicals. The Liberal bloc was at present the master of
the situation, and intended to remain so. They held the
road to Canossa or Protection in force. A hint came from
Varzin. Bennigsen went to the lion's den and returned.
When Bismarck came back to Berlin in the spring of
1878 it was clear what had happened. He had offered
office to the Nationalist Liberal leader, but on condition
of support in a new policy, vaguely outlined. 'I desired,'
wrote Bismarck, in his Memoirs (ii. 198), ' sincerely to per-
suade him, as I expressed it, to jump into my boat and
help me steer; I was drawn up by the landing-stage and
waiting for him to embark. ' Bennigsen indicated that, if
places were also found for two or three other prominent
National Liberals, the proposal might be seriously con-
sidered. Bismarck refused. There was room for Bennig-
sen in the King's Council, but not for Forckenbeck, or
Stauffenberg or any one else.
Bennigsen then refused
for himself and the others. When the Emperor, inspired
by the Conservatives and soldiers, angrily remonstrated
against this trafficking with Liberalism behind his Imperial
and Prussian back, Bismarck was able to assure him, with
perfect truth, that the last thing he desired was to ask his
Majesty to confer office on National Liberals. Bismarck
had hoped to split the Liberals by detaching Bennigsen and
the right of the party. Bennigsen desired to introduce
Parliamentary government--'a ministry a la Gladstone,'
which as in Great Britain would be representative of the
strongest party in the Legislature and make the policy of
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BISMARCK
the future. The negotiation, however, was a complete
failure. But while Bennigsen did not get office, Bismarck
gave the coup de gr&ce to the last effort to introduce the
system of responsible party government into the govern-
ment of the Empire. It only remained now to crush the
National Liberals.
It is commonly said that the Bismarckian policy in the
Kulturkampf ended in a complete defeat--proved by the
recantation of the next ten years. Three comments, how-
ever, are essential in this connection. First, the Liberal
parties which passed and upheld ' the May Laws ' and the
principles underlying them never recanted nor repented.
On the contrary, they opposed and lamented, with good
reason, the Chancellor's surrender. Secondly, the Vatican
in 1878 was as tired of the struggle as Bismarck. It had not
been defeated, but it had failed so far to secure amendment,
much less the repeal, of ' the May Laws. ' By 1878 the
danger of serious schism within the Roman Communion
had vanished. Ninety-nine Catholics out of a hundred
accepted the Vatican Decrees, but the Roman Church in
Germany was crippled by the Falk code. Had the
National Liberals come into office, determined to fight
to a finish, the Vatican would not have had an alliance to
sell which gave it so commanding a position in the nego-
tiations that followed the death of Pio Nono and the ac-
cession of Leo xii1. There is every reason to suppose that
a strong National Liberal ministry could have continued
the struggle and imposed a very different compromise to
that dictated from Rome and accepted by Bismarck.
Thirdly, Bismarck deliberately sacrificed victory in the
Kulturkampf to victory in other issues, more important
in his judgment. What those issues were the next twelve
years revealed (see p. 451). The turning-point in the
making of Imperial Germany was reached in 1878. The
Germany of 1890 was essentially the product of Bismarck's
policy in these twelve years imposed on the results pre-
viously achieved. But Bismarck was able to evade the
Liberal ultimatum and accomplish the vital transition to
the new era, only because the Reichstag was not a govern-
ment-making, policy-making organ. The adroitness and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
intuition with which he created opportunities and
utilised those provided by fate or fortune are very
remarkable. The years 1878 and 1879 are essentially
years, within Germany and without it, of 'the Bis-
marck touch. '
When the Chancellor returned to the Wilhelmstrasse
in the spring of 1878 his first business was to deal
with the Eastern Question and to preside at the Congress
of Berlin.
? 3. Foreign Policy, 1871-1879
The student of Bismarck's foreign policy after 1870 is
perpetually confronted with the difficulty of ascertaining
the truth. Sybel down to 1868 was permitted to use
freely the Prussian archives, and his classical history, The
Foundation of the German Empire, is written from original
official sources and enriched by precious quotations, not
available in other authorities. But for the period after
1868 Sybel found the . archives closed. He was not suffi-
ciently impressed with the duty of writing the history of
Germany as a chronicle of Hohenzollern omniscience.
Bismarck was lavish of explanations in the Reichstag, and
in documents intended for publication, but the gaps are
more conspicuous than the inclusions, nor do the ex-
planations offered always tally in substance and fact. It
is true that from British, French, Russian, and Austrian
sources much new light has been shed on dark places, but
the conclusion remains that the interpretation of many
critical episodes rests on inferences from acts and events,
with such other help as can be pieced together from stray
sources. It is significant that Stosch's Memoirs stop at
1872, and that, critically tested, Hohenlohe's Memoirs ob-
viously contain many excisions. The furious controversy
over the Crown Prince's Diary, published by Geffcken, is
illuminated by Bismarck's Immediate Report, the object
of which was to deny its accuracy, combined with a virtual
admission of its authenticity and a denunciation of the
crime of publishing truth so damaging to the official version
of the origin of the Empire. Bismarck's revelation in 1896
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BISMARCK
of the Re-insurance Treaty and its non-renewal terrified
the Foreign Office. There were, obviously, a great many
more skeletons in the cupboard, the key of which was kept
by the relentless old man; or, as Bismarck expressed it to
Treitschke, ' you will not find our linen as clean as could
be wished. ' The official version of foreign policy for the
public, and above all the German public, was framed in the
interest of the dynasty and the government--as was its
military history with all its parade of information by the
General Staff. Such a publication as the French Origines
de la guerre de 1870, dating back to 1863 with its complete
set of documents, critically edited and annotated, has
never been, and probably never will be, attempted by the
Prussian authorities. Indeed, the closer one works on
German foreign policy after 1871 the more certain is the
conclusion that German official statements cannot be
accepted as substantially true without independent corro-
borative evidence. And this is particularly the case with
Bismarck himself.
Bismarck's conception of diplomacy was singularly like
that of Metternich. Foreign policy should be handled as
a confidential and personal transaction of State affairs by
plenipotentiaries, able to bind their governments. Oral
discussions permitted great freedom of intercourse, and a
no less unfettered freedom of repudiation. The nego-
tiations with Napoleon in. between i860 and 1866 were
models of Bismarckian methods. Similarly, after 1870 his
dealings with Russia rested largely on personal engage-
ments to, or from, Alexander 11. and Alexander 1n. Hence
his preference for autocracies; business could be done
with the autocrat, or, as in his own case, with the minister
who had the autocrat well in hand. The continuity of the
individual was more important than the continuity of the
policy. Hence, also, his dislike of France after 1871.
French statesmen came and went like partners at a ball,
and the promise of the first might be good reason for in-
fidelity in the next. Hence still more his dislike of Great
Britain and the British system of publicity and ministerial
responsibility: the more so because, unlike France,
German threats could not cause the fall of a Gladstone or
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 329
a Beaconsfield, a Granville or a Salisbury. 1 Above all, he
detested with a fierce detestation the British Blue-Book 2
which brought government into the arena of public debate
and enlightened the public not with acts, which was all
that the public was entitled to know, but with methods,
which it was certain to misunderstand. Bismarck's
hatred of the British Blue-Book was a blend of the
patrician superstition that foreign policy was a mystery
only to be mastered by the privileged class with a heredi-
tary aptitude for its ritual--a superstition that still obsesses
the well-bred Levites of the cosmopolitan priesthood of
diplomacy--resentment at any government daring to do
anything without his permission, and the fear that if the
blinds of the temple were perpetually drawn up the plain
man would condemn the result because the methods were
so peculiar. Bismarck knew well that the diplomacy which
annexed Schleswig-Holstein, which prepared the war of
1866, which laid the long mine of the Hohenzollern candi-
dature and the 'defensive' war of 1870, and the revision
of the Treaty of 1856 did not cease with the Treaty of
Frankfurt. Peace and those who ensue it have their
victories of lies, stratagems, plots, and counter-plots no
less than have war and the soldiers.
Peace after 1871 was the supreme need for the Empire.
Germany was now a 'satiated' country. The 'injuries
of time ' had been obliterated at last, and Germany, having
obtained by war the conditions on which she desired to
live with her neighbours, now wished for no more than the
maintenance of those conditions, and their development
into a permanent system. It was inevitable that mutilated
and humiliated France should dream of the day when the
Treaty of Frankfurt would be revised--by a successful war
1 Not that Bismarck did not attempt in Great Britain this particularly
German method of controlling policy. There is clear evidence that Bismarck
between 1880 and 1885 tried to get both Lord Derby and Lord Granville dis-
missed, and their places taken by ministers more amenable to German
dictation. The dismissal of Delcasse in 1905 was the Bismarckian stroke by
Bismarck's disciples.
* 'It is astonishing,' wrote Odo Russell to Granville,' how cordially Bismarck
hates our Blue Books. . . . If he once takes offence at anything we publish, he
wiH take his revenge by making himself as disagreeable as possible for the rest
of his days. '--{Life of Granville, ii. p. 367. )
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? 330
BISMARCK
of revenge--but the France of 1871 single-handed could
never accomplish that. A France without allies was a
France condemned to accept 1871 as the last word in the
great struggle for the Rhine. The task therefore was to
keep France isolated. The surest way of accomplishing
this was the organisation of Central Europe with the rest
of the States in subordination to the new German Empire.
The isolation of France and the German hegemony of the
Continent were complementary aspects of the same
problem and were complementary results of a single
aim.
Bismarck set to work after 1871 to convince the leading
continental States that it was their interest to accept the
facts of 1871 and keep France isolated. The revival of the
Triple Alliance of the three monarchies of Russia, Austria,
and Imperial Prussia was the first step. 'There is always
a chancellor in Europe,' says M. de Mazade in his illumi-
nating study of Metternich. The difference between the
system of Metternich and that of Bismarck lay in the
transfer of the centre of gravity from Vienna to Berlin.
But that was vital.
The material interests of the Empire, deduced from a
system of political ideas maintained by Germany, with the
nation in arms, as the guardian of both--such was the core
of the Chancellor's system. Prestige in diplomacy also
was a weapon of incalculable strength in Bismarck's hands.
Prussian prestige after 1871 rested on two clearly defined
and intelligible elements--a man and a nation's power.
In 1862 the European chancelleries had felt like the Prus-
sian officers before Jena. 'Your majesty,' they assured
Frederick William in. , 'has several generals superior to
M. de Bonaparte. ' In 1871 they felt what Goethe said of
Napoleon 1. 'You cannot beat him, the man is too
strong for you. ' Personal intercourse with the man
heightened the hypnotism that Bismarck exercised.
His personal diplomacy was a marvellous mixture of
brutality, arrogance, and geniality, of patrician grandeur
aided by the tricks of the card-sharper. A stab in the
back came as easily from his vindictive rancour, as the great
stroke that achieved a long-matured ideal. He might
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
pretend to forget, but he could not forgive, and never
pretended that he did.
The invincibility of Prussia, scientifically organised, so
that her strength could be concentrated on a policy
directed by an unflinching fidelity to a single purpose--
on that assumption he had taken office in 1862, and that
assumption after 1871 he taught Europe to regard as the
first and last axiom of the State system of the Continent.
The power of Germany, a Germany perpetually mobilised
and ready to spring at a word from the Wilhelmstrasse,
was burnt into the mind of Europe, and the German
Foreign Office acted on the assumption in every trans-
action, great or small. 'Germany,' said Moltke in the
Reichstag in 1875, 'must remain armed to the teeth for
fifty years, in order to keep what took her six months to
win. ' The world studied and copied the Prussian army.
Even at our Horse Guards the British military' demi-gods'
began dimly to realise that the conduct of war required
educated brains, and could not be acquired on the parade
ground in the morning and the hunting or cricket-field
in the afternoon. Moltke, however, was determined that
for all the slavish copying of Prussian technique by
Prussia's rivals, the real secret, 'the secret of the higher
command ' should remain an inviolable Prussian monopoly.
Other nations would produce soldiers, but Germany alone
would continue to educate generals. And Bismarck in the
Reichskanzlerpalais had the same determination. The
secret of the higher command in policy, won by the blood
and sweat of a lifetime, must be kept by the same blood and
sweat. If Germany once allowed the quality of that right
judgment in all things on which her prestige in diplomacy
was built to deteriorate, disaster would follow. No
material strength could compensate for an inferiority in
the higher direction.
The confidence of Germany in the Chancellor as the
director of foreign policy and the guardian of Germany's
place in Europe was implicit. The bitter criticism poured
on the successive phases of his home policy scarcely trickled
into the sphere of foreign affairs. Gone were the days of
1862 and 1863, when professors and pathologists, publicists
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? 33*
BISMARCK
and pamphleteers, arraigned before an audience half-
convinced in advance, the foreign policy of the Minister-
President. The Reichstag listened and obeyed, at the
feet of the Master. Bismarck studied and gave great
weight to the volume of public opinion, as his handling of
the colonial question subsequently showed. His speeches
on the delicate problems of international relations were
invariably stamped with the magisterial note, the recog-
nition of the nation's demand for power, and the subtle
personal appeal for confidence. 'Bismarck has,' said Lord
Odo Russell, 'a prophetic coup HceiV He wove into his
analysis autobiographic reminiscences and tantalising
glimpses of the forces moving behind the scene; and the
vanity and egoism with which they were flavoured reflected
the vanity and egoism of the audience. The German
Reichstag was on these occasions, and it knew it, the
Olympus from which Jove spoke to Europe. He made
Germany feel its unity and grandeur. Such speeches,
with their exposition of the realities, were a tonic and an
inspiration. No German but drew deeper lungs after
hearing these utterances of pontifical infallibility from the
tribune of the Reichstag; the speaker himself--that
gigantic figure of the Chancellor, the civil Prime Minister
of the Empire, in a military uniform with his sword at his
side, the nonlike head, the flashing eyes, the gesture of
command, even the hoarse, rasping, and hesitating voice
that made the barbed phrase or the felicitous apophthegm
more telling--the speaker himself was an arresting in-
carnation of Imperial power and of Prussian militarism.
In reviving the triple entente of the Central and Eastern
monarchies Bismarck securely reckoned on the ill-will of
Russia to Great Britain, so patent in the Washington
negotiations and the Genevan arbitration, and the genuine
fear of Liberal and Radical tendencies in France and
Great Britain. 'The downward course' of England
alarmed Alexander n. , who forgot that England had been
going to perdition since 1815, and that some countries
can even wax strong and prosperous on such perdition,
and can be a far safer home for monarchs than the hearth
of order at Petersburg. 'The sacred cause of Royalty' was
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
declared to be imperilled; 'Germany, Austria, and Russia
should hold together to resist those dangerous and evil influ-
ences of England, if order was to be maintained in Europe. '
Dynasticism and order were to be pitted against republican-
ism and the revolution. The solidarity of European Con-
servatism--the familiar catchword took Bismarck back
to the age of Metternich in which he had grown up, and
the school of Gerlach that now proclaimed him a rene-
gade. Toujours ca change, toujours c'est la meme chose.
Bismarck now exploited the shibboleths of the dynasties to
rivet the Bismarckian conception of Central Europe on
Vienna and Petersburg, as he had exploited the shibboleths
of Gerlach to rivet Prussian supremacy on Germany. The
sovereigns met in 1871 at Gastein and Salzburg--which
was ' the coffin' of Beust, about to be dismissed and re-
placed by Andrassy--and in 1872 at Berlin, exchanged
kisses on both cheeks and showered decorations. Bismarck
entertained the royalties and their staffs with diplomatic
reminiscences; he was particularly pleased to dilate on the
tortures suffered by the French negotiators (1870-1), and
explained with genial humour how he had baited the hooks
to play with the fish before landing it. The Emperor
William returned the visits at Petersburg and Vienna.
Koniggratz was forgotten; the reconciliation prepared
by the peace of 1866 proceeded rapidly. 'No formal
treaty was concluded,' the Crown Prince wrote to his
cousin the ruler of Roumania, but the understanding was
intimate and complete. In 1873 Victor Emmanuel also
came to Berlin. His readiness to join Napoleon in 1870
was forgiven and forgotten by his accession to the monar-
chical entente. Bismarck had secured the vulnerable flank
of Germany in the east; he had withdrawn the consti-
tutional kingdom of Italy from gravitating towards the
sister Latin race; France was without an ally. The Kings
of Holland and Sweden made a pilgrimage to the new
Mecca of royalism and order at Berlin, and Belgium was
compelled to alter her penal code, because Germany did
not think it adequate to deal with Ultramontanes or
Radical journalists. Beyond the Carpathians and in the
valley of the lower Danube stood the Hohenzollern
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 317
momentous. 1 After 1878 he argued that he was not
responsible for the policy of the Kulturkampf, nor for the
May Laws and their execution. The argument will not
stand the test of facts nor of probability. In 1872, 1873,
and 1875 ne spoke repeatedly both in the Reichstag and
the Prussian Landtag in defence of the coercive legislation
and of the general policy of Prussia and the Empire in the
controversy. He complained bitterly in private letters
to Roon of the desertion of the Conservative party in
the 'Catholic controversy'; he was responsible for the
appointment of Falk, and supported him until 1878 against
the attacks in Court circles. It is, in the absence of all
corroborative evidence to the contrary, impossible to
believe that Bismarck as Chancellor and Minister-President
would have allowed a subordinate colleague to embark
Prussia and the Empire by legislation and administrative
action in a life-and-death struggle, which involved the most
delicate and fundamental issues of high policy at home and
abroad, without his complete concurrence. It is demon-
strable that the correspondence between the Emperor and
the Pope, which stated very tersely the Prussian attitude,
was on the Emperor's side drafted by Bismarck; the with-
drawal of the German mission from the Curia--the rupture,
in fact, of diplomatic relations--was Bismarck's act, and in
the negotiations after 1878 Bismarck assumed that the
May Laws would not be withdrawn unless the Vatican
made substantial concessions. The later assertion (in 1878
and repeated in his Memoirs) that he regarded the struggle
as mainly a recrudescence of the chronic problem of
Poland was an afterthought, and the blame subsequently
laid on Falk, as the author of the mischief and the failure,
was a characteristic trait of ingratitude. A scapegoat had
to be found, and Falk, the hero of the National Liberals
and Radicals, served the convenient purpose of exculpating
the Chancellor and affronting the parties with which
Bismarck broke between 1878 and 1879.
In 1874 Bismarck told the Reichstag that since 1862 his
1 Under-Secretary von Thile told Lord Odo Russell in 1872 'that Bismarck's
determination to raise the storm and fight the Church was so sudden that he
and Bismarck's private secretaries could mark the day and hour of 4the change
that came over him like an inspiration. '
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? BISMARCK
previsions and forecasts in all the great issues had been
wonderfully accurate. The remark had a side reference
to the KulturkampJ. But in 1871 Bismarck plainly mis-1
calculated. The diplomacy with which he had hitherto
crossed swords successfully had not had the traditions,
skill, fertility in resource, and pertinacity of the Vatican.
The Roman Curia could and did pull many wires through-
out Europe, and it could afford to wait. It had no capital
that could be stormed, leaving the defence impotent. Its
capital was everywhere, planted in the consciences of
millions of its communion. Heads can be cut off, but the
obedience of heart and will cannot be enforced by prison
or the guillotine. Bullets or wristcuffs cannot kill ideas.
The extermination of the faithful is not the same thing as
the extirpation of a faith. Indeed, the seven years from
1871 to 1878 were an instructive object-lesson in the limits
of power even when exercised by a State with the executive
strength of Prussia. In the constitutional conflict in 1862
Bismarck had rightly assumed that the Liberals would not
raise barricades, defy the laws, or refuse to pay taxes, and
that, if they did, the whiff of grapeshot would settle the
first outbreak. In 1872 he apparently calculated that the
Catholics would either not resist, or, if they did, would soon
surrender to a rigorous coercion. He was completely
mistaken. When Cardinal Archbishops, with the applause
of their congregations, defied the law and went to prison,
the State as Power could only, as Windthorst remarked,
bring in the guillotine--if it dared. For when a State by
its own action converts law-breakers into martyrs for con-
science it loses the sympathy of the law-abiding. The
average German began to think as Pepys did when he saw
oppressed Dissenters going to prison under the Clarendon
code: 'I would to God they would conform or not be so
well catch'd. ' Universal suffrage proved a terrible weapon
in the hands of the Centre party. At the general election
of 1874 the National Liberals increased their numbers to
over one hundred and fifty, but the Clericals polled
a million and a half votes and returned not sixty but
ninety-one members. Bismarck therefore had to face a
National Liberal party stronger than ever and more
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 319
indispensable to the government, and a Centre opposi-
tion enormously encouraged by its success.
It was in the nature of things that on both sides the
struggle should extend far beyond the limits foreseen in
1871: and the simple original issue, whether the Vatican
should or should not constrain opponents of the Decrees
to obedience, was by 1876 converted into an illimitable
controversy on the functions, basis, character, and ends of
civil government and its relation to ecclesiastical authority;
it threatened to divide Germany into two great con-
fessional camps, Protestant and Catholic, and to throw
back the newly born Empire of 1871 into the maelstrom
of Charles v. and the epoch of the Reformation, with the
passions of mediaeval Guelph and Ghibelline, and of Empire
and Papacy superimposed. In the welter of conflict the
secession and formation of the 'Old Catholics,' a tiny hand-
ful of the combatants, became a neglected by-issue. The
fiery support of religious and political Protestantism, and
of die powerful secularist intellectuals who desired to see a
complete separation of Church and State in every German
State, and the extirpation of denominational endowment
and teaching, was fatal to Liberal Catholicism. The issues
raised by Vaticanism became an assault in many quarters
on the Roman Catholic Church: and the cry of ' Los von
Rom ' and the establishment of a German national Catholic
Church on Febronian lines, independent of the Papacy,
aided the Papal effort to represent 'the May Laws' as a
Diocletian persecution, led by Bismarck into whom Satan
had entered.
To the Papacy, indeed, the Kulturkampf proved to
be an unqualified blessing. In 1871 and 1872 the anti-
infallibility movement within the Roman Communion was
a grave danger. But with an unerring eye the directors of
Vatican policy seized the weapon of their adversaries and
turned it against them. They closed the Roman Catholic
ranks as far as possible, and shifted the issue from the
narrower field of ' the May Laws' to a trial of strength
between the Roman Church as a whole and its opponents
spiritual or secular. The more eagerly did those oppo-
nents mass for attacks on a broad front, the broader the
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? 320
BISMARCK
front on which the Vatican deployed its counter-attacks.
Windthorst proved himself a consummate tactician and a
polished debater. He placed large issues in sonorous
phrases before the electorate in the programmes of the
Clerical Centre--freedom of conscience, the independence
of religion, the liberty of the individual German to worship
as reason led him, an Empire based on justice (Justitia funda-
mentum regnorum), taken from the mediaeval law books--and
by provocative taunts he understood how to seduce Con-
servatives, Liberals, Radicals, and Progressives into violent
indiscretions. It required courage to stand up to Bismarck,
but Windthorst smilingly removed the gloves and took and
gave telling punishment with a finished equanimity.
The results by 1878 were disquieting. Lord Odo
Russell's dispatches from 1873-77 indicate Bismarck's de-
pression, irritation, and anxiety. The Clericals had built
up a powerful and extraordinarily well-organised party;
they had ample funds, an influential press, and a network of
local machinery. It was the Kulturkampf which enabled
the Centre to become in Bismarck's lifetime the best
drilled, most obedient, and strongest single party in
Germany. They drew their strength from every class--
from cardinals and Polish magnates to the industrial
democracy in the old ecclesiastical principalities. The
stronger the executive action against them, the stronger
they reacted against it. The disciplining of Germany for
two generations told immensely in their favour. The
Clericals, and later the Social Democrats, had in the
German voter a man who had been drilled in a great mili-
tary machine, to whom obedience to command was life.
Given an organiser, a party with a real cause had organis-
able material ready to hand in the German electorate.
The Roman Church was an organisation already made.
Windthorst enjoyed its matchless and unlimited support.
The decadence of National Liberalism after 1878 is largely
accounted for by the absence of an intelligible cause, the
halting and contradictory language of its spokesmen, and
its dependence on a reservoir in a single social stratum, the
middle class. The Clerical party had none of these patent
defects.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 321
The ministerial conduct of the fight was vitiated also by
serious blunders. The punitive measures against the
inferior clergy--the hard-working priest of the village and
small town--threw hundreds of parishes, ignorant of the
deeper issues of Vaticanism, into opposition. The govern-
ment made no effort to enlist the sympathy of educated
Catholicism with the cause of freedom of opinion. Instead
of concentrating on the narrower issue of Vaticanism and
assisting the German hierarchy, placed in a grave perplexity
between two allegiances and influenced by a genuine anti-
pathy to the more profound consequences in the Decrees
and by a patriotic reluctance to defy the law binding on
German citizens; instead of trying to find a compromise for
the bishops coerced by Rome and menaced by the State;
instead of rallying the Catholic laity to the support of its
episcopate in the struggle with the Curia, the government
struck right and left at high and low with the indiscrimina-
tion of brute strength. Falk fought with the ability of a
trained lawyer who assumes that a juristic answer, expressed
in well-drafted legislation, and backed by executive action,
can settle every problem of life and conduct. Bismarck left
the law to Falk, the administration to the Home Office,
and thought of the higher politics alone. The limitations
in his statecraft were at once exposed. This was not a
case where ' one hand could wash the other. ' The subtle
yet deep intellectual and moral implications in the contro-
versy did not interest him, nor had he the time, the inclina-
tion, or the accumulated knowledge to master them. And,
as with Napoleon 1. in his struggle with the Papacy, the
ingrained contempt for ideas as ideas, for 'ideologues,' and
for men to whom ideas have a more inspiring import than
material force warped his judgment and blinded his in-
tuition. To Bismarck, as to Napoleon, the Church was a
necessity of an ordered life, but its action and position must
be strictly correlated to the ends prescribed by reasons of
State. In the Kulturkampf Bismarck found himself in
deeper water than his strength and skill could manage.
He was to repeat the experience in the struggle with
Social Democracy.
The shrewd Thiers predicted in 1873 that 'the iron
B. X
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? $22
BISMARCK
Chancellor' would find himself in the position described
in a story of Napoleon 1. 'Sire,' said a wag,' the enemy
has lost thousands of men. ' 'Yes,' replied Napoleon,' but
I have lost the battle. ' At Varzin in 1877 Bismarck was
ruefully reflecting that hundreds of priests had been driven
from their altars, but that he was on the point of losing the
battle.
For twelve months in the solitude of his estate the
Chancellor calculated and probed. The Emperor was
very unhappy, for he was at war with a third of his Empire.
'We have made enough concessions to Liberalism,' he
kept on fretfully repeating. The Empress, the powerful
Radziwills who represented at Court the Polish cause, the
Crown Prince's circle, and the Conservatives who after
1876 had closed their split, were in different ways and for
different reasons pressing for a cessation of the struggle.
Strong Protestants argued that the State as Power might
apply to the Lutheran Church the Erastian control applied
to the Roman Catholics. The Conservatives hated the
alliance with National Liberalism. The Centre might be
intolerant and superstitious, but it stood for authority and
social order, for religion and the Christian State, and not
for secularism and a godless education. Bismarck's sup-
port of the law imposing civil marriage in the Empire--a
recantation of the principles he had laid down from 1847-
51--was denounced as a lamentable apostasy, forced on him
by Liberalism. The governing class pressed for a return
to a Conservative policy. In a word, the pressure in all
the quarters most influential with the Crown was exerted
against the Bismarckian regime from 1871 to 1877.
Bismarck felt the pressure, and lashed out perpetually at
the insolence of the critics. But he recognised that the
whole internal and parliamentary situation was crumbling
into chaos. The financial position was critical. The
unified Empire was proving to be very costly. The system
of 'matricular contributions' to the Imperial revenue
from the federated States was a burden that aggravated
Particularism. The failure to nationalise the raflways cut
off a valuable Imperial revenue. New taxation was im-
peratively needed. The government required a large
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 323
expanding income, removed as far as possible from the
control of the Reichstag. There was only one method
available--indirect taxation by a tariff. Failure to provide
the necessary Imperial revenue, except by trenching on the
funds of the federated States, would inevitably cause a
demand for a reduction of military expenditure. Yet, a
comprehensive tariff meant a complete departure from
the Free-Trade system. Would the Liberals--would
Germany--agree to that?
Since 1873 a series of commercial crises, aided by a wave
of speculation and ' bubble companies' and the artificial
inflation caused by the milliards of the French indemnity
swept over Germany. Bankruptcies became as familiar
as funerals. German industry was hard pressed by inter-
national, and especially British, competition. The manu-
facturing interests cried out for protection, and the for-
mation in 1876 of a ' central union of German Industrials'
(Central Verband deutscher Industrieller) on a Protectionist
basis was a significant symptom. The industrial revolu-
tion, that had been coming for a generation, developed
after 1871 with impressive rapidity. It was to convert
Germany in thirty years into a second workshop of the
world, in which the need of raw material and of expanding
export markets, the rise of an industrial ' proletariat,' in-
creasing with every decade at a remarkable rate, and the
establishment of ' the grand industry,' were to be the de-
cisive characteristics. The middle class was throwing up
an industrial aristocracy drawn from the captains of in-
dustry--the financier, the manufacturer, the director of
interlocking syndicates, cartels and companies--whose
interests were those of a capitalistic society, freed from
the interference of Parliament. Could not this new
Schlotjunkertum--'theJunkers of the chimneys' that turned
the romantic banks of the fabled Rhine into the Lancashire
and Midlands of Germany-- be allied with the old agrarian
Junkertum in the struggle with individualist Liberalism
inspired by Cobden, Mill, and the British? With 1877
agricultural depression set in all over Europe, caused by the
raising of the European margin of cultivation in conse-
quence of competition in agricultural produce from the
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? 3H
BISMARCK
two Americas and the cheapness and facilities of oceanic
transit. Rents fell as prices fell. Agrarian Junkertum
was being hard hit; no less serious was the future of
German agriculture, on which the structure of Prussian
society was based and the supply of the best recruits for
the army depended. Had Bismarck read Adam Smith he
would have agreed that for Germany defence was more
important than opulence, and defence meant the whole
system of government and the governing class.
The Kulturkampf had thrown much more than Vatican-
ism into the crucible. Socialist Democracy, fed by the
industrial revolution, and watered by the political con-
fusion, was reproducing itself in the tissues, fibres, and
blood stream of the social and political organism with the
rapidity of the anthrax bacillus in an appropriate culture.
The Gotha programme of Social Democracy in 1875 re-
wrote the Eisenach programme of 1869 in italics: the
realisation of its aims was as deadly to the agrarian Junkers
as to the capitalist class; its secularism menaced Catholic
Clericals, Lutherans, and Calvinists with complete impar-
tiality. In 1874 the two Socialist members of the Reichstag
of 1871 had become 9, in 1877 12, representing half a million
votes, a third of the Centre vote. If it were not crushed,
what would Socialist Democracy be in 1887? Bismarck's
survey in short--the survey of a statesman who based his
policy on 'ponderable' realities--suggested a complete
change of system; and already in 1876 Roon, so often the
conservative periscope, hinted from his retirement that con-
servatives could begin to fatten the calf for the prodigal son
of Junkertum, emaciated by the husks of Liberalism.
It was not only in foreign policy that Bismarck's pro-
longed silences caused apprehension. From the woods
and glades of Varzin came rumours that rippled from the
lobbies of the Reichstag to the portico of the Vatican. Two
obstacles--the Kulturkampf and the National Liberals--
barred a bold bid for the governing classes of a future,
rather than the present, Germany, by a new, comprehen-
sive and constructive policy--a policy of pourboires and
power. To Bismarck more than any man the road to
Canossa, the white shirt and shivering in the snow of
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 325
Henry iv. , were hateful. But if the Papacy would share
the shirt, forgo the snow and trudge half-way to meet
him, a joint Canossa might be found at Kissingen or some
other resort where foreign diplomatists cured their souls
while they washed their bodies. If the Centre could be
secured it would vote solidly and manoeuvre at command
like a regiment. As for ' the May Laws' and Falk, 'we
can always,' as Bismarck said to Augustenburg in 1864,
'wring the necks of the chickens we have ourselves hatched. '
The National Liberals were tremendously powerful--
one hundred and fifty votes in the Reichstag--and they
could rely in Liberal issues on the Progressives and
Radicals. The Liberal bloc was at present the master of
the situation, and intended to remain so. They held the
road to Canossa or Protection in force. A hint came from
Varzin. Bennigsen went to the lion's den and returned.
When Bismarck came back to Berlin in the spring of
1878 it was clear what had happened. He had offered
office to the Nationalist Liberal leader, but on condition
of support in a new policy, vaguely outlined. 'I desired,'
wrote Bismarck, in his Memoirs (ii. 198), ' sincerely to per-
suade him, as I expressed it, to jump into my boat and
help me steer; I was drawn up by the landing-stage and
waiting for him to embark. ' Bennigsen indicated that, if
places were also found for two or three other prominent
National Liberals, the proposal might be seriously con-
sidered. Bismarck refused. There was room for Bennig-
sen in the King's Council, but not for Forckenbeck, or
Stauffenberg or any one else.
Bennigsen then refused
for himself and the others. When the Emperor, inspired
by the Conservatives and soldiers, angrily remonstrated
against this trafficking with Liberalism behind his Imperial
and Prussian back, Bismarck was able to assure him, with
perfect truth, that the last thing he desired was to ask his
Majesty to confer office on National Liberals. Bismarck
had hoped to split the Liberals by detaching Bennigsen and
the right of the party. Bennigsen desired to introduce
Parliamentary government--'a ministry a la Gladstone,'
which as in Great Britain would be representative of the
strongest party in the Legislature and make the policy of
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BISMARCK
the future. The negotiation, however, was a complete
failure. But while Bennigsen did not get office, Bismarck
gave the coup de gr&ce to the last effort to introduce the
system of responsible party government into the govern-
ment of the Empire. It only remained now to crush the
National Liberals.
It is commonly said that the Bismarckian policy in the
Kulturkampf ended in a complete defeat--proved by the
recantation of the next ten years. Three comments, how-
ever, are essential in this connection. First, the Liberal
parties which passed and upheld ' the May Laws ' and the
principles underlying them never recanted nor repented.
On the contrary, they opposed and lamented, with good
reason, the Chancellor's surrender. Secondly, the Vatican
in 1878 was as tired of the struggle as Bismarck. It had not
been defeated, but it had failed so far to secure amendment,
much less the repeal, of ' the May Laws. ' By 1878 the
danger of serious schism within the Roman Communion
had vanished. Ninety-nine Catholics out of a hundred
accepted the Vatican Decrees, but the Roman Church in
Germany was crippled by the Falk code. Had the
National Liberals come into office, determined to fight
to a finish, the Vatican would not have had an alliance to
sell which gave it so commanding a position in the nego-
tiations that followed the death of Pio Nono and the ac-
cession of Leo xii1. There is every reason to suppose that
a strong National Liberal ministry could have continued
the struggle and imposed a very different compromise to
that dictated from Rome and accepted by Bismarck.
Thirdly, Bismarck deliberately sacrificed victory in the
Kulturkampf to victory in other issues, more important
in his judgment. What those issues were the next twelve
years revealed (see p. 451). The turning-point in the
making of Imperial Germany was reached in 1878. The
Germany of 1890 was essentially the product of Bismarck's
policy in these twelve years imposed on the results pre-
viously achieved. But Bismarck was able to evade the
Liberal ultimatum and accomplish the vital transition to
the new era, only because the Reichstag was not a govern-
ment-making, policy-making organ. The adroitness and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
intuition with which he created opportunities and
utilised those provided by fate or fortune are very
remarkable. The years 1878 and 1879 are essentially
years, within Germany and without it, of 'the Bis-
marck touch. '
When the Chancellor returned to the Wilhelmstrasse
in the spring of 1878 his first business was to deal
with the Eastern Question and to preside at the Congress
of Berlin.
? 3. Foreign Policy, 1871-1879
The student of Bismarck's foreign policy after 1870 is
perpetually confronted with the difficulty of ascertaining
the truth. Sybel down to 1868 was permitted to use
freely the Prussian archives, and his classical history, The
Foundation of the German Empire, is written from original
official sources and enriched by precious quotations, not
available in other authorities. But for the period after
1868 Sybel found the . archives closed. He was not suffi-
ciently impressed with the duty of writing the history of
Germany as a chronicle of Hohenzollern omniscience.
Bismarck was lavish of explanations in the Reichstag, and
in documents intended for publication, but the gaps are
more conspicuous than the inclusions, nor do the ex-
planations offered always tally in substance and fact. It
is true that from British, French, Russian, and Austrian
sources much new light has been shed on dark places, but
the conclusion remains that the interpretation of many
critical episodes rests on inferences from acts and events,
with such other help as can be pieced together from stray
sources. It is significant that Stosch's Memoirs stop at
1872, and that, critically tested, Hohenlohe's Memoirs ob-
viously contain many excisions. The furious controversy
over the Crown Prince's Diary, published by Geffcken, is
illuminated by Bismarck's Immediate Report, the object
of which was to deny its accuracy, combined with a virtual
admission of its authenticity and a denunciation of the
crime of publishing truth so damaging to the official version
of the origin of the Empire. Bismarck's revelation in 1896
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BISMARCK
of the Re-insurance Treaty and its non-renewal terrified
the Foreign Office. There were, obviously, a great many
more skeletons in the cupboard, the key of which was kept
by the relentless old man; or, as Bismarck expressed it to
Treitschke, ' you will not find our linen as clean as could
be wished. ' The official version of foreign policy for the
public, and above all the German public, was framed in the
interest of the dynasty and the government--as was its
military history with all its parade of information by the
General Staff. Such a publication as the French Origines
de la guerre de 1870, dating back to 1863 with its complete
set of documents, critically edited and annotated, has
never been, and probably never will be, attempted by the
Prussian authorities. Indeed, the closer one works on
German foreign policy after 1871 the more certain is the
conclusion that German official statements cannot be
accepted as substantially true without independent corro-
borative evidence. And this is particularly the case with
Bismarck himself.
Bismarck's conception of diplomacy was singularly like
that of Metternich. Foreign policy should be handled as
a confidential and personal transaction of State affairs by
plenipotentiaries, able to bind their governments. Oral
discussions permitted great freedom of intercourse, and a
no less unfettered freedom of repudiation. The nego-
tiations with Napoleon in. between i860 and 1866 were
models of Bismarckian methods. Similarly, after 1870 his
dealings with Russia rested largely on personal engage-
ments to, or from, Alexander 11. and Alexander 1n. Hence
his preference for autocracies; business could be done
with the autocrat, or, as in his own case, with the minister
who had the autocrat well in hand. The continuity of the
individual was more important than the continuity of the
policy. Hence, also, his dislike of France after 1871.
French statesmen came and went like partners at a ball,
and the promise of the first might be good reason for in-
fidelity in the next. Hence still more his dislike of Great
Britain and the British system of publicity and ministerial
responsibility: the more so because, unlike France,
German threats could not cause the fall of a Gladstone or
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 329
a Beaconsfield, a Granville or a Salisbury. 1 Above all, he
detested with a fierce detestation the British Blue-Book 2
which brought government into the arena of public debate
and enlightened the public not with acts, which was all
that the public was entitled to know, but with methods,
which it was certain to misunderstand. Bismarck's
hatred of the British Blue-Book was a blend of the
patrician superstition that foreign policy was a mystery
only to be mastered by the privileged class with a heredi-
tary aptitude for its ritual--a superstition that still obsesses
the well-bred Levites of the cosmopolitan priesthood of
diplomacy--resentment at any government daring to do
anything without his permission, and the fear that if the
blinds of the temple were perpetually drawn up the plain
man would condemn the result because the methods were
so peculiar. Bismarck knew well that the diplomacy which
annexed Schleswig-Holstein, which prepared the war of
1866, which laid the long mine of the Hohenzollern candi-
dature and the 'defensive' war of 1870, and the revision
of the Treaty of 1856 did not cease with the Treaty of
Frankfurt. Peace and those who ensue it have their
victories of lies, stratagems, plots, and counter-plots no
less than have war and the soldiers.
Peace after 1871 was the supreme need for the Empire.
Germany was now a 'satiated' country. The 'injuries
of time ' had been obliterated at last, and Germany, having
obtained by war the conditions on which she desired to
live with her neighbours, now wished for no more than the
maintenance of those conditions, and their development
into a permanent system. It was inevitable that mutilated
and humiliated France should dream of the day when the
Treaty of Frankfurt would be revised--by a successful war
1 Not that Bismarck did not attempt in Great Britain this particularly
German method of controlling policy. There is clear evidence that Bismarck
between 1880 and 1885 tried to get both Lord Derby and Lord Granville dis-
missed, and their places taken by ministers more amenable to German
dictation. The dismissal of Delcasse in 1905 was the Bismarckian stroke by
Bismarck's disciples.
* 'It is astonishing,' wrote Odo Russell to Granville,' how cordially Bismarck
hates our Blue Books. . . . If he once takes offence at anything we publish, he
wiH take his revenge by making himself as disagreeable as possible for the rest
of his days. '--{Life of Granville, ii. p. 367. )
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? 330
BISMARCK
of revenge--but the France of 1871 single-handed could
never accomplish that. A France without allies was a
France condemned to accept 1871 as the last word in the
great struggle for the Rhine. The task therefore was to
keep France isolated. The surest way of accomplishing
this was the organisation of Central Europe with the rest
of the States in subordination to the new German Empire.
The isolation of France and the German hegemony of the
Continent were complementary aspects of the same
problem and were complementary results of a single
aim.
Bismarck set to work after 1871 to convince the leading
continental States that it was their interest to accept the
facts of 1871 and keep France isolated. The revival of the
Triple Alliance of the three monarchies of Russia, Austria,
and Imperial Prussia was the first step. 'There is always
a chancellor in Europe,' says M. de Mazade in his illumi-
nating study of Metternich. The difference between the
system of Metternich and that of Bismarck lay in the
transfer of the centre of gravity from Vienna to Berlin.
But that was vital.
The material interests of the Empire, deduced from a
system of political ideas maintained by Germany, with the
nation in arms, as the guardian of both--such was the core
of the Chancellor's system. Prestige in diplomacy also
was a weapon of incalculable strength in Bismarck's hands.
Prussian prestige after 1871 rested on two clearly defined
and intelligible elements--a man and a nation's power.
In 1862 the European chancelleries had felt like the Prus-
sian officers before Jena. 'Your majesty,' they assured
Frederick William in. , 'has several generals superior to
M. de Bonaparte. ' In 1871 they felt what Goethe said of
Napoleon 1. 'You cannot beat him, the man is too
strong for you. ' Personal intercourse with the man
heightened the hypnotism that Bismarck exercised.
His personal diplomacy was a marvellous mixture of
brutality, arrogance, and geniality, of patrician grandeur
aided by the tricks of the card-sharper. A stab in the
back came as easily from his vindictive rancour, as the great
stroke that achieved a long-matured ideal. He might
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
pretend to forget, but he could not forgive, and never
pretended that he did.
The invincibility of Prussia, scientifically organised, so
that her strength could be concentrated on a policy
directed by an unflinching fidelity to a single purpose--
on that assumption he had taken office in 1862, and that
assumption after 1871 he taught Europe to regard as the
first and last axiom of the State system of the Continent.
The power of Germany, a Germany perpetually mobilised
and ready to spring at a word from the Wilhelmstrasse,
was burnt into the mind of Europe, and the German
Foreign Office acted on the assumption in every trans-
action, great or small. 'Germany,' said Moltke in the
Reichstag in 1875, 'must remain armed to the teeth for
fifty years, in order to keep what took her six months to
win. ' The world studied and copied the Prussian army.
Even at our Horse Guards the British military' demi-gods'
began dimly to realise that the conduct of war required
educated brains, and could not be acquired on the parade
ground in the morning and the hunting or cricket-field
in the afternoon. Moltke, however, was determined that
for all the slavish copying of Prussian technique by
Prussia's rivals, the real secret, 'the secret of the higher
command ' should remain an inviolable Prussian monopoly.
Other nations would produce soldiers, but Germany alone
would continue to educate generals. And Bismarck in the
Reichskanzlerpalais had the same determination. The
secret of the higher command in policy, won by the blood
and sweat of a lifetime, must be kept by the same blood and
sweat. If Germany once allowed the quality of that right
judgment in all things on which her prestige in diplomacy
was built to deteriorate, disaster would follow. No
material strength could compensate for an inferiority in
the higher direction.
The confidence of Germany in the Chancellor as the
director of foreign policy and the guardian of Germany's
place in Europe was implicit. The bitter criticism poured
on the successive phases of his home policy scarcely trickled
into the sphere of foreign affairs. Gone were the days of
1862 and 1863, when professors and pathologists, publicists
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? 33*
BISMARCK
and pamphleteers, arraigned before an audience half-
convinced in advance, the foreign policy of the Minister-
President. The Reichstag listened and obeyed, at the
feet of the Master. Bismarck studied and gave great
weight to the volume of public opinion, as his handling of
the colonial question subsequently showed. His speeches
on the delicate problems of international relations were
invariably stamped with the magisterial note, the recog-
nition of the nation's demand for power, and the subtle
personal appeal for confidence. 'Bismarck has,' said Lord
Odo Russell, 'a prophetic coup HceiV He wove into his
analysis autobiographic reminiscences and tantalising
glimpses of the forces moving behind the scene; and the
vanity and egoism with which they were flavoured reflected
the vanity and egoism of the audience. The German
Reichstag was on these occasions, and it knew it, the
Olympus from which Jove spoke to Europe. He made
Germany feel its unity and grandeur. Such speeches,
with their exposition of the realities, were a tonic and an
inspiration. No German but drew deeper lungs after
hearing these utterances of pontifical infallibility from the
tribune of the Reichstag; the speaker himself--that
gigantic figure of the Chancellor, the civil Prime Minister
of the Empire, in a military uniform with his sword at his
side, the nonlike head, the flashing eyes, the gesture of
command, even the hoarse, rasping, and hesitating voice
that made the barbed phrase or the felicitous apophthegm
more telling--the speaker himself was an arresting in-
carnation of Imperial power and of Prussian militarism.
In reviving the triple entente of the Central and Eastern
monarchies Bismarck securely reckoned on the ill-will of
Russia to Great Britain, so patent in the Washington
negotiations and the Genevan arbitration, and the genuine
fear of Liberal and Radical tendencies in France and
Great Britain. 'The downward course' of England
alarmed Alexander n. , who forgot that England had been
going to perdition since 1815, and that some countries
can even wax strong and prosperous on such perdition,
and can be a far safer home for monarchs than the hearth
of order at Petersburg. 'The sacred cause of Royalty' was
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
declared to be imperilled; 'Germany, Austria, and Russia
should hold together to resist those dangerous and evil influ-
ences of England, if order was to be maintained in Europe. '
Dynasticism and order were to be pitted against republican-
ism and the revolution. The solidarity of European Con-
servatism--the familiar catchword took Bismarck back
to the age of Metternich in which he had grown up, and
the school of Gerlach that now proclaimed him a rene-
gade. Toujours ca change, toujours c'est la meme chose.
Bismarck now exploited the shibboleths of the dynasties to
rivet the Bismarckian conception of Central Europe on
Vienna and Petersburg, as he had exploited the shibboleths
of Gerlach to rivet Prussian supremacy on Germany. The
sovereigns met in 1871 at Gastein and Salzburg--which
was ' the coffin' of Beust, about to be dismissed and re-
placed by Andrassy--and in 1872 at Berlin, exchanged
kisses on both cheeks and showered decorations. Bismarck
entertained the royalties and their staffs with diplomatic
reminiscences; he was particularly pleased to dilate on the
tortures suffered by the French negotiators (1870-1), and
explained with genial humour how he had baited the hooks
to play with the fish before landing it. The Emperor
William returned the visits at Petersburg and Vienna.
Koniggratz was forgotten; the reconciliation prepared
by the peace of 1866 proceeded rapidly. 'No formal
treaty was concluded,' the Crown Prince wrote to his
cousin the ruler of Roumania, but the understanding was
intimate and complete. In 1873 Victor Emmanuel also
came to Berlin. His readiness to join Napoleon in 1870
was forgiven and forgotten by his accession to the monar-
chical entente. Bismarck had secured the vulnerable flank
of Germany in the east; he had withdrawn the consti-
tutional kingdom of Italy from gravitating towards the
sister Latin race; France was without an ally. The Kings
of Holland and Sweden made a pilgrimage to the new
Mecca of royalism and order at Berlin, and Belgium was
compelled to alter her penal code, because Germany did
not think it adequate to deal with Ultramontanes or
Radical journalists. Beyond the Carpathians and in the
valley of the lower Danube stood the Hohenzollern
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