In 1881
Bismarck
compared Gambetta to a
drummer in the sick-room of Europe.
drummer in the sick-room of Europe.
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? 402
BISMARCK
way that, in Bismarck's view, might imperil not merely
Germany^ interest in the East but the fundamental basis
of German supremacy in Europe. For Bismarck an
alliance of Russia and France, and the closing of the breach
between Great Britain and Russia, spelled the ruin of a
true system of European policy. The younger generation,
in short, was distinguishing between Bismarckian Central-
ism and a Weltpolitik. They aspired to make Germany a
Wdtmacht--a World-Empire--and not merely a Con-
tinental Power, and they saw the main road winding from
Hamburg through Berlin across the Balkans, through a
Constantinople controlled by Germany to Mesopotamia
and the Persian Gulf, with an entry to the seas not so
closely controlled as the routes down the Channel or
north of the Shetlands; they also saw it reaching across
the Atlantic to the Pacific, expressed in the formula ' ships,
colonies, and commerce. ' And for this young generation
the heart of the position lay in the closest offensive alliance
with Austria. It made Great Britain, not France or
Russia, the great rival of Germany. Bismarck's virtual
reply to such an argument was a paraphrase of Beacons-
field's judgment on Herat and Candahar. 'The Key of
East and West, of Centralism. . and Empire, was not in
Belgrade or Constantinople or Zanzibar--it was in Metz,
Berlin, and Thorn. '
In a more concrete form, the Near Eastern Question
from 1879 to 1890 was summed up in the antagonism of
Austria and Russia in the Balkans, and in the rivalry
between Great Britain and France in Egypt. These two
problems brought the Mediterranean into the main
diplomatic theatre, and kept it there.
By 1878 the isolation of France was proving exceedingly
difficult. The crisis of 1875 had shown that the European
Powers would not tolerate a further reduction of France
or French power; the International Exhibition of 1878
picturesquely mirrored the remarkable extent of France's
recovery from the collapse in 1870. Paris, as in 1867,
was still a great, if not the great, foyer de civilisation,
the attraction of which was inextinguishable. The new
France, working so hard to make good the blunders of the
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 403
Second Empire, would soon be, if she was not already, an
ally worth having. But the Germany that had failed to
crush her or to isolate her completely, and that must fail
to reconcile her because of Alsace and Lorraine, might
divert her gathering strength into directions that would
involve her in a collision with all the possible allies of the
new France. There were three such possible allies--
Great Britain, Russia, and Italy. The colonial movement
combined with the situation in the Mediterranean to give
Bismarck a fine chance of checkmating the rapprochement
so necessary to France and his diplomacy was equal to it.
After 1879 Colonial questions moved sharply and sud-
denly into the forefront of European controversy and
ambition. Africa and the Pacific kept the chancelleries
busy. For Africa was the one great area, of vast extent,
and unlimited possibilities, a continent not yet properly
explored, and not yet finally allotted to, or occupied by,
any great European Power. With 1880 'the scramble
for Africa ' seriously began, and it behove the Powers that
had started late in the foundation of colonies to be quick,
or the one fine field left in a limited world would be over-
run and mastered by the Powers which had started early,
and were already settled at various points on the rim of
the Continent. Everything combined to make the
'African appeal' urgent and critical--the romance of
exploration, the prose of business and trade, missions and
religion, coaling stations, hinterlands and doctrines of
international law, struggling to establish principles which
distinguished spheres of influence, protectorates, treaty
rights, and the nature of actual or virtual possession; and
with these mingled the claims of humanity and the slave-
trade, the rights of races and civilisation,' the white man's
burden,' and the territorial ambitions that underlay the
conception of the State as the incarnation of Power, or the
State as the incarnation of Right and Law. Darkest . and
unknown Africa indeed summed up everything for Europe,
from the selfless heroism of a Livingstone, the stubborn
pertinacity of a Stanley, and the philanthropy of a
Lavigerie to the imperialism of a Rhodes or the syndicates
of gold and diamond companies, the provision of raw
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BISMARCK
materials for the workshops of Europe, or the cruder
claim to sell bad guns and the poison of potato-spirit in
return for rubber extracted by the lash. And in Africa,
with its harbours and mighty rivers and its stepping-
stones, east or west, might not prescient statecraft call a
new world into existence that would not merely redress,
but completely upset, the balance of the old? Africa
was the whole which developed the rivalries of other and
more purely local areas--for the Mediterranean was a
localised form both of the larger African and the Near
Eastern problems.
The diversion, as distinct from the isolation, of France,
began in 1878. Whether Bismarck first, in the green-
rooms of the Berlin Congress, where so many tempting
whispers were uttered, suggested the idea of France occupy-
ing Tunis, as a compensation for losses elsewhere, or
whether the suggestion fell from Beaconsfield and Salis-
bury, may be a nice question in the origin of things, the
evidence for which is still incomplete; but it is tolerably
certain that France understood after 1878 that, if she did
go to Tunis, Germany and Great Britain would not com-
bine to make the occupation a casus belli, or an occasion
for a humiliating rebuff. In 1881 France accordingly
went to Tunis--with the results that Bismarck at any
rate had foreseen and intended. Great Britain was
already hard pressed by difficulties in Egypt; her relations
with France were becoming strained, and the new Foreign
Secretary at London regretted the virtual pledge of his
predecessor.
That France should quarrel with Great Britain was just
what Bismarck desired, and the causes of quarrel could be
extended by judicious diplomacy inflaming further French
colonial ambitions in Africa, in Siam, Cochin-China, and
the Pacific. The more that France spent in men or
money on colonial expansion, the less she would have for
her eastern frontier in Europe; the more she stared
across the seas the less she would be 'hypnotised by the
gap in the Vosges'; she would not find European allies
by expeditions to the Nile, the Mekong, or the Niger,
but European rivals, whose ambitions would be reflected
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 405
and refracted at London, Paris, Rome, Petersburg,
Brussels, and the Hague: colonial policy and colonial
failures have, moreover, always been since 1660 a fine
dissolvent of ministries in most European States. French
and British ministries would come to grief at home because
French or British expeditions met with reverses on the
Nile or the Niger: France must therefore be encouraged
to suffer a perpetual angina pectoris, in which colonialism
would be an irritant, very shattering to the Republic.
No less beneficial to Berlin and Central Europe, Tunis
and French Mediterranean ambitions brought France at
once into sharp collision with the sister Latin race in Italy.
The kingdom of Italy desired colonies and a sure grip on
the Mediterranean. - The French occupation of Tunis
was a bitter blow. How was France to be prevented from
adding Tripoli to Tunis? And if she had a condominium
in Egypt, what was there left in the Mediterranean for
Italy? An isolated Italy studied the map and the diplo-
matic constellations. Her position was becoming des-
perate. She could not stand alone. But with whom
could she act? A confidential explanation from Berlin
of the terms and meaning of the Dual Alliance of 1879,
made one certainty absolutely clear. 'Unredeemed
Italy' (Italia irredenta)--Trieste and Istria, the Alpine
frontier of the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy of 1810, the
Balkan littoral of the Adriatic were now postponed to
the German Kalends. If Italy could not get these from
Austria single-handed, she assuredly could not get them
by a war in which Germany stood behind Austria. The
Dual Alliance sponged from the screen of the future the
Italian dream of rounding off the unification of 1859 and
1866 by the incorporation of unredeemed Italy or securing
the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. And the exposed
shores of the peninsula were vulnerable to sea-power and
to French sea-power, located at Toulon, Corsica, Tunis,
Bizerta--perhaps Egypt. Given the conditions of 1882,
the accession of Italy to the Dual Alliance was--if the invi-
tation were held out from Berlin--a foregone conclusion.
On May 20, 1882, Italy's accession turned the Dual
into the Triple Alliance. The text of the treaty has
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? 406
BISMARCK
never been officially published; but it is certain that in
1882 Italy joined for five years, and that the treaty was
renewed in 1887 and at subsequent intervals, with which
Bismarck was not concerned. It is practically certain that
the three signatory Powers gave a reciprocal guarantee
for the integrity of their respective territories, undertook
to assist each other in the case of attack by any European
Power (i. e. France), and (probably by secret conventions)
agreed to allot with precision the nature and amount of
their respective military contribution to a joint effort.
It is practically certain that no guarantee was given to
Italy either by Germany or Austria of support in a colonial
policy in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, and that Italy
was in no way bound to support Balkan or other adven-
tures of Germany or Austria. The maintenance of the
existing balance of power in the Mediterranean, or the
nature of any future rearrangement of the Mediterranean
situation, probably did not fall within the scope of the
engagements undertaken in 1882.
The wisdom or the inexpediency of Italy's action in
1882 do not call for judgment here; but two other con-
siderations, besides those mentioned, unquestionably
weighed with Depretis and his successors. Alliance with
Berlin was a powerful support to the Quirinal against the
Vatican, and in 1882 the relations of Quirinal and Vatican
were severely strained: if the Dual Alliance made 'un-
redeemed Italy' an affair beyond redemption, the Triple
Alliance made the restoration of the temporal power of
the Papacy and the removal of the House of Savoy from
Rome practically impossible. The annoyance and anger
of Ultramontanism in Italy, Austria and France, and also
in Germany, are the best- proof of this consequence of the
Triple Alliance. Secondly, it did not prevent Italy from
improving an historic friendship with Great Britain, and
obtaining, if circumstances required, the assistance or
protection of the British fleet, with one of its bases
at Malta. The more strained Anglo-French relations
became, the greater became the likelihood of such assist-
ance; the better Anglo-German relations became, the
better would become the relations of Great Britain and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
Italy. Italy was, and was desired at Berlin to be, a middle
term between Great Britain and the new Triple Alliance.
To Bismarck the conclusion of the Treaty of May 20,
1882, was the culmination of his system. Henceforward
German hegemony in Central Europe moved securely
on the pivotal point of the Triple Alliance, which gradu-
ally and naturally grew into the one grand combination
in the European State system, with which all other possible
combinations or ententes had to reckon. And for Bismarck
the accession of Italy had every advantage and no disad-
vantages. Italy from 1878 to 1882 was in a restless and
excited state. 1 She might indeed precipitate a crisis
which would upset the carefully poised equilibrium of
Europe. Crises that arise from the action of strong
States are often not as dangerous as the crises provoked
by the recklessness of weak States. Italian policy in 1882
came under the control of the Wilhelmstrasse, and control
was stealthily and relentlessly followed by the moral and
economic penetration of the German bankers, cartels,
syndicates, and commercial travellers. After 1878 the
Ottoman Empire was similarly 'penetrated. ' How
deeply the penetration had pierced in both cases--how
enmeshed had become the finance and the springs of trade
by German wheels and cogs and 'controls'--Italy and
the world learned in 1914. 'Trade followed the alliances,
and the alliances followed trade. '
In 1882 the Kulturkampf was by no means healed. The
agreement of ' May 20, 1882' was a potent schedule to
'the May Laws' of 1873 and 1875. Prussia now had a
rod, steeped in Italian brine, which it could use, if required.
Crispi, who figures so prominently in the later phases of
the story, had known and fought under great and hypnotic
men--Garibaldi and Cavour. At Friedrichsruhe he met
another hypnotic personality and succumbed. Bismarck
and Crispi, exchanging their memories over cigars and
wine at Friedrichsruhe, the old revolutionary of the red-
1 'This whole attitude shows that Italy must not be numbered to-day among
the peace-loving and conservative Powers, who must reckon with the fact. . . .
Every encouragement to Italian policy to join the bellicose and predatory
Powers in Europe is contrary to German interests. '--Bismarck to Prince Reuss
at Vienna, Jap. z8, 1880. --Busch, Bismarck, Hi. p. zn,
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? 408
BISMARCK
shirts and 'The Thousand' and the veteran Junker who
had denounced the journey to Canossa, overthrown clerical
France and Apostolic Austria, were not a pleasant thought,
we may be sure, in the Apostolic chancery of the Vatican.
But Bismarck, in concluding the Triple Alliance, was
not thinking so much of the Vatican or the British fleet,
as of Central Europe and France. The Triple Alliance
completed Central Europe; it closed the Alpine passes;
it barred the great gate to Vienna through which Napoleon
had marched in 1796; it opened the Mediterranean to
Germany; it rent away from France the ally of the sister
Latin race and made it henceforward necessary for her to
keep two of her best corps to guard against invasion
through the Maritime Alps. Best of all, it shivered the
serious menace of 1869 and 1871. France, Austria and
Italy, bound in a common war of revenge, had been a
real danger. Austria had been secured as an ally in 1879;
Italy was secured in 1882. It would take genius on the
one side or bungling on the other to undo the Triple
Alliance. Where were now the possible allies of France?
Great Britain? Russia?
In 1882, with the bombardment of Alexandria, the re-
bellion of Arabi, the fall of Gambetta (January 26), and
the Anglo-Egyptian Campaign, war was more likely than
an alliance between France and Great Britain. The
Triple Alliance, in fact, largely. undid the benefits to
France of the benevolent hint to take Tunis and to take it
at once. In the future Italy's claims in the Mediter-
ranean might be much more serious, if Berlin found it
convenient to give them 'moral' support. Bismarck's
'moral' support was unlike that of most European
Powers. It was only given because he had decided that,
if need be, behind it lay 'the immoral' support of
German force.
And there was another supreme advantage in Bismarck's
eyes. If Austria kept Italy in check, Italy could be used
to keep Austria in vassalage. There was little fear that
Italy, the weakest of the three allies, would break loose,
take the bit in her teeth, and defy Berlin and Vienna,
while France was hostile, and Great Britain vaguely
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
friendly. But there was always a real danger that the
men in the Ball-Platz might lose their heads. Megalo-
mania and folly were hereditary diseases in the statesman-
ship of Imperial Vienna. Modern history was a dreary
record of Austrian blunders--from Charles VI. to Francis
Joseph; we are almost tempted to add from Charles v1.
to Aerenthal, Hotzendorf and Tisza. Italy provided the
Wilhelmstrasse with a very useful curb for keeping the
Ball-Platz 'in hand. ' In that unwritten chapter of the
relations of Berlin and Vienna after 1879 the historical
student of Bismarck's statecraft, provoked by the tempting
glimpses revealed here and there, sighs indeed for a few
weeks uninterrupted work in the archives of Vienna and
the Wilhelmstrasse with an unrestricted general warrant,
entitling him to examine all confidential documents.
Such a search would not merely satisfy a hungry curi-
osity; it would be invaluable in the scientific appreciation
of Bismarck's statecraft. The use of Italy's aspirations in
pruning the rank growth of Austrian appetites is an
obscure chapter in Bismarck's system--but would be an
illuminating one. It might, indeed probably would, fur-
nish an instructive contrast between Bismarck and the
post-Bis marckians.
Italy in 1882 was like Italy in 1866. She had concluded
a treaty which imposed obligations, but conferred prac-
tically no rights. Bismarck had, to a certainty, refused in
any way to endorse in advance the ' Italian draft' on the
future. How far he had cautiously endorsed a very limited
Austrian 'draft' is, as has been pointed out, very un-
certain; but Italian claims and aspirations in Albania or
elsewhere, that so obviously conflicted with an Austrian
programme, could be, and were, used after 1882 to keep
Austria 'in order. ' How far Bismarck's successors de-
parted from the Bismarckian system--how far they
gradually interpreted the articles of association in the very
limited liability company that constituted Bismarck's
Triple Alliance, as constituting a company of unlimited
liability, how far they gradually came to regard it as
practically a Dual Alliance in which Italy made a negli-
gible third, who would not dare to break away, and at the
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? BISMARCK
worst would observe a sulking and peevish neutrality--
it is neither necessary, nor possible, to decide here. But
to Bismarck, the Continentalist in feeling, thought, and
fibre, the Triple Alliance was of supreme importance, for
it secured the Continental position that made the marrow
and bone of Bismarckian Central Europe; and if it was
never easy from 1882 to 1890 to prevent his two allies
from snarling at, or quarrelling with each other, such
management called for all the arts and skill which Bismarck
rejoiced to prove that he had. The position of arbiter
was precisely what he desired, and in the exercise of the
office he was consummate. The Triple Alliance, in short,
was an open re-insurance against the liabilities, deliber-
ately incurred in 1879. But if we may judge from the
copious criticisms poured out in the Hamburger Nach-
richten after 1890, Bismarck was convinced that very
little of his mantle and no double portion of his spirit
had fallen on his successors. It is no less certain that
had Count Herbert Bismarck succeeded in due course, as
his father intended, to the vacant desk in the Wilhelm-
strasse that Hohenlohe and Bulow could have said with
unanswerable truth that the mantle and the double
portion of the Chancellor's spirit had not fallen on the son.
The Triple Alliance was, like all Bismarck's strokes,
aimed at France. It was the policy of isolation and diver-
sion in one. There is substantial reason for believing
that in 1882 a serious attempt was made to include Spain
in the network of alliances. But the attempt, if it was
made--which would have completed the isolation of
France--did not come to a treaty. Spain was left to
'moral penetration' by Germany--and it was effective.
Be that as it may, German emphasis was now laid on the
diversion of France. After 1882 the Republic was quietly
or openly encouraged from Berlin to pursue colonial
aims.
In 1881 Bismarck compared Gambetta to a
drummer in the sick-room of Europe. But Gambetta's
fall1 and death, which soon followed, ended the Gambetta
policy of cultivating the good-will of Great Britain, uniting
1 'Gambetta,' says M. Hanotaux, 'had to learn that one cannot in France
defend French interest with impunity. '--La France Contemporaine, 4. 629.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 411
the Latin races, and making a democratic Republic a power
for democracy in Europe, while keeping the lamp of
revenge at home polished and burning with a subdued
and steady light that at the right moment could flame
into a great national beacon. 'Ne parlez jamais de la
guerre,' Gambetta had said, 'mais pensez-y toujours. '
Gambetta's radical republicanism quenched the ardour of
Russian autocracy for a Franco-Russian entente.
After 1882 Ferry's policy in Egypt and the Far East
steadily estranged France from Great Britain. The Nile
and Tonkin, Madagascar and Siam, caused the French to
forget their hostility to Germany in their hostility to
Great Britain. And Bismarck took care to hold open the
fissure between Great Britain and France. Encourage-
ment to England in Egypt was balanced by encouragement
to France in the Far East and the Pacific. The Foreign
Office in Berlin and the German Embassy in Paris were
prolific in their hints of 'the great man's' sincerity in
wishing France well, while his magisterial experience
was readily placed at French disposal. The French
consulted the oracle freely. The Ferry Ministry in 1884
could say publicly that not for two decades had the re-
lations of France and Germany been so friendly. Such
friendship with good reasons disquieted the Cabinet at
London.
Bismarck certainly hoped that a few years of this con-
ciliation by diversion would wring from a French govern-
ment a stammering renunciation of revanche. A great
and magnanimous speech in the Reichstag from the
Chancellor could then have proclaimed that a generous
and brave nation had wisely closed the account and hence-
forward with Germany's unqualified goodwill and assist-
ance would march in a common work of civilisation--in
which Great Britain must be compelled to yield to the
legitimate rights of the new entente. But, instead of
the stammering renunciation came Ferry's fall (April 2,
1885): a colonial failure sharply awakened France to the
truth that colonies might be colonies, but Alsace and
Lorraine remained the monument of German victory and
French defeat. French ministries henceforward grew
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? 412
BISMARCK
like grass in the green spring and fell like leaves in chill
October; and in the place of the great and unspoken
speech that Bismarck desired to make, we have the
Bismarckian orations of 1887 and 1888, in which France
was held up to Germany as the hereditary, irreconcilable,
and malignant foe in whose vile heart justice and con-
ciliation only whetted the impotent lust of revenge.
Worse still, the colonial movement, Egypt and the diver-
sion of Russia to the Middle East brought on a severe
Anglo-Russian crisis and involved Germany in sharp and
dangerous friction with Great Britain. The year 1884
was a momentous one in French history. It was a far
more momentous one in the history of Great Britain, of
Germany and of Bismarck.
The relations of Great Britain and Germany after 1871
and Bismarck's policy are susceptible of various and contra-
dictory interpretations. Bismarck's dislike of Gladstone
and Gladstonianism is beyond question, for Gladstone's
principles of foreign policy and theory of international
relations, no less than his system of home politics,
represented everything that Bismarck regarded as danger-
ous, detestable or futile,1 and Gladstone's noted radical
distrust of Bismarckianism, which was very apparent
from 1880 to 1885, and was largely, if not mainly, re-
sponsible for the refusal of Great Britain to enter the
German net, was no less strong. Bismarck seems to have
held the view, adopted by many continental statesmen,
that Great Britain as essentially a naval, maritime, and
colonial Power was not, and ought not to be, concerned
with the Continent of Europe. If, therefore, Great
Britain actively intervened in 'purely continental affairs,'
she was taking upon herself matters not properly sui juris,
as well as introducing an unwelcome and incalculable
element into a situation, already sufficiently complicated.
Her very disinterestedness could be disconcerting:
because it made it difficult to conclude material bargains
by material bribes. British Liberalism, in particular,
1 'It is very apparent in the Sabouroff memoirs,' writes Professor Simpson,
who has seen these unpublished papers, 'how uneasy Bismarck was at the
prospects of a Liberal England. '--Nineteenth Century, December iji7,
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
introduced also into international relations ' cant' phrases
and formulae--humanity, the Concert of Europe, the
unity of European moral interests, arbitratior, moral
responsibility, Blue Books, amenability to public opinion,
and 'nations rightly struggling to be free '--and had
always done so from Canning onwards. Great Britain's
intervention in 1875 had been more than disconcerting--
it had led to a serious rebuff: and even more serious had
been the sharp action of the Beaconsfield ministry in the
crisis of 1877-8. A war between Great Britain and Russia
over Constantinople and the Balkans would create an in-
soluble dilemma for Austria, and therefore for Germany.
The steady insistence of'Mr. Gladstone's ministry in 1880
on fulfilling the pledges and terms of the Treaty of Berlin
was very annoying. A Concert of Europe, manipulated by
the Wilhelmstrasse, was one thing--a Concert of Europe
led by Great Britain was another, and did not make for
German hegemony and for peace as Bismarck under-
stood it.
But for all his gibes or snarling innuendoes Bismarck did
not underrate British strength. The British fleet, unlike
the British army, could not be dealt with by ' calling in the
police. ' And Great Britain in some mysterious way had
an uncanny gift for provoking the jealousy yet attracting
the support of European Powers. Bismarck, therefore,
after 1871, aimed mainly at encouraging British goodwill
to Austria and Italy, at keeping France and Great Britain
apart and Russia and Great Britain in strained tension, in
which German good offices could be effectively employed
to maintain the tension, yet prevent a complete rupture.
Down to 1884 Germany and Great Britain could maintain
in theory and phrase the friendliest of relations, for no
direct or serious cause of quarrel between the two Powers
existed. The two Powers might indirectly have divergent
interests in many European questions in which these
European States were largely concerned, but a direct
antagonism in which Great Britain and Germany were
the chief actors had not so far arisen.
The Egyptian question, with all the embarrassments
arising out of the tangle or created by ministerial policy in
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? 4H
BISMARCK
Great Britain, was just what Bismarck could have wished.
It made Great Britain more dependent on German good-
will, and, properly handled with the requisite air of im-
partiality, could separate France and Great Britain and
prevent an Anglo-French alliance. The evidence that
Bismarck would have welcomed a loose Anglo-German
alliance or entente between 1880 and 1890 is suggestive,
but neither precise nor conclusive. Such an 'alliance'
would have been a triumphant codicil to the Triple
Alliance, would have been warmly welcomed in Italy, and
need not have damaged a separate understanding between
Germany and Russia. The interests of Great Britain and
Russia in many respects were not more divergent than
those of Austria and Italy; and it would have been a
powerful aid in emphasising German arguments at
Petersburg. But if Bismarck went so far as to make
direct or indirect overtures, they broke down on
Mr. Gladstone's radical distrust, and no less on the direct
conflict of interest in colonial policy that came to a head
in 1884. In that year Germany was caught up in the
colonial movement.
It was inevitable after 1871 that Germany should begin
to take an interest in colonial expansion, if for no other
reason than that the most powerful of the Continental
States had no colonies, and that colonial possessions were
a proof and a guarantee of strength. German Nationalism,
after 1815, as has been emphasised earlier in these pages,
had found its deepest conviction and most stimulating
nourishment in the consciousness of German impotence
relatively to other great national States. The feeling that
a united Germany could and ought to stand in the world
as a Power, able to stand and speak for Germans as a whole
in the gate of its rivals, and on terms of equality face
France, Austria, Russia, and Great Britain, was overwhelm-
ing and reasonable. Germany had now accomplished
her unification, and the power of the German Empire
after 1871 was an indisputable fact which satisfied to the
full the passionate craving of the once impotent Germany
of the Federal Diet. After 1871 the German nation, like
its Emperor had ' drunk of the chalice of victory and would
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 415
not break it. ' It now desired to be an Empire like other
great Empires--and the Empires with a future had colonies
because the future lay with colonies. Leroy Beaulieu's
remark, that colonies may not be signs of strength to-day,
but that they hold the strength of the future, sums up the
inarticulate German ambition. Just as a man who has
made himself a millionaire by his own efforts desires motor
cars, a fine picture gallery, or historic castles in the country,
not for their intrinsic value, but because they prove that
he is as rich and as powerful as other millionaires, so the
German nation also desired colonies as the appurtenances
and apparatus of Empire--to give them the external
position and framework in the world enjoyed by other
imperial nations.
After 1871 a decade was spent in completing unification
into which the best energies of the German nation were
thrown with enthusiasm. By 1880 the increase in popula-
tion, wealth, commerce, and maritime trade, no less than the
stability and strength of the administrative and military
fabric was remarkable. The industrialisation of Germany
proceeded by leaps and bounds. A still greater future
awaited a further expansion. It was inevitable that the
German trader should seek outlets for capital and markets
outside Europe. He found them and developed them with
the same energy and thoroughness that marked the work
done by Germans at home in science, the army, civil ad-
ministration and trade. But there was one humiliating
disadvantage. The German emigrant was lost to Germany
because there was no Germany outside Europe. The
German trader had to explore and develop his trade either
under the protection of a foreign flag or at his own risk.
In Europe he could say 'civis Germanus sum'--a claim
that no European State was likely to underrate--but in the
Pacific or on the coast of East or West Africa the claim
lost its force. The German found the white ensign of
Great Britain everywhere; the tricolour of a France
which he had defeated and despised was being planted
steadily outside France; but the German flag did not fly,
even where trade was in German hands or the unknown
spaces of the earth had been explored by German effort.
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? 416
BISMARCK
Germany had obliterated, since 1815, the ' injuries of two
centuries' in Europe. Unless she now girt up her
puissant loins the world would be closed and time would
have inflicted fresh and irremovable injuries.
The conversion to Protection at home clinched con-
clusively the sentimental and the political argument.
That conversion, as has been pointed out, was a renaissance
of seventeenth-century mercantilism interpreted in the
terms of the later nineteenth century. The Bismarckian
doctrine of power, developed from the renaissance theory
of Reason of State, joined hands with the mercantilist
doctrine of power, founded on a specific economic analysis
of national power, of which F. List in his masterpiece The
National System of Political Economy, a generation earlier,
had given a penetrating and reasoned exposition. Cobden-
ism and Manchesterism, the disciples of List in Germany
argued, had failed. The belief of the Cobdenites and the
builders of the Zollverein that the future of the great
economic and industrial States lay with Free Trade had
proved a delusion. The world had slowly turned not to
Free Trade but to Protection, to tariffs and tariff treaties,
and Germany had now turned with it. The economic
future lay with a new and scientific Protection, which was
the basis of economic and political Power. The essential
and logical corollary to the reservation of the home-market,
and the home industries to the natives of the State, was the
opening of the maritime markets to the products of modern
industry on the grand scale. Germany as a workshop of
the world--protected by a scientific tariff--required
expanding markets and the reservation of the requisite
raw materials which could not be provided in Europe.
Unless these were secured beyond dispute German trade
would either be mutilated in its upward expansion or be
left dependent on the precarious goodwill and the certain
jealousy of her European rivals. Her most serious
economic competitors were also her most formidable
political rivals. Markets and raw materials could, in
short, only be secured by colonies and a fleet. Without
colonies, the expanding mercantile marine and the nerves
and sinews of German industry were exposed to an in-
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 417
creasing jeopardy. Colonies, therefore, on this argument,
the cogency of which was strengthened by every increase
in economic efficiency and prosperity, were not a luxury,
but an absolute necessity of power. In the early eighties
the argument was being driven home by professors, news-
papers, the industrial magnates and the increasing scramble
for colonies, so notable after 1871. In 1887 Die Deutsche
Colonial Gesellschaft, the union of two separate colonial
organisations, was a significant proof of the solidarity of
the movement; and the formation of a' Colonial group' in
the Reichstag as early as 1883, to press the demand, was
the political expression of the forces at work.
Bismarck was not convinced. Like most men who have
grown up and achieved great things under the influence of
one set of conditions--men whose characters, convictions,
and principles of action are strong because they are so set
in their fibres and their blood that they are the men them-
selves--Bismarck was never very sensitive to new ideas
and new forces which were the result of wholly new con-
ditions and a new age. He was hostile to ' colonialism,'
also, because it was not his own idea, the product of his
own original and creative gifts. Unlike many statesmen,
and most of his own countrymen, Bismarck had, with all his
devouring ambition and pride of, and trust in, power, a
fine and moderating sense of limits. Between the ideal
and the practicable he continually drew a distinction that
is the marrow of his statecraft. He was like Gustavus
Adolphus or Richelieu energy indeed, but energy under
restraint. And he. never forgot what he wrote to his wife
after Ktmiggratz--' we must not think that we have
conquered the world nor forget that we have to live with
three neighbours. ' He recognised that the success of the
German Empire had stirred the deepest jealousies and
resentment; it might and could be overthrown by
coalitions; Germany was not able, for all her strength, to
defy the world.
His intuitional dislike of colonialism went deeper than
mere sentiment, temperamental indifference to principles
not his own, or a practical calculation of the limits of
German Power. He was and he remained to his death
R. 2D
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? BISMARCK
essentially a continentalist; that is, he held as the core of
a true system of German policy that the German Empire
must be based on the complete mastery of the continental
conditions of supremacy. Germany must control Central
Europe; without that control the Empire would either
be dissolved or be reduced to the second rate position of
his youth and early manhood. And the control of Central
Europe imposed the absolute necessity of an invincible
army, superior to that of any likely coalition of forces--
an army in fact on a two-Power or three-Power standard--
together with a foreign policy carried out by a vigilant
and invincible Higher Direction, concentrating on the
keys of power in Europe. The German army involved
a severe tax in manhood and money. Any dissipation of
strength on objectives outside the main theatre would
mean a proportionate reduction in the army; and, no less
pernicious, a dualism in the higher strategy of the Wilhelm-
strasse. No one realised more completely than Bismarck
the task that the maintenance of German hegemony in
Europe after 1871 laid on the Chancellor. Only by
prestige and a sleepless diplomacy had the successive
phases of the European situation been successfully met,
manipulated, and worked into the broad plan. The task
of watching and controlling Austria, France, Russia, Italy,
Spain--of anticipating the complications in the Near East,
in Poland, and the Mediterranean--became harder, not
easier, as the European Powers grew, penetrated or copied
Bismarckian principles and methods. The invitation
therefore to break out on a new objective--a great colonial
campaign--must be resisted. It was excentric to the
central issues, which in the nature of things constituted
the essentials of a true German policy.
Moreover, Bismarck foresaw that a successful colonial
campaign inevitably involved rivalries outside Europe
that would react on the European position. There were
two chief Colonial States in Europe--France and Great
Britain. Was Germany to compete with France, stop the
policy of diversion which dissipated French strength and
drive her back on concentrating on Europe ? ? And Great
Britain? Competition here would not drive Great Britain
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
back on Europe--it was competition with a Power essen-
tially colonial and only secondarily continental. At sea
Great Britain was supreme. What if Great Britain replied
by building up a European coalition against Germany? The
antagonism of Great Britain was not lightly to be provoked.
Bismarck predicted that a really serious German challenge
to Great Britain in the colonial and extra-European
sphere would end in a Franco-British alliance and a deep
penetration of Great Britain into the continental situa-
tion--precisely the one object that he desired to prevent.
Bismarck had studied history as a great statesman should
study it--to learn from it the secrets of statecraft. History
was for him a study in statesmanship: precisely as to all the
great commanders from Caesar to Moltke the study of military
history--the great things in war done by the great soldiers
--is the indispensable apprenticeship in the principles of
their science. And he saw, as his speeches and obiter dicta
prove, in modern European history that Great Britain had
always, and only, been formidable, when, in the task of
building and consolidating the British Empire, and in the
pursuit of British ends, she had been driven by the facts
and forces of a given situation to be the backbone and
the reservoir of a European combination. William in. ,
Marlborough, Chatham, Castlereagh--did not these prove
that no European coalition had ever succeeded of which
Great Britain was not the backbone and the reservoir?
Thus, indeed, had Louis xiv. , Louis xv. , Kaunitz, and
Napoleon been overthrown. The Great Britain of Lord
North and George in. , or of the ministries of 1864, 1866,
and 1870, without European allies, and either refusing to
find them or wilfully rejecting them--sulking or ignorantly
rejoicing in a splendid isolation--had brought disaster or
impotence on itself. Put Great Britain, Bismarck virtually
argued, with her back to the wall, because her imperial
interests are threatened, and if she had a statesman to
direct her policy, she would make a European coalition
and keep it going until her British ends--outside Europe
--were achieved.
? 402
BISMARCK
way that, in Bismarck's view, might imperil not merely
Germany^ interest in the East but the fundamental basis
of German supremacy in Europe. For Bismarck an
alliance of Russia and France, and the closing of the breach
between Great Britain and Russia, spelled the ruin of a
true system of European policy. The younger generation,
in short, was distinguishing between Bismarckian Central-
ism and a Weltpolitik. They aspired to make Germany a
Wdtmacht--a World-Empire--and not merely a Con-
tinental Power, and they saw the main road winding from
Hamburg through Berlin across the Balkans, through a
Constantinople controlled by Germany to Mesopotamia
and the Persian Gulf, with an entry to the seas not so
closely controlled as the routes down the Channel or
north of the Shetlands; they also saw it reaching across
the Atlantic to the Pacific, expressed in the formula ' ships,
colonies, and commerce. ' And for this young generation
the heart of the position lay in the closest offensive alliance
with Austria. It made Great Britain, not France or
Russia, the great rival of Germany. Bismarck's virtual
reply to such an argument was a paraphrase of Beacons-
field's judgment on Herat and Candahar. 'The Key of
East and West, of Centralism. . and Empire, was not in
Belgrade or Constantinople or Zanzibar--it was in Metz,
Berlin, and Thorn. '
In a more concrete form, the Near Eastern Question
from 1879 to 1890 was summed up in the antagonism of
Austria and Russia in the Balkans, and in the rivalry
between Great Britain and France in Egypt. These two
problems brought the Mediterranean into the main
diplomatic theatre, and kept it there.
By 1878 the isolation of France was proving exceedingly
difficult. The crisis of 1875 had shown that the European
Powers would not tolerate a further reduction of France
or French power; the International Exhibition of 1878
picturesquely mirrored the remarkable extent of France's
recovery from the collapse in 1870. Paris, as in 1867,
was still a great, if not the great, foyer de civilisation,
the attraction of which was inextinguishable. The new
France, working so hard to make good the blunders of the
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 403
Second Empire, would soon be, if she was not already, an
ally worth having. But the Germany that had failed to
crush her or to isolate her completely, and that must fail
to reconcile her because of Alsace and Lorraine, might
divert her gathering strength into directions that would
involve her in a collision with all the possible allies of the
new France. There were three such possible allies--
Great Britain, Russia, and Italy. The colonial movement
combined with the situation in the Mediterranean to give
Bismarck a fine chance of checkmating the rapprochement
so necessary to France and his diplomacy was equal to it.
After 1879 Colonial questions moved sharply and sud-
denly into the forefront of European controversy and
ambition. Africa and the Pacific kept the chancelleries
busy. For Africa was the one great area, of vast extent,
and unlimited possibilities, a continent not yet properly
explored, and not yet finally allotted to, or occupied by,
any great European Power. With 1880 'the scramble
for Africa ' seriously began, and it behove the Powers that
had started late in the foundation of colonies to be quick,
or the one fine field left in a limited world would be over-
run and mastered by the Powers which had started early,
and were already settled at various points on the rim of
the Continent. Everything combined to make the
'African appeal' urgent and critical--the romance of
exploration, the prose of business and trade, missions and
religion, coaling stations, hinterlands and doctrines of
international law, struggling to establish principles which
distinguished spheres of influence, protectorates, treaty
rights, and the nature of actual or virtual possession; and
with these mingled the claims of humanity and the slave-
trade, the rights of races and civilisation,' the white man's
burden,' and the territorial ambitions that underlay the
conception of the State as the incarnation of Power, or the
State as the incarnation of Right and Law. Darkest . and
unknown Africa indeed summed up everything for Europe,
from the selfless heroism of a Livingstone, the stubborn
pertinacity of a Stanley, and the philanthropy of a
Lavigerie to the imperialism of a Rhodes or the syndicates
of gold and diamond companies, the provision of raw
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? 404
BISMARCK
materials for the workshops of Europe, or the cruder
claim to sell bad guns and the poison of potato-spirit in
return for rubber extracted by the lash. And in Africa,
with its harbours and mighty rivers and its stepping-
stones, east or west, might not prescient statecraft call a
new world into existence that would not merely redress,
but completely upset, the balance of the old? Africa
was the whole which developed the rivalries of other and
more purely local areas--for the Mediterranean was a
localised form both of the larger African and the Near
Eastern problems.
The diversion, as distinct from the isolation, of France,
began in 1878. Whether Bismarck first, in the green-
rooms of the Berlin Congress, where so many tempting
whispers were uttered, suggested the idea of France occupy-
ing Tunis, as a compensation for losses elsewhere, or
whether the suggestion fell from Beaconsfield and Salis-
bury, may be a nice question in the origin of things, the
evidence for which is still incomplete; but it is tolerably
certain that France understood after 1878 that, if she did
go to Tunis, Germany and Great Britain would not com-
bine to make the occupation a casus belli, or an occasion
for a humiliating rebuff. In 1881 France accordingly
went to Tunis--with the results that Bismarck at any
rate had foreseen and intended. Great Britain was
already hard pressed by difficulties in Egypt; her relations
with France were becoming strained, and the new Foreign
Secretary at London regretted the virtual pledge of his
predecessor.
That France should quarrel with Great Britain was just
what Bismarck desired, and the causes of quarrel could be
extended by judicious diplomacy inflaming further French
colonial ambitions in Africa, in Siam, Cochin-China, and
the Pacific. The more that France spent in men or
money on colonial expansion, the less she would have for
her eastern frontier in Europe; the more she stared
across the seas the less she would be 'hypnotised by the
gap in the Vosges'; she would not find European allies
by expeditions to the Nile, the Mekong, or the Niger,
but European rivals, whose ambitions would be reflected
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 405
and refracted at London, Paris, Rome, Petersburg,
Brussels, and the Hague: colonial policy and colonial
failures have, moreover, always been since 1660 a fine
dissolvent of ministries in most European States. French
and British ministries would come to grief at home because
French or British expeditions met with reverses on the
Nile or the Niger: France must therefore be encouraged
to suffer a perpetual angina pectoris, in which colonialism
would be an irritant, very shattering to the Republic.
No less beneficial to Berlin and Central Europe, Tunis
and French Mediterranean ambitions brought France at
once into sharp collision with the sister Latin race in Italy.
The kingdom of Italy desired colonies and a sure grip on
the Mediterranean. - The French occupation of Tunis
was a bitter blow. How was France to be prevented from
adding Tripoli to Tunis? And if she had a condominium
in Egypt, what was there left in the Mediterranean for
Italy? An isolated Italy studied the map and the diplo-
matic constellations. Her position was becoming des-
perate. She could not stand alone. But with whom
could she act? A confidential explanation from Berlin
of the terms and meaning of the Dual Alliance of 1879,
made one certainty absolutely clear. 'Unredeemed
Italy' (Italia irredenta)--Trieste and Istria, the Alpine
frontier of the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy of 1810, the
Balkan littoral of the Adriatic were now postponed to
the German Kalends. If Italy could not get these from
Austria single-handed, she assuredly could not get them
by a war in which Germany stood behind Austria. The
Dual Alliance sponged from the screen of the future the
Italian dream of rounding off the unification of 1859 and
1866 by the incorporation of unredeemed Italy or securing
the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. And the exposed
shores of the peninsula were vulnerable to sea-power and
to French sea-power, located at Toulon, Corsica, Tunis,
Bizerta--perhaps Egypt. Given the conditions of 1882,
the accession of Italy to the Dual Alliance was--if the invi-
tation were held out from Berlin--a foregone conclusion.
On May 20, 1882, Italy's accession turned the Dual
into the Triple Alliance. The text of the treaty has
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? 406
BISMARCK
never been officially published; but it is certain that in
1882 Italy joined for five years, and that the treaty was
renewed in 1887 and at subsequent intervals, with which
Bismarck was not concerned. It is practically certain that
the three signatory Powers gave a reciprocal guarantee
for the integrity of their respective territories, undertook
to assist each other in the case of attack by any European
Power (i. e. France), and (probably by secret conventions)
agreed to allot with precision the nature and amount of
their respective military contribution to a joint effort.
It is practically certain that no guarantee was given to
Italy either by Germany or Austria of support in a colonial
policy in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, and that Italy
was in no way bound to support Balkan or other adven-
tures of Germany or Austria. The maintenance of the
existing balance of power in the Mediterranean, or the
nature of any future rearrangement of the Mediterranean
situation, probably did not fall within the scope of the
engagements undertaken in 1882.
The wisdom or the inexpediency of Italy's action in
1882 do not call for judgment here; but two other con-
siderations, besides those mentioned, unquestionably
weighed with Depretis and his successors. Alliance with
Berlin was a powerful support to the Quirinal against the
Vatican, and in 1882 the relations of Quirinal and Vatican
were severely strained: if the Dual Alliance made 'un-
redeemed Italy' an affair beyond redemption, the Triple
Alliance made the restoration of the temporal power of
the Papacy and the removal of the House of Savoy from
Rome practically impossible. The annoyance and anger
of Ultramontanism in Italy, Austria and France, and also
in Germany, are the best- proof of this consequence of the
Triple Alliance. Secondly, it did not prevent Italy from
improving an historic friendship with Great Britain, and
obtaining, if circumstances required, the assistance or
protection of the British fleet, with one of its bases
at Malta. The more strained Anglo-French relations
became, the greater became the likelihood of such assist-
ance; the better Anglo-German relations became, the
better would become the relations of Great Britain and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
Italy. Italy was, and was desired at Berlin to be, a middle
term between Great Britain and the new Triple Alliance.
To Bismarck the conclusion of the Treaty of May 20,
1882, was the culmination of his system. Henceforward
German hegemony in Central Europe moved securely
on the pivotal point of the Triple Alliance, which gradu-
ally and naturally grew into the one grand combination
in the European State system, with which all other possible
combinations or ententes had to reckon. And for Bismarck
the accession of Italy had every advantage and no disad-
vantages. Italy from 1878 to 1882 was in a restless and
excited state. 1 She might indeed precipitate a crisis
which would upset the carefully poised equilibrium of
Europe. Crises that arise from the action of strong
States are often not as dangerous as the crises provoked
by the recklessness of weak States. Italian policy in 1882
came under the control of the Wilhelmstrasse, and control
was stealthily and relentlessly followed by the moral and
economic penetration of the German bankers, cartels,
syndicates, and commercial travellers. After 1878 the
Ottoman Empire was similarly 'penetrated. ' How
deeply the penetration had pierced in both cases--how
enmeshed had become the finance and the springs of trade
by German wheels and cogs and 'controls'--Italy and
the world learned in 1914. 'Trade followed the alliances,
and the alliances followed trade. '
In 1882 the Kulturkampf was by no means healed. The
agreement of ' May 20, 1882' was a potent schedule to
'the May Laws' of 1873 and 1875. Prussia now had a
rod, steeped in Italian brine, which it could use, if required.
Crispi, who figures so prominently in the later phases of
the story, had known and fought under great and hypnotic
men--Garibaldi and Cavour. At Friedrichsruhe he met
another hypnotic personality and succumbed. Bismarck
and Crispi, exchanging their memories over cigars and
wine at Friedrichsruhe, the old revolutionary of the red-
1 'This whole attitude shows that Italy must not be numbered to-day among
the peace-loving and conservative Powers, who must reckon with the fact. . . .
Every encouragement to Italian policy to join the bellicose and predatory
Powers in Europe is contrary to German interests. '--Bismarck to Prince Reuss
at Vienna, Jap. z8, 1880. --Busch, Bismarck, Hi. p. zn,
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? 408
BISMARCK
shirts and 'The Thousand' and the veteran Junker who
had denounced the journey to Canossa, overthrown clerical
France and Apostolic Austria, were not a pleasant thought,
we may be sure, in the Apostolic chancery of the Vatican.
But Bismarck, in concluding the Triple Alliance, was
not thinking so much of the Vatican or the British fleet,
as of Central Europe and France. The Triple Alliance
completed Central Europe; it closed the Alpine passes;
it barred the great gate to Vienna through which Napoleon
had marched in 1796; it opened the Mediterranean to
Germany; it rent away from France the ally of the sister
Latin race and made it henceforward necessary for her to
keep two of her best corps to guard against invasion
through the Maritime Alps. Best of all, it shivered the
serious menace of 1869 and 1871. France, Austria and
Italy, bound in a common war of revenge, had been a
real danger. Austria had been secured as an ally in 1879;
Italy was secured in 1882. It would take genius on the
one side or bungling on the other to undo the Triple
Alliance. Where were now the possible allies of France?
Great Britain? Russia?
In 1882, with the bombardment of Alexandria, the re-
bellion of Arabi, the fall of Gambetta (January 26), and
the Anglo-Egyptian Campaign, war was more likely than
an alliance between France and Great Britain. The
Triple Alliance, in fact, largely. undid the benefits to
France of the benevolent hint to take Tunis and to take it
at once. In the future Italy's claims in the Mediter-
ranean might be much more serious, if Berlin found it
convenient to give them 'moral' support. Bismarck's
'moral' support was unlike that of most European
Powers. It was only given because he had decided that,
if need be, behind it lay 'the immoral' support of
German force.
And there was another supreme advantage in Bismarck's
eyes. If Austria kept Italy in check, Italy could be used
to keep Austria in vassalage. There was little fear that
Italy, the weakest of the three allies, would break loose,
take the bit in her teeth, and defy Berlin and Vienna,
while France was hostile, and Great Britain vaguely
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
friendly. But there was always a real danger that the
men in the Ball-Platz might lose their heads. Megalo-
mania and folly were hereditary diseases in the statesman-
ship of Imperial Vienna. Modern history was a dreary
record of Austrian blunders--from Charles VI. to Francis
Joseph; we are almost tempted to add from Charles v1.
to Aerenthal, Hotzendorf and Tisza. Italy provided the
Wilhelmstrasse with a very useful curb for keeping the
Ball-Platz 'in hand. ' In that unwritten chapter of the
relations of Berlin and Vienna after 1879 the historical
student of Bismarck's statecraft, provoked by the tempting
glimpses revealed here and there, sighs indeed for a few
weeks uninterrupted work in the archives of Vienna and
the Wilhelmstrasse with an unrestricted general warrant,
entitling him to examine all confidential documents.
Such a search would not merely satisfy a hungry curi-
osity; it would be invaluable in the scientific appreciation
of Bismarck's statecraft. The use of Italy's aspirations in
pruning the rank growth of Austrian appetites is an
obscure chapter in Bismarck's system--but would be an
illuminating one. It might, indeed probably would, fur-
nish an instructive contrast between Bismarck and the
post-Bis marckians.
Italy in 1882 was like Italy in 1866. She had concluded
a treaty which imposed obligations, but conferred prac-
tically no rights. Bismarck had, to a certainty, refused in
any way to endorse in advance the ' Italian draft' on the
future. How far he had cautiously endorsed a very limited
Austrian 'draft' is, as has been pointed out, very un-
certain; but Italian claims and aspirations in Albania or
elsewhere, that so obviously conflicted with an Austrian
programme, could be, and were, used after 1882 to keep
Austria 'in order. ' How far Bismarck's successors de-
parted from the Bismarckian system--how far they
gradually interpreted the articles of association in the very
limited liability company that constituted Bismarck's
Triple Alliance, as constituting a company of unlimited
liability, how far they gradually came to regard it as
practically a Dual Alliance in which Italy made a negli-
gible third, who would not dare to break away, and at the
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? BISMARCK
worst would observe a sulking and peevish neutrality--
it is neither necessary, nor possible, to decide here. But
to Bismarck, the Continentalist in feeling, thought, and
fibre, the Triple Alliance was of supreme importance, for
it secured the Continental position that made the marrow
and bone of Bismarckian Central Europe; and if it was
never easy from 1882 to 1890 to prevent his two allies
from snarling at, or quarrelling with each other, such
management called for all the arts and skill which Bismarck
rejoiced to prove that he had. The position of arbiter
was precisely what he desired, and in the exercise of the
office he was consummate. The Triple Alliance, in short,
was an open re-insurance against the liabilities, deliber-
ately incurred in 1879. But if we may judge from the
copious criticisms poured out in the Hamburger Nach-
richten after 1890, Bismarck was convinced that very
little of his mantle and no double portion of his spirit
had fallen on his successors. It is no less certain that
had Count Herbert Bismarck succeeded in due course, as
his father intended, to the vacant desk in the Wilhelm-
strasse that Hohenlohe and Bulow could have said with
unanswerable truth that the mantle and the double
portion of the Chancellor's spirit had not fallen on the son.
The Triple Alliance was, like all Bismarck's strokes,
aimed at France. It was the policy of isolation and diver-
sion in one. There is substantial reason for believing
that in 1882 a serious attempt was made to include Spain
in the network of alliances. But the attempt, if it was
made--which would have completed the isolation of
France--did not come to a treaty. Spain was left to
'moral penetration' by Germany--and it was effective.
Be that as it may, German emphasis was now laid on the
diversion of France. After 1882 the Republic was quietly
or openly encouraged from Berlin to pursue colonial
aims.
In 1881 Bismarck compared Gambetta to a
drummer in the sick-room of Europe. But Gambetta's
fall1 and death, which soon followed, ended the Gambetta
policy of cultivating the good-will of Great Britain, uniting
1 'Gambetta,' says M. Hanotaux, 'had to learn that one cannot in France
defend French interest with impunity. '--La France Contemporaine, 4. 629.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 411
the Latin races, and making a democratic Republic a power
for democracy in Europe, while keeping the lamp of
revenge at home polished and burning with a subdued
and steady light that at the right moment could flame
into a great national beacon. 'Ne parlez jamais de la
guerre,' Gambetta had said, 'mais pensez-y toujours. '
Gambetta's radical republicanism quenched the ardour of
Russian autocracy for a Franco-Russian entente.
After 1882 Ferry's policy in Egypt and the Far East
steadily estranged France from Great Britain. The Nile
and Tonkin, Madagascar and Siam, caused the French to
forget their hostility to Germany in their hostility to
Great Britain. And Bismarck took care to hold open the
fissure between Great Britain and France. Encourage-
ment to England in Egypt was balanced by encouragement
to France in the Far East and the Pacific. The Foreign
Office in Berlin and the German Embassy in Paris were
prolific in their hints of 'the great man's' sincerity in
wishing France well, while his magisterial experience
was readily placed at French disposal. The French
consulted the oracle freely. The Ferry Ministry in 1884
could say publicly that not for two decades had the re-
lations of France and Germany been so friendly. Such
friendship with good reasons disquieted the Cabinet at
London.
Bismarck certainly hoped that a few years of this con-
ciliation by diversion would wring from a French govern-
ment a stammering renunciation of revanche. A great
and magnanimous speech in the Reichstag from the
Chancellor could then have proclaimed that a generous
and brave nation had wisely closed the account and hence-
forward with Germany's unqualified goodwill and assist-
ance would march in a common work of civilisation--in
which Great Britain must be compelled to yield to the
legitimate rights of the new entente. But, instead of
the stammering renunciation came Ferry's fall (April 2,
1885): a colonial failure sharply awakened France to the
truth that colonies might be colonies, but Alsace and
Lorraine remained the monument of German victory and
French defeat. French ministries henceforward grew
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? 412
BISMARCK
like grass in the green spring and fell like leaves in chill
October; and in the place of the great and unspoken
speech that Bismarck desired to make, we have the
Bismarckian orations of 1887 and 1888, in which France
was held up to Germany as the hereditary, irreconcilable,
and malignant foe in whose vile heart justice and con-
ciliation only whetted the impotent lust of revenge.
Worse still, the colonial movement, Egypt and the diver-
sion of Russia to the Middle East brought on a severe
Anglo-Russian crisis and involved Germany in sharp and
dangerous friction with Great Britain. The year 1884
was a momentous one in French history. It was a far
more momentous one in the history of Great Britain, of
Germany and of Bismarck.
The relations of Great Britain and Germany after 1871
and Bismarck's policy are susceptible of various and contra-
dictory interpretations. Bismarck's dislike of Gladstone
and Gladstonianism is beyond question, for Gladstone's
principles of foreign policy and theory of international
relations, no less than his system of home politics,
represented everything that Bismarck regarded as danger-
ous, detestable or futile,1 and Gladstone's noted radical
distrust of Bismarckianism, which was very apparent
from 1880 to 1885, and was largely, if not mainly, re-
sponsible for the refusal of Great Britain to enter the
German net, was no less strong. Bismarck seems to have
held the view, adopted by many continental statesmen,
that Great Britain as essentially a naval, maritime, and
colonial Power was not, and ought not to be, concerned
with the Continent of Europe. If, therefore, Great
Britain actively intervened in 'purely continental affairs,'
she was taking upon herself matters not properly sui juris,
as well as introducing an unwelcome and incalculable
element into a situation, already sufficiently complicated.
Her very disinterestedness could be disconcerting:
because it made it difficult to conclude material bargains
by material bribes. British Liberalism, in particular,
1 'It is very apparent in the Sabouroff memoirs,' writes Professor Simpson,
who has seen these unpublished papers, 'how uneasy Bismarck was at the
prospects of a Liberal England. '--Nineteenth Century, December iji7,
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
introduced also into international relations ' cant' phrases
and formulae--humanity, the Concert of Europe, the
unity of European moral interests, arbitratior, moral
responsibility, Blue Books, amenability to public opinion,
and 'nations rightly struggling to be free '--and had
always done so from Canning onwards. Great Britain's
intervention in 1875 had been more than disconcerting--
it had led to a serious rebuff: and even more serious had
been the sharp action of the Beaconsfield ministry in the
crisis of 1877-8. A war between Great Britain and Russia
over Constantinople and the Balkans would create an in-
soluble dilemma for Austria, and therefore for Germany.
The steady insistence of'Mr. Gladstone's ministry in 1880
on fulfilling the pledges and terms of the Treaty of Berlin
was very annoying. A Concert of Europe, manipulated by
the Wilhelmstrasse, was one thing--a Concert of Europe
led by Great Britain was another, and did not make for
German hegemony and for peace as Bismarck under-
stood it.
But for all his gibes or snarling innuendoes Bismarck did
not underrate British strength. The British fleet, unlike
the British army, could not be dealt with by ' calling in the
police. ' And Great Britain in some mysterious way had
an uncanny gift for provoking the jealousy yet attracting
the support of European Powers. Bismarck, therefore,
after 1871, aimed mainly at encouraging British goodwill
to Austria and Italy, at keeping France and Great Britain
apart and Russia and Great Britain in strained tension, in
which German good offices could be effectively employed
to maintain the tension, yet prevent a complete rupture.
Down to 1884 Germany and Great Britain could maintain
in theory and phrase the friendliest of relations, for no
direct or serious cause of quarrel between the two Powers
existed. The two Powers might indirectly have divergent
interests in many European questions in which these
European States were largely concerned, but a direct
antagonism in which Great Britain and Germany were
the chief actors had not so far arisen.
The Egyptian question, with all the embarrassments
arising out of the tangle or created by ministerial policy in
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? 4H
BISMARCK
Great Britain, was just what Bismarck could have wished.
It made Great Britain more dependent on German good-
will, and, properly handled with the requisite air of im-
partiality, could separate France and Great Britain and
prevent an Anglo-French alliance. The evidence that
Bismarck would have welcomed a loose Anglo-German
alliance or entente between 1880 and 1890 is suggestive,
but neither precise nor conclusive. Such an 'alliance'
would have been a triumphant codicil to the Triple
Alliance, would have been warmly welcomed in Italy, and
need not have damaged a separate understanding between
Germany and Russia. The interests of Great Britain and
Russia in many respects were not more divergent than
those of Austria and Italy; and it would have been a
powerful aid in emphasising German arguments at
Petersburg. But if Bismarck went so far as to make
direct or indirect overtures, they broke down on
Mr. Gladstone's radical distrust, and no less on the direct
conflict of interest in colonial policy that came to a head
in 1884. In that year Germany was caught up in the
colonial movement.
It was inevitable after 1871 that Germany should begin
to take an interest in colonial expansion, if for no other
reason than that the most powerful of the Continental
States had no colonies, and that colonial possessions were
a proof and a guarantee of strength. German Nationalism,
after 1815, as has been emphasised earlier in these pages,
had found its deepest conviction and most stimulating
nourishment in the consciousness of German impotence
relatively to other great national States. The feeling that
a united Germany could and ought to stand in the world
as a Power, able to stand and speak for Germans as a whole
in the gate of its rivals, and on terms of equality face
France, Austria, Russia, and Great Britain, was overwhelm-
ing and reasonable. Germany had now accomplished
her unification, and the power of the German Empire
after 1871 was an indisputable fact which satisfied to the
full the passionate craving of the once impotent Germany
of the Federal Diet. After 1871 the German nation, like
its Emperor had ' drunk of the chalice of victory and would
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 415
not break it. ' It now desired to be an Empire like other
great Empires--and the Empires with a future had colonies
because the future lay with colonies. Leroy Beaulieu's
remark, that colonies may not be signs of strength to-day,
but that they hold the strength of the future, sums up the
inarticulate German ambition. Just as a man who has
made himself a millionaire by his own efforts desires motor
cars, a fine picture gallery, or historic castles in the country,
not for their intrinsic value, but because they prove that
he is as rich and as powerful as other millionaires, so the
German nation also desired colonies as the appurtenances
and apparatus of Empire--to give them the external
position and framework in the world enjoyed by other
imperial nations.
After 1871 a decade was spent in completing unification
into which the best energies of the German nation were
thrown with enthusiasm. By 1880 the increase in popula-
tion, wealth, commerce, and maritime trade, no less than the
stability and strength of the administrative and military
fabric was remarkable. The industrialisation of Germany
proceeded by leaps and bounds. A still greater future
awaited a further expansion. It was inevitable that the
German trader should seek outlets for capital and markets
outside Europe. He found them and developed them with
the same energy and thoroughness that marked the work
done by Germans at home in science, the army, civil ad-
ministration and trade. But there was one humiliating
disadvantage. The German emigrant was lost to Germany
because there was no Germany outside Europe. The
German trader had to explore and develop his trade either
under the protection of a foreign flag or at his own risk.
In Europe he could say 'civis Germanus sum'--a claim
that no European State was likely to underrate--but in the
Pacific or on the coast of East or West Africa the claim
lost its force. The German found the white ensign of
Great Britain everywhere; the tricolour of a France
which he had defeated and despised was being planted
steadily outside France; but the German flag did not fly,
even where trade was in German hands or the unknown
spaces of the earth had been explored by German effort.
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? 416
BISMARCK
Germany had obliterated, since 1815, the ' injuries of two
centuries' in Europe. Unless she now girt up her
puissant loins the world would be closed and time would
have inflicted fresh and irremovable injuries.
The conversion to Protection at home clinched con-
clusively the sentimental and the political argument.
That conversion, as has been pointed out, was a renaissance
of seventeenth-century mercantilism interpreted in the
terms of the later nineteenth century. The Bismarckian
doctrine of power, developed from the renaissance theory
of Reason of State, joined hands with the mercantilist
doctrine of power, founded on a specific economic analysis
of national power, of which F. List in his masterpiece The
National System of Political Economy, a generation earlier,
had given a penetrating and reasoned exposition. Cobden-
ism and Manchesterism, the disciples of List in Germany
argued, had failed. The belief of the Cobdenites and the
builders of the Zollverein that the future of the great
economic and industrial States lay with Free Trade had
proved a delusion. The world had slowly turned not to
Free Trade but to Protection, to tariffs and tariff treaties,
and Germany had now turned with it. The economic
future lay with a new and scientific Protection, which was
the basis of economic and political Power. The essential
and logical corollary to the reservation of the home-market,
and the home industries to the natives of the State, was the
opening of the maritime markets to the products of modern
industry on the grand scale. Germany as a workshop of
the world--protected by a scientific tariff--required
expanding markets and the reservation of the requisite
raw materials which could not be provided in Europe.
Unless these were secured beyond dispute German trade
would either be mutilated in its upward expansion or be
left dependent on the precarious goodwill and the certain
jealousy of her European rivals. Her most serious
economic competitors were also her most formidable
political rivals. Markets and raw materials could, in
short, only be secured by colonies and a fleet. Without
colonies, the expanding mercantile marine and the nerves
and sinews of German industry were exposed to an in-
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 417
creasing jeopardy. Colonies, therefore, on this argument,
the cogency of which was strengthened by every increase
in economic efficiency and prosperity, were not a luxury,
but an absolute necessity of power. In the early eighties
the argument was being driven home by professors, news-
papers, the industrial magnates and the increasing scramble
for colonies, so notable after 1871. In 1887 Die Deutsche
Colonial Gesellschaft, the union of two separate colonial
organisations, was a significant proof of the solidarity of
the movement; and the formation of a' Colonial group' in
the Reichstag as early as 1883, to press the demand, was
the political expression of the forces at work.
Bismarck was not convinced. Like most men who have
grown up and achieved great things under the influence of
one set of conditions--men whose characters, convictions,
and principles of action are strong because they are so set
in their fibres and their blood that they are the men them-
selves--Bismarck was never very sensitive to new ideas
and new forces which were the result of wholly new con-
ditions and a new age. He was hostile to ' colonialism,'
also, because it was not his own idea, the product of his
own original and creative gifts. Unlike many statesmen,
and most of his own countrymen, Bismarck had, with all his
devouring ambition and pride of, and trust in, power, a
fine and moderating sense of limits. Between the ideal
and the practicable he continually drew a distinction that
is the marrow of his statecraft. He was like Gustavus
Adolphus or Richelieu energy indeed, but energy under
restraint. And he. never forgot what he wrote to his wife
after Ktmiggratz--' we must not think that we have
conquered the world nor forget that we have to live with
three neighbours. ' He recognised that the success of the
German Empire had stirred the deepest jealousies and
resentment; it might and could be overthrown by
coalitions; Germany was not able, for all her strength, to
defy the world.
His intuitional dislike of colonialism went deeper than
mere sentiment, temperamental indifference to principles
not his own, or a practical calculation of the limits of
German Power. He was and he remained to his death
R. 2D
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? BISMARCK
essentially a continentalist; that is, he held as the core of
a true system of German policy that the German Empire
must be based on the complete mastery of the continental
conditions of supremacy. Germany must control Central
Europe; without that control the Empire would either
be dissolved or be reduced to the second rate position of
his youth and early manhood. And the control of Central
Europe imposed the absolute necessity of an invincible
army, superior to that of any likely coalition of forces--
an army in fact on a two-Power or three-Power standard--
together with a foreign policy carried out by a vigilant
and invincible Higher Direction, concentrating on the
keys of power in Europe. The German army involved
a severe tax in manhood and money. Any dissipation of
strength on objectives outside the main theatre would
mean a proportionate reduction in the army; and, no less
pernicious, a dualism in the higher strategy of the Wilhelm-
strasse. No one realised more completely than Bismarck
the task that the maintenance of German hegemony in
Europe after 1871 laid on the Chancellor. Only by
prestige and a sleepless diplomacy had the successive
phases of the European situation been successfully met,
manipulated, and worked into the broad plan. The task
of watching and controlling Austria, France, Russia, Italy,
Spain--of anticipating the complications in the Near East,
in Poland, and the Mediterranean--became harder, not
easier, as the European Powers grew, penetrated or copied
Bismarckian principles and methods. The invitation
therefore to break out on a new objective--a great colonial
campaign--must be resisted. It was excentric to the
central issues, which in the nature of things constituted
the essentials of a true German policy.
Moreover, Bismarck foresaw that a successful colonial
campaign inevitably involved rivalries outside Europe
that would react on the European position. There were
two chief Colonial States in Europe--France and Great
Britain. Was Germany to compete with France, stop the
policy of diversion which dissipated French strength and
drive her back on concentrating on Europe ? ? And Great
Britain? Competition here would not drive Great Britain
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
back on Europe--it was competition with a Power essen-
tially colonial and only secondarily continental. At sea
Great Britain was supreme. What if Great Britain replied
by building up a European coalition against Germany? The
antagonism of Great Britain was not lightly to be provoked.
Bismarck predicted that a really serious German challenge
to Great Britain in the colonial and extra-European
sphere would end in a Franco-British alliance and a deep
penetration of Great Britain into the continental situa-
tion--precisely the one object that he desired to prevent.
Bismarck had studied history as a great statesman should
study it--to learn from it the secrets of statecraft. History
was for him a study in statesmanship: precisely as to all the
great commanders from Caesar to Moltke the study of military
history--the great things in war done by the great soldiers
--is the indispensable apprenticeship in the principles of
their science. And he saw, as his speeches and obiter dicta
prove, in modern European history that Great Britain had
always, and only, been formidable, when, in the task of
building and consolidating the British Empire, and in the
pursuit of British ends, she had been driven by the facts
and forces of a given situation to be the backbone and
the reservoir of a European combination. William in. ,
Marlborough, Chatham, Castlereagh--did not these prove
that no European coalition had ever succeeded of which
Great Britain was not the backbone and the reservoir?
Thus, indeed, had Louis xiv. , Louis xv. , Kaunitz, and
Napoleon been overthrown. The Great Britain of Lord
North and George in. , or of the ministries of 1864, 1866,
and 1870, without European allies, and either refusing to
find them or wilfully rejecting them--sulking or ignorantly
rejoicing in a splendid isolation--had brought disaster or
impotence on itself. Put Great Britain, Bismarck virtually
argued, with her back to the wall, because her imperial
interests are threatened, and if she had a statesman to
direct her policy, she would make a European coalition
and keep it going until her British ends--outside Europe
--were achieved.
