No More Learning

In 1862, everything turned on the King. The consti-
tutional conflict had flooded the royal hearth and the steps
to the throne. The Crown Prince and his circle, in close
touch with the intellectuals of Liberalism, such as M.
Duncker, Samwer, and Bernhardi, indicated unmistakably
their disagreement with the minister's policy and methods,
and their genuine fear that a reckless gambler was im-
perilling the future of the dynasty, pledging the monarchy
to an irreconcilable breach with the nation, and destroying
the moral'primacy of Prussia in Germany.
King William was, indeed, desperately unhappy; the
pressure of contradictory counsels was almost intolerable;
adjured on one side to authorise negotiations with the
Landtag over Bismarck's head, which would save his
honour, and satisfy the opposition, on the other to stand
firm and save the Crown and army from the men who in-
sulted him by accusations of violating the constitution.
Bismarck has vividly described the King's fear that he would
end like our Charles 1. on a scaffold, erected on the wreckage
of the hereditary monarchy, and his appeal to the King that
if it needs must be so, better to die at his post than sur-
render. He, at any rate, would not desert him, for he
preferred the fate of Strafford to a craven submission. It
is one of the many penalties of service under an autocracy
that the security of tenure, assured by a representative
legislature, is dependent on a single personality, and at the
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BISMARCK
mercy of political intriguers, soldiers, courtiers, priests,
or women: doubly so, if that autocracy has broken with
a legislature that has challenged the royal authority.
Bismarck's management of his sovereign for six-and-twenty
years was perhaps his most consummate performance;
for he never stooped to sacrifice his own, nor demanded
the sacrifice of his master's, independence. His task was
to keep the King's feet firm on a path, the direction of
which he could not, and dare not, define; and never did
he so sorely and continuously need the magic mixture of
firmness and flexibility, inspired by an unerring intuition,
as in these first few years when he fought, dagger out of
sheath, for a cause and himself. The argument between
King and minister invariably left the final coercion to
William's conscience, vibrating to his deep sense of re-
sponsibility to the Divine Ruler for his royal duty to the
kingdom of Prussia.
The personal relations of these two, William and Bis-
marck, so momentous in their consequences on two
generations of civilised Europe, are an intensely and
infinitely human background to the grandeur and petti-
nesses of the drama in which they are the leading figures.
One example must suffice. When the Crown Prince at
Dantzig in 1863 was so deeply stirred as to indicate in a
public speech his disapproval of his father's ministry, the
wrath of the King as a soldier and as a father, boiled over.
His son was guilty of plain mutiny: he must be stripped
of his military rank and disgraced. The conciliator was
Bismarck, who had little reason for leniency on behalf of
one who desired his dismissal. He urged the Crown Prince
to admit a grave error of judgment; he begged the King
to be content with a severe reprimand* Sons, however
erring, had claims on a father's affection; the struggle
had embittered the feelings of every one, and an open
breach between the King and the heir to the throne would
cause a scandal so serious as irretrievably to damage the.
cause of the King and even of the monarchy. Bismarck's
courage won. Nor was the advice simply the adroit tactics
of an inhuman player with the human pawns in a great
game. Bismarck was capable of amazing meanness and
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 133
a card-sharper's trickery, but he was an intensely affectionate
father, and on critical occasions he could always remember
and rise to the dignity due from a great officer responsible
for a great kingdom.
The constitutional conflict that the opposition was con-
vinced would make the minister's grave of shame, proved
in the issue, as Bismarck utilised it, a weapon of victory.
The olive branch was put away for the happy day when
the foe had surrendered at discretion. Bismarck after
January 1863 rejected all compromise. A proposal en-
gineered in the autumn of that year by E. von Manteuffel,
the chief of the Military Cabinet, to accept the demand
for two years' service and obtain all the other essentials of
the rnilitary reorganisation, was rejected by Bismarck.
The army chiefs were ready to sacrifice the Minister-
President, he inferred, and possibly place a soldier at the
head of the government. Bismarck made it quite clear that
he would fight for the King to the end, but that between
his continuance in office with a free hand and surrender to
the opposition there was no practical alternative. His dis-
missal, however wrapped up or plastered over--and he
was right--meant hauling down the flag of the monarchy.
He kept the King steadily pinned to that. And as the poli-
tical difficulties steadily thickened and one storm-cloud
after another rolled up on a darkening horizon, William's
faith in the star of his Minister-President became clearer
and clearer. The success that Bismarck promised, not the
disaster predicted by his foes, was coming slowly but surely.
Meanwhile, Bismarck took care that the breach with
the opposition was widened, and that attacks on the pre-
rogative extended to every sphere of governmental action.
When the popular movement flagged, a press ordinance
muzzling the newspaper critics, the purging of the civil
service of all tainted with Liberal doctrines, an order to the
government officials to put pressure on the electors, a
fresh twist in the sharpness of the police administration,
inspired articles in unsuspected journals revealing indis-
creet threats and waste by military Hotspurs, the parade
of votes of confidence from manipulated town councils,
or alleged reports of reactionary remarks by Majesty itself,
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BISMARCK
and the distribution of ribbons and decorations to avowed
Absolutists could always raise the necessary steam in the
boilers of Liberalism. Foreign policy, finance, and mili-
tary administration provided inexhaustible material for
baiting the opposition into violent rhetoric and resolutions
passed by overwhelming majorities. Roon's temper was
of a military shortness when he dealt, as Minister of War,
with civilian amateurs. Bismarck allowed him to provoke
quarrels in the Landtag, and then with magisterial im-
partiality, poured vitriol on the parliamentary critics.
The Minister-President proved that the Junker of 1848,
with his vivid utterance and racy brutality, was a master
of the studied insult, the barbed innuendo, the cynical
contempt, the phrase that cut down to the bone and
stuck. Indignation vexed him as a thing that is raw.
And he could lose his temper, too, when nerves and endur-
ance cracked under the burden that he carried, virtually
alone. * The House of Phrases' simply provided loqua-
cious passengers in a coach, the driving of which without
their ignorant interference imposed an almost impossible
task on the coachman. Bismarck was as little able as
Frederick the Great or Richelieu to share government
with a representative assembly. He did not understand,
or wish or try to understand, the secrets and mechanism
of a system repugnant to his feelings and a permanent
hindrance to the achievement of his ends. The time
spent in futile debates and logic-chopping controversies
was sheer waste. Every ounce of his strength, every hour
of his overworked day, were needed for the real partner in
government--the King--and the multifarious business of
the State. Not on the floor of the Landtag, but in a
correct judgment of political realities, lay the secret of
statecraft, and for the judgment of his opponents, Conser-
vative or Radical, ignorant of the European theatre of
politics, and worshippers at the shrines of all the Idols of
the Tribe and of the Market-Place, he had a pitying con-
tempt. Salvation would come from action--the patient
manoeuvring for the strategic points, and then the decisive
stroke--the State as the incarnation of power and statecraft
as the expression of its disciplined force.
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 135
From the very outset he gave Germany a taste of the
'Bismarck touch. ' The constitutional and chronic im-
broglio at Hesse-Cassel was settled by a curt ultimatum.
The reactionary Elector recognised that the new minister
meant what was said and surrendered. Public opinion
was bewildered at this example of Satan rebuking Sin.
For here was a ruler advised by his reactionary minister,
Hassenpflug, in conflict with a rebel legislature over his
prerogative, and compelled to admit the claims of the
rebels by a minister who was a Prussian super-Hassenpflug.
It forgot that Hesse-Cassel was not Prussia, that the struggle
was in Bismarck's eyes a nuisance, the continuance of which
strengthened the Progressives in Berlin, and that surrender
on a word from Berlin was a proof of Prussian strength.
That strength was more effectively exemplified in the
matter of the French Commercial Treaty and the renewal
of the Zollverein's Tariff Treaty with Austria. . The
French Treaty was an important step in promoting a
better understanding between Prussia and the Second
Empire. Austria, as in 1851, desired either to break up
the Zollverein and thereby damage the political and
economic supremacy in non-Austrian Germany exercised
by Prussia, or to secure the inclusion of the Austrian
dominions in the Tariff Union on terms favourable to her
peculiar economic needs. The French Commercial Treaty
had stirred serious opposition within the Tariff Union, and
at Vienna there was good hope of driving one or other,
perhaps both, of the wedges into the Prussian system.
The foundations of Bismarck's system were threatened. In
Delbruck he had the coadjutor he needed, for Delbruck
had first-class ability and a complete mastery of the econ-
omic facts, and behind Delbruck stood Bismarck confident
in Prussia's strength. The French Commercial Treaty
must go through. Austria could renew with trifling
modifications the previous agreement. But her inclusion
in the Customs Union was impossible. And if the Zoll-
verein refused the Prussian proposals, then it must break
up. Prussia would go her own way and make her own
tariff arrangements, for she was strong enough to stand
by herself. She peremptorily refused to sacrifice her
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BISMARCK
economic interests to South German particularism or
Austrian selfishness. Let the middle and petty States
choose between a Prussia which desired to be their friend
and ally and an Austria that aimed at exploiting them.
They chose. Austria secured neither the rejection of
the French Treaty, nor the dissolution of the Zollverein,
nor her inclusion within the Tariff Union. She had per-
force to accept simply a renewal of the fiscal treaty with
the Zollverein, that. included the whole of non-Austrian
Germany and as a fiscal unit to stand outside the German
ring fence. There was more in this settlement than the
incompatibility of Austrian Protectionism with German
economic development, and a correct judgment that
material interests would defeat political sentiment in the
rivalry between Prussia and Austria for the economic
leadership of the middle and petty States. Bismarck had
struck for and obtained three results. First, the inde-
pendence of Prussia; secondly, the right to settle with
France on his own terms; thirdly, clear proof that Austria
was not, properly speaking, a true German State. The
essential preliminary to a settlement of the political uni-
fication of Germany on the lines of the Small and not the
Great Germany conception was the establishment of an
economic unification which drew an unmistakable frontier
line between the Austrian Empire and the rest of the
Federal organisation. The Great Germany party, as
Bismarck fully realised, was by no means dead, either at
Berlin or outside it. The first step to the final defeat of
the Great Germans was taken with the successful con-
clusion of the complicated and highly technical nego-
tiations in economics, and Bismarck took care to indicate
a helpful moral at Paris. Prussia had deliberately pre-
ferred an arrangement with France to an arrangement
with Austria. The identity of interest, he commented,
between France and Prussia was not necessarily confined
to tariff duties and the most-favoured nation clause.
At the snarling criticism on Prussia's anti-German and
unbrotherly Prussian selfishness towards Austria Bismarck
shrugged his shoulders. It was the privilege of the de-
feated to snarl. The spring of 1863 enabled the Foreign
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 137
Office in the Wilhelmstrasse to provide Germany and
Europe with another example of Prussian independence
and egoism that stirred a tempest of denunciation.
The Polish rebellion of January, 1863, precipitated a
European crisis. The sympathy of Western and Central
Europe, alike in the governments and their people, with
the Polish effort to secure national unity and adminis-
trative autonomy--freedom as a race from Russian tyranny
--is very remarkable and profoundly significant of the grip
of Liberal and Nationalist ideals on the temper of the age.
In London, Paris, Turin, and Vienna, the Polish cause was
acclaimed with enthusiasm. The Poles were fighting for
the inalienable right of a nation to work out its salvation
and establish its civilisation as a self-governing unit in the
fraternity of European National-States. The disin-
tegrated Germany of the Federal Bund and denationalised
Austria were no whit behind the new Italy, France, and
Great Britain in their Polish sympathies. The contrast,
indeed, is striking between the manifestation in 1863 of
public opinion in Prussia and non-Prussian Germany, in
support of the Poles, and in sincere reprobation of the
terrible severity with which the defeated rising was crushed
by the Russian autocracy, and the cold-blooded equan-
imity with which Germany and the Magyarised Dual
Empire of 1876 and 1896 condoned, when they did not
positively approve, the more terrible treatment of the
Balkan Slavs and the Armenians by the Ottoman auto-
cracy. Only by such a contrast can we realise the
strength of the Liberal movement and of the moral forces
behind it, with which Bismarck wrestled in 1863, and
register in 1896 the atrophy of a nation's conscience and the
withering of its ideals, when for two generations it has
been drugged by the doctrine that the great questions of
the day can be decided only by blood and iron.
Bismarck at once recognised the gravity of the Polish
issue and the opportunity that the Polish question pro-
vided. His attitude to the problem of Poland, and Prus-
sian Poland in particular, never altered since 1848, when
he first denounced the danger of Polonism to the Prussian
State, through the Kulturkampf to the anti-Polish legis-
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BISMARCK
lation of his chancellorship that he left as a wasting mort-
gage to his successors. He told General Fleuiy in De-
cember, 1863, that the question was one of life and death
to Prussia: 'I would rather die,' he said, 'than permit
our position in Posen to be discussed at a European Con-
gress: I would rather cede our Rhinelands. ' He had no' .
sympathy with the Nationalist principle, outside Prussia
and Germany; it was simply a force in a political situation,
to be exploited as such; and if a force that threatened
Prussian hegemony one to be extirpated. The eighteenth-
century partitions of Poland were the well-merited fate
of a State too anarchic to resist the strength of its neigh-
bours. The dream of a reconstructed Poland on Liberal
lines in 1863 was simply a childish chimera. The inde-
pendence of Russian Poland under the suzerainty of the
Tsar would lead to a demand for the freedom of Prussian
Poland, a result absolutely fatal to the Prussian position
in the East and on the Baltic. The demand for autonomy
and political liberties sprang from the same delusions about
government that tainted the progressive and democratic
parties in Germany. Concessions to Polish demands
within Prussia were intrinsically inadmissible, and would
embarrass the good friend, Russia. The Polish rebellion
was a domestic affair of the Tsar's government, interference
with which was an impertinence that the Tsar would
justly resent.
Prussia's interest must be the sole criterion of Prussia's
policy. A rebellion on her borders was a serious danger;
there were disquieting signs that the conflagration would
spread. The sooner it was stamped out the better for
every one concerned. Bismarck, in short, only cared to
extract the maximum of political advantage from an affair
which he examined with icy impartiality. The blood of
Polish martyrs, for whose sufferings he did not care a
groschen, might become the seed of Prussian domination
in Central Europe. Through General von Alvensleben
he promptly (March 8) concluded a convention with
Russia, by which the two countries undertook to establish
a military cordon on their respective frontiers in order to
stop their respective Polish subjects from aiding the rebel-
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 139
lion, and to prevent the escape of rebels from lawful au-
thority. The action of the parliamentary opposition in
the Landtag only confirmed Bismarck's determination.
Interpellations, denunciations of the convention, reso-
lutions by sweeping majorities, he brushed aside as irre-
levant attempts to interfere wkh the royal right to con-
clude treaties by prerogative, and to make the foreign policy
of Prussia conform to the folly of ignorant idealists or crazy
demagogues. He told the Lower House roundly that the
making of war and treaties was the right of the Crown,
and roused its fury by the emphatic assertion that he would
make war or abstain from it without their approbation or
consent, and that his duty to his sovereign and Prussia
would never be influenced one hair's-breadth by their
votes or their attacks.
When the governments of Great Britain, France, and
Austria, under the pressure of public opinion agreed to
gresent a joint note formulating six demands 1 to the
. ussian government, and invited the concurrence of
Prussia in this diplomatic pressure, Bismarck firmly refused,
and for four chief reasons. A close understanding with
Russia was, and had long been, the sine qua non of his sys-
tem. Refusal to sign the note was the most practical
proof he could give of friendship to Russia. The aliena-
tion of Russia, still suffering from the humiliation of 1856,
and threatened with the boycott of Europe and the moral
condemnation of the civilised conscience, was for Prussia
in 1863 midsummer madness. Secondly, he disapproved of
the six demands. If Russia conceded them, the National
Union and the Radicals throughout Germany would
utilise the concession to harass the government of Prussia
already plagued with the charlatanry of Progress. Thirdly,
rejection by the Russian government of the joint note
must be followed either by more exacting pressure, and if
necessary, war, or by a painful rebuff at Petersburg.
Bismarck did not believe in a diplomacy that invited hu-
miliation, and the idea of war on behalf of the Polish rebels
1 The six points were briefly: (i) an amnesty; (2) a Polish parliament j
(3) a Polish National Executive; (4) Polish language in official communica-
tions j (5) religious freedom; (6) legal recruiting.
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BISMARCK
was idiotic. Fourthly, he foresaw the failure of this sin-
gular union of Great Britain, France, and Austria, and he
desired it to fail. The ill-assorted partners would quarrel,
and from their quarrel Prussia would derive advantages
that could be left for future exploitation. The separation
of Austria and of France from Russia was worth all the
joint notes and all the Polish lives in the world. As early
as I860 Bismarck had expressed the fear that France would
ally with Russia, isolate Prussia, or drive her into a hateful
dependence on Austria. He had laid it down that in a
Franco-Russian alliance Prussia must be the third member.
Great Britain could be soothed or neglected as circum-
stances indicated. The British army did not exist; and
the British fleet was useless in this business. Fortune had
now given Prussia an unexpected favour.
France by her
stupid sentimentalism would alienate Russia. Prussia
could first secure Russian friendship, break up the Franco-
British entente, then work for a French benevolent neu-
trality, and Austria would be left to face an irreconcilable
Italy and an independent Prussia secure on both her
flanks. Here, indeed, was a game for the Titans.
Bismarck might well gaze into the baffling face of the
Time-spirit. The Schleswig-Holstein question was threat-
ening an ugly crisis. It is significant of the minister's
exploratory and prescient vigilance that while Nation-
alists and democrats were crying aloud for Germany and
Prussia to act, he gave no sign that he was earnestly
sounding all the depths and shallows in a rock-sown sea.
He contented himself with a pointed reminder to the
Danish government that Prussia was a signatory to the
Convention of London of 1852, and a sharp rap on the
heads of the ' noisy' journalists and politicians who desired
Prussia to go to war with all her neighbours because of
alleged grievances. Toujours en vedette! The motto of
Frederick, the Master, was more than ever the watchword.
Neither menaces nor caresses from London, Paris, and
Vienna induced Bismarck to modify his refusal to join
in the combined intervention at Petersburg and, as he
foresaw, the joint note was a complete failure. Assured
of Prussia's support, the Russian government in effect bade
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 141
the signatory Powers mind their own business, and pro-
ceeded to extinguish the rebellion in blood and flame.
Napoleon was intensely chagrined at the result, the blame
for which he threw chiefly on Great Britain. Our Foreign
Office had used the strong language that should precede
strong action, but it now covered its retreat to the wired
trenches of a good conscience in the smoke-clouds of a
parliamentary Blue-Book. At the Tuileries the need of a
real diplomatic success somewhere was being seriously
felt. Paris was seething with sentiment and ill-defined
ambition. Napoleon's disillusioned eyes turned to Berlin.
In the Wilhelmstrasse, not in the Ball-Platz, lay the keys
that could unlock the doors to the Rhine; and Napoleon
knew that the hunger of France, gnawing at the vitals of
the Second Empire, could be appeased, and only appeased,
by the Rhenish provinces.
The true author of the Polish fiasco was Bismarck. Had
he made Prussia a signatory to the Note of the Six De-
mands, the Russia of 1863, isolated and in grave difficulties,
would have been obliged to yield to the Concert of Europe.
Had Prussia been a country with responsible self-govern-
ment Bismarck must either have met the overwhelming
demand of the Landtag or been driven from office. With
Prussian support it was well within the compass of practical
diplomacy, without firing a shot, to have extorted a charter
of liberties for Russian Poland and prevented the cruelties
that added one more chapter to the blood-stained record.
The moral and political effect of such concerted action
would have been of incalculable advantage. But a Can-
ning in London or a Cavour at Berlin were needed.
Instead, there was Bismarck on the one side, and on the
other Napoleon and the clever mediocrities of the Quai
d'Orsay, the organised hypocrisy of Vienna and a Palmer-
ston, no longer the man of 1839, and permanently suspect
to a hostile court. Public opinion in Prussia and Germany
was impotent against Bismarck. While it raged, he sided
with Russia, thereby revealing to the Triple Entente that
without war they were helpless, and that the strategic
position of Prussia and the strength of the Prussian army
made the suggestion of war without Prussia ridiculous and
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BISMARCK
impossible. It was in Bismarck's power, and he knew it, to
meet the storm in the last resort by an appeal to Prussia
and Germany to forget the exaggerated woes of Poland
and concentrate on the Ahab of Europe--Napoleon.
Bismarck, it must be remembered, in these years was in
a dangerous temper: he was fighting for the life, honour,
and greatness of Prussia, as he interpreted them, and he
had thrown his all into the struggle. Even more truly
than Cavour from 1852 onwards he was gambling for
tremendous stakes. Not once but fifty times in the next
few year she indicated his determination, if the gods failed
him, to move Acheron. What could not be done by the
Conservative forces, could be done by calling in the Revo-
lution. His heart within was white-hot with the same
emotion that mastered the German of his day, and no
man could let loose more skilfully the whirlwinds of
national passion, or rejoice more triumphantly in riding
the storm.
But in 1863, as always, he had himself in hand. The
hour assuredly had not come: the situation must be de-
veloped much further and with a remorseless caution.
He could not afford to make a single mistake. The Prus-
sian army was not ready. Like his diplomacy it needed
time. And it was of the essence of his system, as of
Frederick the Great's, that so far as preparation and cal-
culation could ensure it, victory must be a certainty. The
Statecraft that is Force betrays the State that is Power if
it ignores or misunderstands the character and conditions
under which Force works in the world of human things.
Bismarck had secured the friendship of Russia. His
confidence that Prussia could rely on her strength and in-
dependence had been justified. The initiative in policy,
lost in the period from 1815 to 1862, was being quietly
recovered. While the members of the temporary Triple
Entente were abusing Prussia, and still more heartily, each
other, Bismarck was drawing up an edifying balance-sheet.
He could remind his royal master of two sound lessons--
the indispensability of the Crown's unfettered control of
policy, the futility of 'moral penetration,' as a solution
of European problems. The relevance of both to the
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
constitutional crisis was obvious, and the sequel was to
drive the argument home with cumulative power. King
William was, Bismarck discovered, eminently teachable;
but he eminently required to be taught. Time was even
more necessary for the instruction of the Crown than for
the development of the European situation. An autocrat
who takes the bit in his teeth will dash the chariot of State
to pieces more quickly and disastrously than a nation that
loses its head. If William's conscience or prejudices
drove him to break loose, Bismarck would share the fate
of Metternich.
The quality of Bismarck's judgment was never better
illustrated than in his refusal of Gortschakov's suggestion
that the Russo-Prussian understanding should be converted
into a formal alliance. It was a tempting proposal; and
we can well believe that he weighed it in every scale before
declining. Treaties, it is true, were not more sacred than
other, less formal, engagements. They were, in Bis-
marck's eyes, no more than the summary of a particular
situation, and their observance was always conditioned by
an implicit clause--rebus sic stantibus--things being as they
were. Nor was it the fear that a treaty would limit his
initiative or freedom of action. A virtual alliance with
Russia was the fixed point on which Prussian policy
was henceforward to pivot. The identity of interest--
dynastic, governmental, political--between the Russia of
the Tsar and the Prussia of William 1. , was practically
complete. Nor did Bismarck fear the accusation at home
or elsewhere that the Holy Alliance was being revived.
He had faced that when he made the Alvensleben Con-
vention, and proved that he could ignore public opinion
in Prussia and the criticism of foreign governments. His
real reason for the refusal of Gortschakov's offer lays bare
an essential principle of his statecraft. To the Prussia of
1863, convalescent from a prolonged locomotor-ataxy, and
not yet cured, Russia was more indispensable to Prussia
than Prussia was to Russia. Bismarck's judgment of
Prussia's strength was extraordinarily sane and impartial.
He shared with Gustavus Adolphus and Richelieu the
sense of limits, which is one of the finest and rarest, if not
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? i44
BISMARCK
the finest and rarest, gift of the highest statesmanship.
Russia, he pronounced with customary vividness, would in
such an alliance sit on the longer arm of the lever. All
that was needed in 1863 could be distilled gradually from
the informal but close understanding already established.
Every alliance, he remarked at another time, implies a
horse and a rider. The function of diplomacy is to secure
that you are the rider and your ally the horse. Because
he correctly judged that in 1863, Gortschakov would be
the rider and he, Bismarck, the horse, he put the offer
politely and with many assurances of affection, personal
and political, on one side.
While the Polish Rebellion was still running its ap-
pointed course, the German question also had developed
a crisis. The demand that something must be done, and
done now, to reshape the indefensible travesty of a political
mechanism, called the Bund--that precious monument
the restoration of which in its anachronistic nudity had
marked the grave both of 1848 and of Conservative con-
structive statesmanship. For ten years every German
mind had been labouring with the problem and putting on
record, to the embarrassment of that age and the despair
of the seeker after truth in the next two generations, its
perplexities, fears, hopes, dreams and solutions. State-
papers, diaries, letters, pamphlets, caricatures, memorials,
note-books, and minutes of clubs, unions, leagues--the
archives of the chancelleries, the waste-paper basket of the
patriot, and the scrap-heap of the lecture-room--which
German research has by no means exhausted, testify to the
deep-seated and universal discontent. Nationalists, Radi-
cals, Clericals and Ultramontanes, Conservatives, bureau-
crats and professors, hummed like bees in the swarming
season from the frontier of Schleswig to the forelands of
the Alps. The flower of the universities, professorial and
undergraduate, linked hands and pens with the politicians
--Bennigsen, Droysen, Samwer, M. Duncker, the Coburg
group, and the unitarian enthusiasm of the Grand-Duke
of Baden. Already the trumpet of the young Treitschke
was blowing its earliest clarion calls.
When the butchers meet in conclave because something
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT
must be done for the sheep, we may be sure that it is not
the sheep but the butchers who fear the future. In 1863,
the Habsburg Emperor felt the cruel coercion of a
Germany out of joint, and the unpleasant necessity of
putting it right before worse befell. The dynasties from
Dresden to Munich leaped to the suggestion from Vienna
that disinterested patriotism could be concentrated in a
Congress of Princes ready to confer benefits on their
subjects. To the adroit Beust at Dresden, as fertile in
diplomatic resource as in conversational epigram, the
opportunity was exceptional. Beust, like every one else,
had his scheme, or rather half a dozen schemes, in pigeon-
holes, and another half dozen producible if required, like
the magician's rabbits, for any audience, and from any
diplomatic bag--and Beust was by far the cleverest of all
the political conjurers in the middle States who desired
a tripartite Germany--Austria, the middle States, and
Prussia--regrouped in a new Federal structure. To Beust
and to the Triad party, the supreme merit of this solution,
the details of which were simply a drafting matter, lay in
its recognition of the equality of non-Austrian and non-
Prussian Germany as a collective unit with Austria and
Prussia. Such equality would fairly meet the Prussian
demand for parity with Austria and the Austrian reluct-
ance to surrender her historic hegemony; it would no less
fairly remove the fatal objection to all dualistic schemes
which imposed on the middle and petty States an obli-
gatory choice of being absorbed either in a Prussian or an
Austrian system, an absorption damaging to the general
interests of Germany, historically unjust, and repugnant
to the legitimist sovereignty of the dynasties.
Concessions must, of course, be made to the people as
well as to the States of Germany. Bismarck's failure was
assumed to be a practical certainty: Prussia would then
succumb to the liberal majority which would adopt the
programme of the National Union and achieve a unitary
and democratic solution under Prussian leadership. Once
the citadel in Prussia had fallen to the parliamentary
opposition, the rest of Germany would lynch its dynasties
into acceptance of the unitary and liberal plan. And
B. K
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? 146
BISMARCK
Austria, racked on a series of Procrustean beds, called con-
stitutions, with Italy on one side and Hungary on the other,
and Russia sullenly hostile, could not expect to repeat in
1864 the miracle of 1849. Now, if ever, was the moment
to drive an Austrian dynastic, anti-Prussian, and particu-
larist programme through.
The problem was first to combine the minimum of real
concession with the maximum of outward homage to
democratic demands; and secondly, to arrange the Federal
machinery in such a way as to grant in theory the Prussian
claim to parity with Austria, while refusing the substance
--an easy matter, for equal voting powers between Austria
and Prussia must always leave Prussia in a minority when
non-Prussian Germany made equal either to Austria or
Prussia voted (as it would) with Austria. The Austrian
government accordingly produced its specious plan. A
new Directorate of six States (Austria, Prussia, Bavaria,
and three others chosen in rotation) under Austrian presi-
dency was to be created, together with a Federal Council
of 21 votes, a Federal Tribunal of Law, and a Federal
Assembly of 302 Delegates elected, not by direct suffrage,
but by the various parliaments of the Federated States.
Rebellious German democracy was, in short, to be re-
manacled in a new Federal cage, and Prussia was, through
her King, to mediatise herself for the benefit of Germany
on the altars of dynasticism. The Emperor Francis
Joseph met King William at Gastein. The crises of
German history always begin or end at a bathing resort.
The two sovereigns talked and agreed that the business
could be settled by a Congress of Princes at Frankfurt.
It was fitting that the rulers, by personal negotiations,
should settle the affairs of-Germany in a royal and family
conference; and their ministers were to be in close attend-
ance, but take no part in the august deliberations. While
their princely masters worked, they could copy letters,
dine, dance, and arrange for the exchange of decorations.
On August 16 the Congress met; only one important
sovereign (and his minister) was absent. The surprise and
dismay were universal, for the absentee was the King of
Prussia. They sent to fetch him. The King of Saxony
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? THE MINISTER-PRESIDENT 147
was the courier chosen to remind King William that a
Congress of Princes, headed by Csesarean Majesty from
Vienna, begged the honour of his company. Delay and
much anxiety. Then the King of Saxony came back.
The King of Prussia regretted his inability to accept the
invitation. Indignation, expostulation, consternation, pre-
vailed: then after a few days, the Congress ruefully broke
up. All that it accomplished was to repeat the invitation
(by letter this time) to Prussia and to 'leave open' the
question of the Presidency ' for further discussion. ' The
proposal to proceed, without Prussia, was indeed suggested,
but crumbled into pieces at once. 'We will have no con-
federation without Austria,' said the Bavarian minister,
'but likewise none without Prussia. ' A reorganisation of
Germany which omitted Prussia was ridiculous. The
coercion of Prussia would, in the state of public opinion,
probably end in the revolution with the Prussian army at
its disposal. And when the Prussian government officially
published its reasons for abstention--the patent inade-
quacy of the proposals of the Princes to meet the rights of
Prussia and the needs of Germany was glaringly and pain-
fully evident. 'A national Parliament,' said the Prussian
memorandum of September 15, 'was an essential of any
Federal reform. The interests and claims of the Prussian
people are intrinsically and inseparably identical with those
of the German people. ' The argument was repeated in the
Note of September 22, sent to all the members of the Con-
gress of Princes. Prussia laid it down that: (1) She, as
well as Austria, must have a right to veto a declaration of
war by the Confederation; (2) her position in the Con-
federation must be equal to that of Austria; (3) she could
not accept an enlargement of the functions of the Con-
federation limiting Prussian independence; (4) there must
be a German Parliament, representative of the German
nation, and elected directly by it.
At a word from Prussia the Austrian plan and all others
of the same kind went, unhouseled, unanointed, and
unannealed into the limbo reserved for the acrobatics of
pseudo-statesmanship. The Congress of Princes sum-
moned to consecrate the consummation of a new German
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? 148
BISMARCK
Confederation, was suddenly turned into the funeral of
the . Greater Germany party.
Henceforward, there were only three possible alter-
natives--a unification under Austria imposed on a defeated
Prussia, a unification under Prussia imposed on a defeated
Austria, or the unitary Empire of the National Union, in
which Prussia was dissolved in a Germany, from which
Austria was excluded, a unification to be imposed on Ger-
many by the triumph of National Liberalism. In the
autumn of 1863, though we to-day find it hard to believe
it, and before the year 1864 had revolutionised the Euro-
pean situation and German public opinion, the last of the
three alternatives seemed far the most probable. One
conclusion, however, is certain. The author of the fiasco
of the Congress of Princes, the man who administered the
coup de gr&ce to the Greater Germany party, was Bismarck.
'Lord ! ' says Puck,' what fools these mortals be. ' The
sacred simplicity of the diplomatic or royal ostrich pro-
vokes a deeper laughter of Jove than the perjuries of lovers.
The supposition of Rechberg and Beust and all the sham
and pigmy Machiavellians, princely or ministerial, that the
Minister-President at Berlin, who had served seven gruel-
ling years of apprenticeship at Frankfurt, would not see
through the patent trap of the Austrian plan must have
provoked the grimmest humour of Bismarck. The idea
that the Prussian monarchy was meekly to strip to the skin
in the imperial. city of Frankfurt, and put on a Nessus shirt
patched up by kings and grand-dukes in the workhouse at
Vienna was too delicious even for the grand diplomacy.
Did Rechberg, Beust, and their company seriously imagine
that the Minister-President was risking all in the struggle
with the Landtag to sacrifice the cause of Prussianism
at the bidding of a mob of princes? Their action proves
that if they knew themselves and their tricks, at least they
did not know the Minister-President at Berlin. 'Stripped
of its coat,' Bismarck said, 'the Austrian poodle is dis-
tinctly meagre. '
Yet the reality of the German situation was profoundly
disquieting to Bismarck. National Liberalism was, and
remained, a tremendous and dangerous force. The time
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