Poland and the Polish
question drove the conclusion home.
question drove the conclusion home.
Robertson - Bismarck
Might
it not be written in the scroll of German destiny that the
mantle of the great Frederick would fall on another and
a greater Hohenzollern?
No German State in the confederation had, since 1789,
suffered more varied vicissitudes, had sunk lower or re-
covered more rapidly than Prussia. The Settlement of
1815 restored the Prussian kingdom to the full measure of
strength enjoyed in 1805, but with a significantly different
geographical configuration. Prussia surrendered much
of the Polish territory acquired in the Second and Third
Partitions, and in compensation received a part of royal
Saxony and rich provinces in the west, which made her
the guardian of the Rhine from Diisseldorf to the suburbs
of Jewish and free Frankfurt. Yet her territories were not
compact, for between the new Rhenish Prussia and the
original nucleus of the Brandenburg Electorate in the Elbe
basin lay Hanover and the Westphalian States, while East
and West Prussia with Silesia made two huge salients
with Poland in the re-entrant of the one and royal
Saxony and (Austrian) Bohemia in the re-entrant of the
other. Prussian patriots regarded the Settlement as an
insult. They had desired to eliminate the Polish and
Catholic elements of the Province of Posen, to- absorb the
whole of Saxony, and (with customary Prussian ' modera-
te c
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BISMARCK
tion ') to reduce their' compensation ' in the west in return
for a consolidation in the centre. Prussia was to be a pure
German State, predominantly Protestant, while the black
and white flag and the double eagle would fly on an un-
broken Prussian kingdom from Coblenz to Konigsberg,
enveloping the north and making Hanover an enclave in
Prussian soil. The ambition was frustrated, but it re-
mained an inextinguishable ideal in baffled Prussian
hearts.
For all that, Prussia was unquestionably the strongest
German State in the federation. And the consequences
of the Settlement operated at once on Prussian policy.
Much of the new acquisitions had never been Prussian,
and their assimilation into the Hohenzollern system was
essential; no easy matter, for the Protestant Saxons
resented the enforced separation from their former State;
on the Rhine a Catholic population with long-established
memories of the sovereign ecclesiastical princes of Cologne,
Miinster and Paderborn, and saturated by French
thought and administration since 1795, resisted the supre-
macy of a sovereign civil state and the categorical
imperatives of the Prussian bureaucracy; in Posen the
aspirations of Catholic and Slav Poles were wholly with
their brothers across the highly artificial frontier that
divided a dismembered Poland from Prussia. And in
Brandenburg and Prussian Pomerania Junkertum retained
its grip on the government.
The next twenty-five years were a bitter disappoint-
ment to the dreams of the men of 1813. The ideal of
Gneisenau and Boyen, bred in the school of Stein, that
Prussia would establish a pre-eminence in Germany on' the
triple supremacy of her army, her science, and her consti-
tution,' withered under the blight of a reactionary sove-
reign. The royal pledge to complete the reforms of Stein
and Scharnhorst by the grant of liberal self-government,
with its apex in a central representative parliament which
would unite the whole nation in co-operation with the
Crown, was deliberately broken. Prussia was re-
modelled into eight administrative provinces and governed
by the central and reorganised executive, a bureaucracy,
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 35
decentralised local estates, and provincial diets so re-
organised as to make the land-owning aristocracy supreme.
Law was a royal ordinance; local, much less national,
control over taxation and expenditure did not exist; the
ministers and civil service were responsible to none but
their royal master; the patrimonial manorial jurisdiction
and administration of Junkertum in Brandenburg, Pome-
rania, and East Prussia, were practically untouched. Prus-
sian unity, in short, was refashioned after 1815 on the lines
of the military and feudal tradition, pieced together from
the days of the Great Elector to the fatal day of Jena.
The monarchy re-established its authority on the rocher
de bronze--the prerogative; the bureaucracy was its
executive instrument; the army and the administration
were staffed and controlled by the noble caste, and the
memorable law of 1814 completing the reforms of Scharn-
horst, which made service in the army compulsory for all
Prussian males, stamped on civil allegiance the inefface-
able imprint of military obedience to the supreme War-
Lord (Kriegesherr), Lord of the Land (Landesherr), and
the Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian nation in arms.
The world outside promptly decided that the new
Prussia was simply the old Frederician State writ large.
Superficially, this was true. But the new Prussia con-
tained elements unknown to the Prussia of the eighteenth
century, and these were developed even under the reaction
of Frederick William in. Education, primary, secondary,
and of the university type, was strenuously reorganised,
and primary education was made as compulsory as military
service. The Prussian universities--Berlin, K6nigsberg,
Breslau, Halle, Bonn--were in the forefront of the in-
tellectual renaissance; and by 1848 a professorial chair
at Berlin was the recognised blue-ribbon of the academic
career. Seldom, indeed, has a university had so much
eminence in its professorial staff in so many departments
of knowledge as that in the Prussian capital. The civil
administration, despised by many of the Junkers, became
extraordinarily efficient, and like the army it was carefully
graded: the men at the top had passed by a severe
apprenticeship through each stage in the official hierarchy.
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BISMARCK
They were experts, trained in obedience, and habituated
to find their initiative in the higher command. The
economic life was taken in hand. The Zollverein or
Customs Union begun in 1819, in order to solve the
difficulties of trade peculiar to a State with foreign en-
claves that broke the Prussian frontier at countless points,
had under Maassen's masterly management included most
of Germany, outside Austria, by direct absorption or by
tariff treaties with similar economic unions. Maassen
was a follower of Adam Smith, and the tariff was low and
simple, avowedly anti-Protectionist and on Free Trade
lines. The economic advance was remarkable, thanks to
sound economic science, the stability of the government,
and the efficiency of the administration. If the new
Prussia was in type autocratic, militarist, and bureaucratic
--a kingdom governed by its Crown and aristocratic
caste--its intellectual and economic activities made its
social structure and political outlook a wholly different
state to the Prussia of Frederick the Great. Between
the governing nobility and the agricultural and industrial
proletariat had grown up a solid middle class, prosperous,
highly educated, very capable, versed in history, steeped
in political ideas, who knew that their brains were indis-
pensable to their country's increasing strength and
mounting ambitions, and who resented their exclusion
from an active share, not in executive tasks, but in shaping
the policy and destinies of Prussia. If they served in the
army, worked in the universities and industries, and paid
more than half the taxation, they had an indefeasible right
to the highest and most responsible duties of citizenship
--a share in the government.
Thirty years of German and European evolution had
reopened not solved the Prussian problem created by
her history and the Settlement of 1815; and the diffi-
culties shelved then and since remained unanswered.
When Frederick William in. was succeeded in 1840 by
Frederick William iv. , men felt that the dead could bury
their dead, but that a new and critical epoch for the living
was at hand. Would Prussia now obtain a constitution
that would satisfy the Liberal party in Prussia? Would
il II I
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 37
Prussian 'foreign' policy satisfy Prussian and German
nationalism?
The cleavage in the various parties and schools of ideas
--the reaction of the internal on the external problem--
made a most complex situation. Tradition, social environ-
ment, class bias, and the infiltration of new categories
of thought operated with varying strength on varying
groups. Prussia since 1815 had been brought into direct
touch with Germany at many new points, and the contact
tore gaps in the old tradition. Her political frontiers
vanished in the sphere of knowledge. Her universities were
recruited from the south and centre of Germany; her own
students went to Gottingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Munich
and Tubingen. Trade, commerce, and industry, with the
aid of the Zollverein, had created economic bonds through-
out the length and breadth of the Federation. Railways
were to carry the revolution much further--and it was a
railway loan that precipitated the constitutional crisis.
Liberals, Radicals, and Nationalists were demanding in
Prussia what Liberals, Radicals, and Nationalists were
demanding in Bavaria and Baden, and for the same
reasons. In the struggle which raged for ten years in
Rhenish Prussia between Catholics claiming the freedom
and independence of their Church from the bondage of a
supreme secular or heretical state--a forerunner of the
great Kulturkampf of Bismarck's chancellorship--Pro-
testant Prussia had learned that ultramontanism was a
grave element both in the Prussian and German problem.
The German 'Watch on the Rhine' was vested in
a Prussia planted by the will of Europe as a strong
barrier against French ambition. Polish Posen and East
Prussia were a perpetual reminder of the Russian danger
and the unsolved Polish question. Along the western
flank of Silesia stretched Austria. Neighbours, neighbours
everywhere, and no real frontier except the army and the
Landwehr, with its immortal, if legendary, memories of
1813. Expansion outwards, consolidation within, were
essential. But in what directions? Save for Dantzig
and Konigsberg and Stettin--windows into a Baltic closed
by Denmark and Sweden--Prussia had no harbours, no
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BISMARCK
fleet, no colonies. Kiel was Danish, Hamburg a free city,
Bremen another free city, Emden belonged to Oldenburg;
due north Hanover blocked the way to the German Ocean,
and the mouths of the Rhine were Dutch.
History and the facts of everyday life taught all Prussians
the unity and sovereignty of the State; yet how could
Prussia expand in Germany when the Federal Consti-
tution guaranteed the inviolability of every German state,
and the Federal Diet was notoriously anti-Prussian?
Only by smashing the Federal Constitution to pieces in her
own and Germany's interests. The service of the Crown,
in the army, the civil service, or the educational organisation
controlled by and modelled for the needs of the State,
was the ordinary career of both the noble and the
middle class. Hence, the political theory of Hegel and
the Hegelian school, with its insistence on the State as
Power, bit deep into the Prussian mind, Conservative
and Liberal alike. It supplied the philosophical basis for,
and justification of, familiar facts; it provided the recon-
ciliation between the claims of the individual and of the
community, for each would attain their consummate
realisation through the supremacy of the unifying and
omnipotent State.
No less important was the teaching of Clausewitz--a
formative influence as powerful as the law of Military
Service, which Treitschke has emphasised. War, Mira-
beau had said, was Prussia's national industry: that
Prussia had grown by war was a commonplace to every
Prussian schoolboy. Clausewitz's Vom Kriege (On War)
was a severely scientific study of war as a subject of know-
ledge, and a manifestation of life through a nation's will
--a treatise based on deep thought and a masterly com-
parative method. The substance of his teaching that
war is simply a continuation of the policy of the State by
methods appropriate to its nature and for the achievement
of the ends of the State, unattainable by the nature of
things in any other way, bit no less deep into the minds
of the governing and middle class. The relations of war
to civil policy, and to the form, functions, and end of the
State; the exploration of first principles in close con-
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 39
nection with their application; the severity and lucidity
of the argument and the intellectual power of the author,
made Vom Kriege a classic which marked an epoch in^the
scientific study of the subject. If Clausewitz summed
up Prussian thought from Frederick to Scharnhorst, his
mental distinction and grip of method were peculiarly his
own, and they rested on the same characteristic that marked
The Wealth of Nations, the intimate connection between
the truth of the principles and their application in tested
facts. To Scharnhorst he owed the inspiration of that
intrepid and inspiring spirit, and in Napoleon he found
the most convincing proof of the doctrines he expounded;
but Clausewitz remained a great Prussian, the founder
of the great Prussian school continued by Moltke and
von der Goltz. His writings were never popular, even
in Prussia: few outside Germany before 1871 had read
him. Like our own Bentham he owed his profound in-
fluence to his mastery of minds which themselves became
masters of science or affairs--to the brain of the Prussian
army organised in the great General Staff, and to the
application of his conclusions by the professoriate in the
universities. The debates in the Prussian Parliament
from 1858 to 1866 reveal the saturation of both political
parties by Clausewitzian principles in this broader sense.
And the greatest of his disciples was not Moltke, who
acknowledged the debt, but Bismarck, who did not.
Not less significant in another sphere of thought was
the work of List, who committed suicide in 1846, and of
Roscher, first at Gottingen, and then at Leipzig. List's
System of National Economy was the foundation of modern
Protectionism; Roscher was the pioneer of the historical,
as opposed to the classical deductive school in economics.
The sum of List's teaching that the economic life and
policy of the community were subservient to, and must
be shaped to express, the will of the national State as
Power, harmonised with Rdscher's conclusions, based on
historical analysis, that economic principles and laws had
only a relative, not an absolute, validity, and were de-
pendent on, and the exemplification of, national types of
economic structure. Hence the argument that Germany
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BISMARCK
to realise its nationalism must have a German national
economy, and to achieve political freedom must first
attain a national economic independence. List and
Rdscher, therefore, and their disciples provided a powerful
antidote to the influence of British thought, so marked in
Prussian Liberalism. Their greatest conquest was not
achieved until a full generation later, when Bismarck
broke in 1879 w^tn tne economic creed of his youth and
middle age, and the converted Imperial Chancellor hoisted
his flag in the camp of Protection.
Particularism was nowhere stronger than in Prussia,
precisely because all the essential ingredients of parti-
cularism were so highly developed in the Prussian State--
a dynasty the history of which was the history of Prussia
--a definite type of civic character reflected in the form
and character of the institutions--a proud record of
achievement due to the unity of a unified and central-
ised State on a racial basis. In a word, Prussia had bought
her freedom in Germany and Europe by fidelity to her
Prussian self, and at a great price. This Prussian parti-
cularism provided an obvious policy and programme of
the future. Let Prussia continue a rigid loyalty to her
traditions. By the union of her monarchy, her army, and
her civil service, in unquestioning obedience to the
Crown, she could always maintain her pride of place and
make a greater Prussia. Her duty to Germany was best
fulfilled by fulfilling her duty to herself--that State
egoism which Bismarck was to preach so effectively. Any
alteration in her historic institutions or principles would
shatter the secret of her strength and success--her Prus-
sianism. The real danger lay in the desire of jealous
friends and baffled foes to 'mediatise' Prussia, melt her
down in a common German mould, and dissolve a good
Prussian into a flabby German, State. In opposition
to this, Prussian Liberals based their programme on the
reform period of Stein and Scharnhorst and the new
Prussia created in 1815. Their object was to complete
the edifice begun after the downfall of Jena--a disaster
in their eyes caused by the isolation of Prussia from Ger-
many, both in politics, thought, and ideals--to modernise
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 41
the Prussian State, while retaining all that was best in the
historic Prussia, and to build up a real self-governing
Prussian nation and government, in which all classes could
share. It was folly, they urged, to ignore the demands of
classes excluded from power, the character of the new
age, and the intellectual movements in Germany and
Europe. Prussia could lead the German renaissance, but
she must first give practical proof of her identity with its
principles and its objects. If she cut herself off from the
great currents in the life of the German people, she would
cease to be German; she would unite Germany against
Prussia, and experience a second time the bitter fruits of
isolation. No other State had so strong a claim to be the
successful champion of a German national movement;
no other State stood to gain so much by accepting, or to
lose so much by refusing, this duty.
A remarkable development of Prussian conservatism,
rather than of Prussian particularism, found its leaders
in the Brandenburg Circle, which took its political philo-
sophy from Haller and Stahl, its religion from a revival
of Evangelical Protestantism, and its sentiment from a
horror and fear of 'the Revolution. ' It constituted the
nucleus from which the Camarilla of the Gerlachs was
evolved; and in touch with it were many of the men
who made the circle of Frederick William iv. both as
Crown Prince and King. It exercised for thirty years a
profound influence on Prussian and German history; in
its ranks Bismarck served his apprenticeship, and his breach
with its principles was the first great formative fact in his
career. The essential points of this aristocratic and
pietistic creed--an offshoot from the Holy Alliance, tinged
in its dreams and its aversions by the Romantic movement--
can be briefly summarised: the maxim of their party was
J. de Maistre's sentence, 'Nous ne voulons pas la contre-
revolution, mais le contraire de la revolution'! The
historic danger to all states and society lay in ' the Revo-
lution '; the struggle between the Revolution and con-
servatism began long^before 1789, and was continually
taking new forms; France was the main source of revo-
lutionary principles, which either placed sovereignty in
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BISMARCK
the people, or divided it between a hybrid and fictitious
popular will and an emasculated monarchy; the political
revolution was united with the intellectual, which taught
the freedom and sufficiency of the critical reason and sub-
jected everything to rational tests. Modern Germany
was deeply infected with both the political and intellectual
revolution, which unchecked would destroy all authority
in government and be subversive of society and religion;
hence it was the duty of Prussia to unite with all govern-
ments, based on legitimate principles, in order to main-
tain those principles and to combat the Revolution.
Conservatism was not local or national; it transcended the
artificial barriers of political, racial, and geographical
division; and in practice the allies of Prussia were Austria
and Russia; England after 1815 had deserted the true
faith; France after 1830 was only a crowned bourgeois
republic. In fine, the closest political and moral under-
standing between Prussia and Austria was the pivot of
a sound German and European system: united with
Russia, Prussia and Austria could save Europe. Separated
from them she was a conspirator in a moral cataclysm.
Such a creed and such a policy differed essentially from
the ideas of Prussian Junkertum; the Prussian polity was
not justified because it was Prussian, but because it con-
formed to the tests of a universalist system, and in any
collision between Prussianism and this orthodox conser-
vatism the former must be sacrificed; but the Gerlach
school shared with the Junker governing class the antipathy
to all liberal reform. For Prussia to tread the path of
England or France would be treachery to the cause of
right. Opposed as these several parties were, they had
two points in common. They accepted as an axiom the
claim of Prussia to be a Grossmacht. They were pro-
foundly dissatisfied with Prussian inactivity from 1815
onwards, which was an abnegation of her strength and
European position. Prussia was the one German state
in which patriotism was more than a rhetorical figure,
and membership in which was a cause of pride and a basis
of duty and service. Liberals, Particularists, or Conser-
vatives demanded that the Prussian king and the Prussian
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 43
sword should play a more independent part in the political
life of Europe. Even to the Gerlachs the Austrian
alliance, the sine qu& non of Prussian policy, caused obstinate
questionings when it involved a submissive subordination
to the secular and selfish statecraft of Vienna. Liberals
felt more strongly the ' shame' of Prussian obedience to
the Carlsbad decrees, the reactionary measures of 1832,
and the Prussian share in the suppression of the Hano-
verian constitution. The alliance with Austria was in
their eyes a surrender to reaction; the Bund and the Diet
were a national disgrace, and Prussia which could give the
tone and the Liberal Law to Germany had become the
tool of selfish and reactionary Austrian interests.
Prussian thought of all schools was inevitably driven
back on the deadlock in the Bund. If Prussia continued
to act with the Diet she was an Austrian instrument; but
how could she act in defiance of it without forfeiting her
German position, and destroying the whole movement
towards a common and more effective German organi-
sation? Nor could Prussian foreign policy be based on
internal German interests. The Prusso-Russian entente
had its roots in the established traditions of policy,
gratitude to Russia for services in the past, and a deep-
seated fear of Russian powex. Since Frederick the Great
had learned the meaning of Russian enmity in the Seven
Years' War, friendship between Berlin and Petersburg was
a postulate of Prussian safety.
Poland and the Polish
question drove the conclusion home. The French
danger was no less impressive. In Prussia, the memories
of Rosbach and of Jena, of Napoleonic humiliation and
partition, and of the War of Liberation, were in the
national blood as nowhere else in Germany. The portrait
of Queen Louisa, the royal saint and martyr, hung in the
manor-houses of Junkertum and the cottages of the
peasantry; her tomb by Rauch at Charlottenburg was a
national vindication of her sufferings at French hands;
and there were thousands of Prussians on both sides of the
barricades in 1848 who had marched into Paris in 1814
after having liberated their country from French domina-
tion. The new King Frederick William iv. (born in 1795),
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BISMARCK
and his brother, the Prince of Prussia (born 1797), were
boys when the French entered Berlin in 1806, and they
had both served in the Prussian army of 1813. If France
was the hereditary enemy of Germany, she was the hated
and hateful oppressor of Prussia. Prussian Conservatives
and Liberals had common ground in their repudiation of
a French hegemony in Europe. It was the duty of
Prussian intellect to assist the superiority of Prussian
science, as it was the task of Prussian arms to maintain
intact the German territory in the west assigned to their
custody. A black cloud and the warning drops falling
anywhere in Europe, and Prussia instinctively faced to the
Rhine. War with. France--long before Bismarck sat in
the Wilhelmstrasse--would always have set Prussian
nationalism aflame; for deep and inarticulate in the
heart of every Prussian lay the desire to undo the work of
Louis xiv. , which Europe, callous to Prussian services and
sacrifices, had forbidden in 1815, when Prussia was
'robbed ' of the fruits of her victories.
Prussian Liberals recognised, but underrated, the
difficulties of liberal reform. Emphasis on the logical
and historical connection of the new liberal programme
with the reformers of the Stein-Scharnhorst period ignored
the cumulative force of facts. The inertia of the mon-
archy and the obstinacy of its ally, Junkertum, were the
real reasons for the failure to complete the reforms of 1808.
The conversion of Prussia into a constitutional state of
the French or Belgian type, with rights guaranteed in a
written constitution, was a reversal of two hundred years
of development in a precisely opposite direction. Yet
the mere demand for the conversion showed the strength
of the new elements in the Prussian State. But it was
clear that it could only be accomplished with the consent
of the monarchy, or by a military disaster, or by revolution.
In 1840 a revolution seemed as improbable as a second
Jena. Hence everything turned on the character of the
new sovereign, Frederick William iv.
Like his ancestor, Frederick 1. , Frederick William iv.
was 'a Hohenzollern with his back broken,' who be-
wildered his subjects and himself by the obstinacy and
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 45
contradiction of his convictions. His pride in the army,
his belief in his unfettered prerogative and the divine
right of his Crown, his conviction that the Prussian
sovereign in the scheme of human and divine things was
appointed to be the instrument of his people's good, and
earning their love and admiration, linked him with the
past. Nature had endowed him with an acquisitive, sym-
pathetic, and versatile intelligence, and no small share of
oratorical and artistic gifts. Essentially pious, he was
deeply stirred by the new religious forces at work in
Germany; a strong Protestant, he desired the union of
the Protestant churches both in Prussia and outside, yet
could sympathise with the Roman Catholic revival, for he
regarded religious belief and emotion as the basis and
sanction of political and social development. As Crown
Prince he had gladly cultivated the leaders of politics,
philosophy, literature and art. The friends of the Crown
Prince and King numbered personalities so various and
so different as the Gerlachs with the orthodox Conser-
vatives of the Gerlach circle, Radowitz, Bunsen, Rauch,
Cornelius, the Munich leader of the Romantic movement
in art, Stockmar, Humboldt and Ranke.
The rebirth of a national Germany, equipped with
organs rescued from the Middle Ages and reshaped to
express modern ideals, the reunion of Emperor and Church
in a revived Holy Roman Empire, the reconciliation of
modern Liberalism with historic Conservatism in the
spiritual, intellectual, and political life of the German
people, inspired the vision which haunted and fired his
imagination. Of this Restauratio Imperii combining the
fundamental unity of German culture with the unity of
German religion, Austria and Prussia were marked out by
Providence to be the co-architects and co-guarantors.
The German Imperial Crown must necessarily be recreated
as the hereditary prerogative of the House of Habsburg,
but beside the Imperial Throne would stand the Hohen-
zollern sovereign as Captain-General and Arch-Cham-
berlain of the restored Empire, and round these two
would be grouped the princes, dynasties, governments
and peoples of Germany in an ordered hierarchy.
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? 46
BISMARCK
Frederick William iv. saw political realities through a
magic and distorting screen of sentiment. His aversions
were as strong as his ideals. Liberal principles were tainted
at their source by French Jacobinism, and everything
French he abominated. Obstinate and impressionable,
he was always under the spell of characters with clearer
and narrower conceptions and stronger wills than his own.
'I am not a Frederick the Great,' he pathetically con-
fessed; and when revolution and then reaction rent the
web of sentiment asunder, he was helpless--the sullen and
disillusioned victim of fate, the reluctant agent of a policy
which, if it defeated the revolution, no less shattered the
dreams and ambitions of the German and Hohenzollern
king.
The summons to Berlin in 1847 of a united Diet--the
concentration in a single assembly of the unreformed
local Estates--brought to a head the issues between the
old Prussia and the new. To the liberal demands the
King replied that the royal creation of the united Diet
redeemed the pledge of his predecessor, and that the con-
stitutional reforms were now complete; he added that
his Crown was his by the grace of God, and that no written
sheet of paper (a constitution) should ever intervene
between his people and himself.
No less significant was the demand at Heppenheim in
October, 1847, for an elected national German Parliament,
repeated in a motion by Bassermann in the Diet at Baden
(February 12, 1848), in which the reform of the obsolete
and obstructive Federal Constitution was to be accom-
plished by and according to the will of the German
nation. In Prussia and in the south the two Germanies
--the Germany of princes and governments, the Germany
of their subjects over whom the liberal and nationalist
creeds were daily gaining a clearer mastery--were set in
array. The nationalist issue could not be burked. Poland
and the Poles within and without the German Con-
federation were in effervescence. From Schleswig-
Holstein came the imperious demand of 'unredeemed'
Germans to be freed from denationalisation by Danish
'tyranny'; and Holstein, as a member of the German
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 47
Confederation, was within the jurisdiction of a federal
execution. At Paris and Prague and Buda-Pesth, in
Switzerland and Italy, the storm-cone was being hoisted.
How long could the German princes resist the pressure
from within? How long could a representative public
opinion acquiesce in an unrepresentative Federal Diet?
In 1847 Germany rang with the confusion of opposed
creeds and programmes; distinguished spokesmen there
were in plenty in every state, but as yet neither side had
produced a leader or a programme commanding an un-
divided allegiance. Well might Stockmar write: 'A
new epoch is in fusion, the particular metal and stamp
of which cannot be divined. '
It was into this Germany of 1815-47 that Bismarck was
born, and in it he grew up. It was in this Germany and
Prussia, on the eve of revolution, that, as a member of the
United Diet, he stepped on to the political stage, and into
the political history of his country.
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? CHAPTER II
THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
? I. Education and Entry into Politics
Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schonhausen,
born on April I, 1815, in the feverish month of renewed
war that followed Napoleon's escape from Elba, was the
third son of Ferdinand von Bismarck and Wilhelmina
Mencken. Of his two elder brothers only one, Bernhard
(born 1810) survived, and a third brother (born 1819)
did not reach manhood. Of his sisters only one, Malwine
(born 1827) reached womanhood. Schonhausen, the
ancestral home of his forefathers, lies to the west of Berlin
in the Old March (Alt Mark) of Brandenburg, which was
the original nucleus of the Electorate and the very core
of the future Prussian kingdom and the cradle of the
Prussian monarchy.
'Who are these Hohenzollerns? ' Bismarck once de-
manded. 'We were in the March long before they were. '
The claim that the Bismarcks settled in the March in the
reign of Charles the Great rests only on the pious autho-
rity of the genealogical table hanging in the hall of the
manor-house at Schonhausen; but two hundred years
before the first Hohenzollern, invested with the Electorate
by Imperial hands, set to work to tame the lawless inde-
pendence of noble and Junker in the March, the petty
village of Bismarck gave its name to a Brandenburg family;
and towards the end of the thirteenth century the Bis-
marcks were established in the guild and government of
Stendal, a township hard by. In 1345, as holders of the
fief of Burgstall, they were definitely registered in the
nobility of the March, and though they never reached
the status of the great aristocracy, they were henceforward
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
49
one of the many noble families who constituted the
governing class. In 1562 they were reluctantly obliged to
transfer Burgstall to the Hohenzollerns and to take in
exchange Schonhausen. Uninterruptedly in Bismarck's
possession from that date, it gave the family the name--
Bismarck-Schonhausen--which distinguished them alike
from other Bismarcks--noble, middle-class, or plebeian.
On his father's side Otto's family record was that of
most Brandenburg squires--military service in the elec-
toral and then the royal army of Brandenburg-Prussia.
Allegiance and devotion to the ruler were the traditional
duty of the manorial lords; and the ruler's prerogative
was reflected in the territorial prerogative of the servants
of the Crown, who administered the land, led their
peasants in battle, fought an unending struggle with
Nature and their own passions, a caste to whom the State
meant their Hohenzollern master and their own divine
right to govern under his guidance. Otto's father had
served, as usual, in the army; had seen Schonhausen
(built in 1700 to replace the original manor-house, de-
stroyed in the Thirty Years' War) in French possession
after Jena, and the sacred family tree pierced by French
bayonets. Love for the French was not, therefore, a
maxim taught to the young Otto. The Old March
nourished bitter memories of the French invaders, and
inspiriting records of the War of Liberation, and these
the young Otto imbibed as soon as he was breeched.
The tradition of the Menckens was very different.
They were not noble, but they could point in their lineage
to three professors of some celebrity in their day. Wil-
helmina Mencken's father served in the Civil Cabinet of
Frederick the Great and of his successor; was accused of
Jacobinism and displaced, to return under a more liberal
dispensation as Cabinets-chef of Frederick William in.
His daughter seems to have inherited the civil, literary,
and intellectual aptitudes of her race; she combined
them with an extravagant love of building, of Berlin, and
of the dilettante society of salons and fashionable watering-
places--all of them, save perhaps the building, tastes
detested by her son Otto.
B. D
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? BISMARCK
But until 1815 neither Bismarcks nor Menckens had
contributed to the dramatic annals of Hohenzollern
Prussia a statesman, a soldier, or a writer of the first, or
even the second, quality. Both families had a long and
creditable, but essentially parochial, record, research into
which could be safely left to the county antiquarian, had
the boy born in 1815 not made his name illustrious and his
ancestry an interesting study in the origins of genius.
These Bismarcks--and in Mendelian phraseology they
were the dominating strain--for four centuries simply did
their duty as squires and earnest Protestants, and they
planted, tilled, fought, drank, duelled, married, served as
sheriffs (Landrath), begat sons and daughters, and slept
their sleep beneath their blazoned arms, 'In Trinitate
Robur,' satisfied with being Bismarcks and Branden-
burger manorial lords. They ended, in the mystery of
human things, by producing a member of their ancient
house to whom they bequeathed in treble measure their
own fierce appetites, loves, and hates, an iron physique, a
brain, ambitions, and a force unique in the history of ^he
March and of their race.
In 1816 Otto's parents moved to Kniephof, the chief
of a group of family estates, inherited in that year, and at
Kniephof in Prussian Pomerania the little Otto grew up.
It was the Paradise of his boyhood, and there the heredi-
tary Bismarck link with the soil was forged. Towns and
the life of towns neither the lad, nor the ambassador, nor
the Imperial Chancellor ever liked. Streets were a prison,
townsfolk an unpleasant riddle. Whatever else changed
in Otto von Bismarck, the passion for rural nature--the
hunger for the land and the life of the land, forests, moor,
the blue spaces of an open sky, the wind across the pas-
tures, the hard-bitten men who lived, worked, and hunted
on the land--never changed. Pictures and sculpture
do not figure in his letters: he confessed when he was an
old man that once, only once, he had entered the Berlin
Museum; of books there is singularly little; there is
much of good food and good wine; but the earth and its
unceasing pageantry of beauty are never forgotten. Dawn
and sunset, the maturing sunshine of midday, snow under
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
moonlight, mountains, crags, and wooded dales--these
things he always saw because he felt their message, their
contact with, or memory of, his own home. The grey-
haired Chancellor, with his wolf-hounds at his heels,
striding with the watchful eye of a master amongst the
sunlit- glades of his oaks and beeches at Varan or Fried-
richsruhe, was happier in his freedom from the fetters of
the State than the boy on holiday who galloped his pony
over the monotonous demesne of Kniephof, stalked snipe
and wild duck, or hunted hares through deep snow.
Otto's education was of the conventional German
humanistic and literary type. At seven years old he was
sent to a preparatory school (Plamann's Institute), and at
twelve passed on to a . gymnasium. At sixteen, as became
a young noble and Protestant, he was confirmed by
Schleiermacher, at the height of his celebrity, whose
brief injunction: 'Whatever you do, do it with all your
heart and as from the Lord,' is said to have made a deep
impression. In 1832 he entered the University of
Gottingen, where he spent two years, followed by one at
the University of Berlin. Instinct and tradition suggested
the army as a profession, but his mother apparently
desired a civil career for this passionate, self-willed and
robust son ;* whether because she feared the life of an
officer, or divined the power in her beloved Otto, is un-
certain; but she had her way, and after passing the neces-
sary examinations he entered the civil service on its
judicial side, and was attached for duty at the fashionable
Aix-la-Chapelle and at Berlin. One year had to be given
to military service, and this he spent with the Rifles of the
Guard (Garde-J'dger).
Until 1839, when he lost his mother, abruptly ter-
minated his State employment and, owing to financial
difficulties of his family, took over with his brother Bern-
hard the management of the family properties, his life
had shown little indication either of ambitions or excep-
tional abilities. As a university student, though not as
idle as legend subsequently pictured, he had failed to find
in academic studies either intellectual inspiration or prac-
tical utility. Heeren's lectures made some impression,
U. OF M. FLINT CC\ : FGE LIBRARY
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? 52
BISMARCK
but neither Dahlmann, the glory of G6ttingen, nor
Savigny at Berlin can be reckoned as formative influences
in his education as they were in the training of his con-
temporaries Windthorst and Beust. The truth is that
then, as throughout his career, Bismarck revolted against
discipleship or subordination of any kind. Life was the
only teacher from whom he was willing to learn, and the
lessons of life he hammered out for himself, and he refused
to take them ready-made. He joined a famous duelling
corps, the Hanoverana. Duelling, beer-drinking, and the
riotous escapades of undergraduate youth, provided an
outlet for his exuberant physical powers. In the punish-
ment book of the university his name figures more than
once. Friends he made in plenty, three in particular--
Moritz von Blanckenburg, Motley, the American historian,
and Roon, twelve years his senior. Little did either guess
what the latter friendship would signify for the history of
Prussia. There is a story that in 1832 he made a bet with
an American student that Germany would be unified in
twenty years; but if he made the bet, he lost it. Forty,
not twenty, years hence he could have asked from the
Wilhelmstrasse for repayment. He detested and neglected
his duties as a civil servant. The career of 'the animal
armed with a pen' behind closed windows and under
the orders of domineering, exacting, or ill-bred superiors,
stirred his Junker pride and independence to mutiny.
At Aix-la-Chapelle, crowded with fashionable pleasure-
seekers of all nations, he plunged into gambling, debt, and
dissipation. For four months he broke away altogether,
travelled to Wiesbaden and Switzerland, fell in love with
a pretty English girl, but whether he broke with her or
she with him is uncertain. The sap was running strongly
upwards, and in the dawn of superb physical vigour Bis-
marck, like many, sought in physical satisfaction an ano-
dyne for an incurable unrest. 'Yesterday,' he wrote to his
wife in 1851, ' I was in Wiesbaden. May it please God to
fill with His clear and strong wine this vessel in which then
the champagne of youth uselessly foamed and left stale
dregs. ' Neither politics nor religion came to his aid.
He had ceased to pray; he was practically an agnostic
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 53
with a vague Pantheism simmering in a brain that de-
manded positive reality. Republicanism as a political
creed had appealed to him, but the democratic excesses
at the Hambacher Fest (1832) disgusted him with radical-
ism and all its works. Prussia had no public life to offer
him. Service in the bureaucracy of an autocratic crown
and the army were the only two professions available, and
he had rejected the one and was too old now for the other.
He fell back gladly on the career of a landed proprietor.
it not be written in the scroll of German destiny that the
mantle of the great Frederick would fall on another and
a greater Hohenzollern?
No German State in the confederation had, since 1789,
suffered more varied vicissitudes, had sunk lower or re-
covered more rapidly than Prussia. The Settlement of
1815 restored the Prussian kingdom to the full measure of
strength enjoyed in 1805, but with a significantly different
geographical configuration. Prussia surrendered much
of the Polish territory acquired in the Second and Third
Partitions, and in compensation received a part of royal
Saxony and rich provinces in the west, which made her
the guardian of the Rhine from Diisseldorf to the suburbs
of Jewish and free Frankfurt. Yet her territories were not
compact, for between the new Rhenish Prussia and the
original nucleus of the Brandenburg Electorate in the Elbe
basin lay Hanover and the Westphalian States, while East
and West Prussia with Silesia made two huge salients
with Poland in the re-entrant of the one and royal
Saxony and (Austrian) Bohemia in the re-entrant of the
other. Prussian patriots regarded the Settlement as an
insult. They had desired to eliminate the Polish and
Catholic elements of the Province of Posen, to- absorb the
whole of Saxony, and (with customary Prussian ' modera-
te c
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? 34
BISMARCK
tion ') to reduce their' compensation ' in the west in return
for a consolidation in the centre. Prussia was to be a pure
German State, predominantly Protestant, while the black
and white flag and the double eagle would fly on an un-
broken Prussian kingdom from Coblenz to Konigsberg,
enveloping the north and making Hanover an enclave in
Prussian soil. The ambition was frustrated, but it re-
mained an inextinguishable ideal in baffled Prussian
hearts.
For all that, Prussia was unquestionably the strongest
German State in the federation. And the consequences
of the Settlement operated at once on Prussian policy.
Much of the new acquisitions had never been Prussian,
and their assimilation into the Hohenzollern system was
essential; no easy matter, for the Protestant Saxons
resented the enforced separation from their former State;
on the Rhine a Catholic population with long-established
memories of the sovereign ecclesiastical princes of Cologne,
Miinster and Paderborn, and saturated by French
thought and administration since 1795, resisted the supre-
macy of a sovereign civil state and the categorical
imperatives of the Prussian bureaucracy; in Posen the
aspirations of Catholic and Slav Poles were wholly with
their brothers across the highly artificial frontier that
divided a dismembered Poland from Prussia. And in
Brandenburg and Prussian Pomerania Junkertum retained
its grip on the government.
The next twenty-five years were a bitter disappoint-
ment to the dreams of the men of 1813. The ideal of
Gneisenau and Boyen, bred in the school of Stein, that
Prussia would establish a pre-eminence in Germany on' the
triple supremacy of her army, her science, and her consti-
tution,' withered under the blight of a reactionary sove-
reign. The royal pledge to complete the reforms of Stein
and Scharnhorst by the grant of liberal self-government,
with its apex in a central representative parliament which
would unite the whole nation in co-operation with the
Crown, was deliberately broken. Prussia was re-
modelled into eight administrative provinces and governed
by the central and reorganised executive, a bureaucracy,
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 35
decentralised local estates, and provincial diets so re-
organised as to make the land-owning aristocracy supreme.
Law was a royal ordinance; local, much less national,
control over taxation and expenditure did not exist; the
ministers and civil service were responsible to none but
their royal master; the patrimonial manorial jurisdiction
and administration of Junkertum in Brandenburg, Pome-
rania, and East Prussia, were practically untouched. Prus-
sian unity, in short, was refashioned after 1815 on the lines
of the military and feudal tradition, pieced together from
the days of the Great Elector to the fatal day of Jena.
The monarchy re-established its authority on the rocher
de bronze--the prerogative; the bureaucracy was its
executive instrument; the army and the administration
were staffed and controlled by the noble caste, and the
memorable law of 1814 completing the reforms of Scharn-
horst, which made service in the army compulsory for all
Prussian males, stamped on civil allegiance the inefface-
able imprint of military obedience to the supreme War-
Lord (Kriegesherr), Lord of the Land (Landesherr), and
the Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian nation in arms.
The world outside promptly decided that the new
Prussia was simply the old Frederician State writ large.
Superficially, this was true. But the new Prussia con-
tained elements unknown to the Prussia of the eighteenth
century, and these were developed even under the reaction
of Frederick William in. Education, primary, secondary,
and of the university type, was strenuously reorganised,
and primary education was made as compulsory as military
service. The Prussian universities--Berlin, K6nigsberg,
Breslau, Halle, Bonn--were in the forefront of the in-
tellectual renaissance; and by 1848 a professorial chair
at Berlin was the recognised blue-ribbon of the academic
career. Seldom, indeed, has a university had so much
eminence in its professorial staff in so many departments
of knowledge as that in the Prussian capital. The civil
administration, despised by many of the Junkers, became
extraordinarily efficient, and like the army it was carefully
graded: the men at the top had passed by a severe
apprenticeship through each stage in the official hierarchy.
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? 36
BISMARCK
They were experts, trained in obedience, and habituated
to find their initiative in the higher command. The
economic life was taken in hand. The Zollverein or
Customs Union begun in 1819, in order to solve the
difficulties of trade peculiar to a State with foreign en-
claves that broke the Prussian frontier at countless points,
had under Maassen's masterly management included most
of Germany, outside Austria, by direct absorption or by
tariff treaties with similar economic unions. Maassen
was a follower of Adam Smith, and the tariff was low and
simple, avowedly anti-Protectionist and on Free Trade
lines. The economic advance was remarkable, thanks to
sound economic science, the stability of the government,
and the efficiency of the administration. If the new
Prussia was in type autocratic, militarist, and bureaucratic
--a kingdom governed by its Crown and aristocratic
caste--its intellectual and economic activities made its
social structure and political outlook a wholly different
state to the Prussia of Frederick the Great. Between
the governing nobility and the agricultural and industrial
proletariat had grown up a solid middle class, prosperous,
highly educated, very capable, versed in history, steeped
in political ideas, who knew that their brains were indis-
pensable to their country's increasing strength and
mounting ambitions, and who resented their exclusion
from an active share, not in executive tasks, but in shaping
the policy and destinies of Prussia. If they served in the
army, worked in the universities and industries, and paid
more than half the taxation, they had an indefeasible right
to the highest and most responsible duties of citizenship
--a share in the government.
Thirty years of German and European evolution had
reopened not solved the Prussian problem created by
her history and the Settlement of 1815; and the diffi-
culties shelved then and since remained unanswered.
When Frederick William in. was succeeded in 1840 by
Frederick William iv. , men felt that the dead could bury
their dead, but that a new and critical epoch for the living
was at hand. Would Prussia now obtain a constitution
that would satisfy the Liberal party in Prussia? Would
il II I
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 37
Prussian 'foreign' policy satisfy Prussian and German
nationalism?
The cleavage in the various parties and schools of ideas
--the reaction of the internal on the external problem--
made a most complex situation. Tradition, social environ-
ment, class bias, and the infiltration of new categories
of thought operated with varying strength on varying
groups. Prussia since 1815 had been brought into direct
touch with Germany at many new points, and the contact
tore gaps in the old tradition. Her political frontiers
vanished in the sphere of knowledge. Her universities were
recruited from the south and centre of Germany; her own
students went to Gottingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Munich
and Tubingen. Trade, commerce, and industry, with the
aid of the Zollverein, had created economic bonds through-
out the length and breadth of the Federation. Railways
were to carry the revolution much further--and it was a
railway loan that precipitated the constitutional crisis.
Liberals, Radicals, and Nationalists were demanding in
Prussia what Liberals, Radicals, and Nationalists were
demanding in Bavaria and Baden, and for the same
reasons. In the struggle which raged for ten years in
Rhenish Prussia between Catholics claiming the freedom
and independence of their Church from the bondage of a
supreme secular or heretical state--a forerunner of the
great Kulturkampf of Bismarck's chancellorship--Pro-
testant Prussia had learned that ultramontanism was a
grave element both in the Prussian and German problem.
The German 'Watch on the Rhine' was vested in
a Prussia planted by the will of Europe as a strong
barrier against French ambition. Polish Posen and East
Prussia were a perpetual reminder of the Russian danger
and the unsolved Polish question. Along the western
flank of Silesia stretched Austria. Neighbours, neighbours
everywhere, and no real frontier except the army and the
Landwehr, with its immortal, if legendary, memories of
1813. Expansion outwards, consolidation within, were
essential. But in what directions? Save for Dantzig
and Konigsberg and Stettin--windows into a Baltic closed
by Denmark and Sweden--Prussia had no harbours, no
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? 38
BISMARCK
fleet, no colonies. Kiel was Danish, Hamburg a free city,
Bremen another free city, Emden belonged to Oldenburg;
due north Hanover blocked the way to the German Ocean,
and the mouths of the Rhine were Dutch.
History and the facts of everyday life taught all Prussians
the unity and sovereignty of the State; yet how could
Prussia expand in Germany when the Federal Consti-
tution guaranteed the inviolability of every German state,
and the Federal Diet was notoriously anti-Prussian?
Only by smashing the Federal Constitution to pieces in her
own and Germany's interests. The service of the Crown,
in the army, the civil service, or the educational organisation
controlled by and modelled for the needs of the State,
was the ordinary career of both the noble and the
middle class. Hence, the political theory of Hegel and
the Hegelian school, with its insistence on the State as
Power, bit deep into the Prussian mind, Conservative
and Liberal alike. It supplied the philosophical basis for,
and justification of, familiar facts; it provided the recon-
ciliation between the claims of the individual and of the
community, for each would attain their consummate
realisation through the supremacy of the unifying and
omnipotent State.
No less important was the teaching of Clausewitz--a
formative influence as powerful as the law of Military
Service, which Treitschke has emphasised. War, Mira-
beau had said, was Prussia's national industry: that
Prussia had grown by war was a commonplace to every
Prussian schoolboy. Clausewitz's Vom Kriege (On War)
was a severely scientific study of war as a subject of know-
ledge, and a manifestation of life through a nation's will
--a treatise based on deep thought and a masterly com-
parative method. The substance of his teaching that
war is simply a continuation of the policy of the State by
methods appropriate to its nature and for the achievement
of the ends of the State, unattainable by the nature of
things in any other way, bit no less deep into the minds
of the governing and middle class. The relations of war
to civil policy, and to the form, functions, and end of the
State; the exploration of first principles in close con-
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 39
nection with their application; the severity and lucidity
of the argument and the intellectual power of the author,
made Vom Kriege a classic which marked an epoch in^the
scientific study of the subject. If Clausewitz summed
up Prussian thought from Frederick to Scharnhorst, his
mental distinction and grip of method were peculiarly his
own, and they rested on the same characteristic that marked
The Wealth of Nations, the intimate connection between
the truth of the principles and their application in tested
facts. To Scharnhorst he owed the inspiration of that
intrepid and inspiring spirit, and in Napoleon he found
the most convincing proof of the doctrines he expounded;
but Clausewitz remained a great Prussian, the founder
of the great Prussian school continued by Moltke and
von der Goltz. His writings were never popular, even
in Prussia: few outside Germany before 1871 had read
him. Like our own Bentham he owed his profound in-
fluence to his mastery of minds which themselves became
masters of science or affairs--to the brain of the Prussian
army organised in the great General Staff, and to the
application of his conclusions by the professoriate in the
universities. The debates in the Prussian Parliament
from 1858 to 1866 reveal the saturation of both political
parties by Clausewitzian principles in this broader sense.
And the greatest of his disciples was not Moltke, who
acknowledged the debt, but Bismarck, who did not.
Not less significant in another sphere of thought was
the work of List, who committed suicide in 1846, and of
Roscher, first at Gottingen, and then at Leipzig. List's
System of National Economy was the foundation of modern
Protectionism; Roscher was the pioneer of the historical,
as opposed to the classical deductive school in economics.
The sum of List's teaching that the economic life and
policy of the community were subservient to, and must
be shaped to express, the will of the national State as
Power, harmonised with Rdscher's conclusions, based on
historical analysis, that economic principles and laws had
only a relative, not an absolute, validity, and were de-
pendent on, and the exemplification of, national types of
economic structure. Hence the argument that Germany
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? 40
BISMARCK
to realise its nationalism must have a German national
economy, and to achieve political freedom must first
attain a national economic independence. List and
Rdscher, therefore, and their disciples provided a powerful
antidote to the influence of British thought, so marked in
Prussian Liberalism. Their greatest conquest was not
achieved until a full generation later, when Bismarck
broke in 1879 w^tn tne economic creed of his youth and
middle age, and the converted Imperial Chancellor hoisted
his flag in the camp of Protection.
Particularism was nowhere stronger than in Prussia,
precisely because all the essential ingredients of parti-
cularism were so highly developed in the Prussian State--
a dynasty the history of which was the history of Prussia
--a definite type of civic character reflected in the form
and character of the institutions--a proud record of
achievement due to the unity of a unified and central-
ised State on a racial basis. In a word, Prussia had bought
her freedom in Germany and Europe by fidelity to her
Prussian self, and at a great price. This Prussian parti-
cularism provided an obvious policy and programme of
the future. Let Prussia continue a rigid loyalty to her
traditions. By the union of her monarchy, her army, and
her civil service, in unquestioning obedience to the
Crown, she could always maintain her pride of place and
make a greater Prussia. Her duty to Germany was best
fulfilled by fulfilling her duty to herself--that State
egoism which Bismarck was to preach so effectively. Any
alteration in her historic institutions or principles would
shatter the secret of her strength and success--her Prus-
sianism. The real danger lay in the desire of jealous
friends and baffled foes to 'mediatise' Prussia, melt her
down in a common German mould, and dissolve a good
Prussian into a flabby German, State. In opposition
to this, Prussian Liberals based their programme on the
reform period of Stein and Scharnhorst and the new
Prussia created in 1815. Their object was to complete
the edifice begun after the downfall of Jena--a disaster
in their eyes caused by the isolation of Prussia from Ger-
many, both in politics, thought, and ideals--to modernise
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 41
the Prussian State, while retaining all that was best in the
historic Prussia, and to build up a real self-governing
Prussian nation and government, in which all classes could
share. It was folly, they urged, to ignore the demands of
classes excluded from power, the character of the new
age, and the intellectual movements in Germany and
Europe. Prussia could lead the German renaissance, but
she must first give practical proof of her identity with its
principles and its objects. If she cut herself off from the
great currents in the life of the German people, she would
cease to be German; she would unite Germany against
Prussia, and experience a second time the bitter fruits of
isolation. No other State had so strong a claim to be the
successful champion of a German national movement;
no other State stood to gain so much by accepting, or to
lose so much by refusing, this duty.
A remarkable development of Prussian conservatism,
rather than of Prussian particularism, found its leaders
in the Brandenburg Circle, which took its political philo-
sophy from Haller and Stahl, its religion from a revival
of Evangelical Protestantism, and its sentiment from a
horror and fear of 'the Revolution. ' It constituted the
nucleus from which the Camarilla of the Gerlachs was
evolved; and in touch with it were many of the men
who made the circle of Frederick William iv. both as
Crown Prince and King. It exercised for thirty years a
profound influence on Prussian and German history; in
its ranks Bismarck served his apprenticeship, and his breach
with its principles was the first great formative fact in his
career. The essential points of this aristocratic and
pietistic creed--an offshoot from the Holy Alliance, tinged
in its dreams and its aversions by the Romantic movement--
can be briefly summarised: the maxim of their party was
J. de Maistre's sentence, 'Nous ne voulons pas la contre-
revolution, mais le contraire de la revolution'! The
historic danger to all states and society lay in ' the Revo-
lution '; the struggle between the Revolution and con-
servatism began long^before 1789, and was continually
taking new forms; France was the main source of revo-
lutionary principles, which either placed sovereignty in
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? 42
BISMARCK
the people, or divided it between a hybrid and fictitious
popular will and an emasculated monarchy; the political
revolution was united with the intellectual, which taught
the freedom and sufficiency of the critical reason and sub-
jected everything to rational tests. Modern Germany
was deeply infected with both the political and intellectual
revolution, which unchecked would destroy all authority
in government and be subversive of society and religion;
hence it was the duty of Prussia to unite with all govern-
ments, based on legitimate principles, in order to main-
tain those principles and to combat the Revolution.
Conservatism was not local or national; it transcended the
artificial barriers of political, racial, and geographical
division; and in practice the allies of Prussia were Austria
and Russia; England after 1815 had deserted the true
faith; France after 1830 was only a crowned bourgeois
republic. In fine, the closest political and moral under-
standing between Prussia and Austria was the pivot of
a sound German and European system: united with
Russia, Prussia and Austria could save Europe. Separated
from them she was a conspirator in a moral cataclysm.
Such a creed and such a policy differed essentially from
the ideas of Prussian Junkertum; the Prussian polity was
not justified because it was Prussian, but because it con-
formed to the tests of a universalist system, and in any
collision between Prussianism and this orthodox conser-
vatism the former must be sacrificed; but the Gerlach
school shared with the Junker governing class the antipathy
to all liberal reform. For Prussia to tread the path of
England or France would be treachery to the cause of
right. Opposed as these several parties were, they had
two points in common. They accepted as an axiom the
claim of Prussia to be a Grossmacht. They were pro-
foundly dissatisfied with Prussian inactivity from 1815
onwards, which was an abnegation of her strength and
European position. Prussia was the one German state
in which patriotism was more than a rhetorical figure,
and membership in which was a cause of pride and a basis
of duty and service. Liberals, Particularists, or Conser-
vatives demanded that the Prussian king and the Prussian
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 43
sword should play a more independent part in the political
life of Europe. Even to the Gerlachs the Austrian
alliance, the sine qu& non of Prussian policy, caused obstinate
questionings when it involved a submissive subordination
to the secular and selfish statecraft of Vienna. Liberals
felt more strongly the ' shame' of Prussian obedience to
the Carlsbad decrees, the reactionary measures of 1832,
and the Prussian share in the suppression of the Hano-
verian constitution. The alliance with Austria was in
their eyes a surrender to reaction; the Bund and the Diet
were a national disgrace, and Prussia which could give the
tone and the Liberal Law to Germany had become the
tool of selfish and reactionary Austrian interests.
Prussian thought of all schools was inevitably driven
back on the deadlock in the Bund. If Prussia continued
to act with the Diet she was an Austrian instrument; but
how could she act in defiance of it without forfeiting her
German position, and destroying the whole movement
towards a common and more effective German organi-
sation? Nor could Prussian foreign policy be based on
internal German interests. The Prusso-Russian entente
had its roots in the established traditions of policy,
gratitude to Russia for services in the past, and a deep-
seated fear of Russian powex. Since Frederick the Great
had learned the meaning of Russian enmity in the Seven
Years' War, friendship between Berlin and Petersburg was
a postulate of Prussian safety.
Poland and the Polish
question drove the conclusion home. The French
danger was no less impressive. In Prussia, the memories
of Rosbach and of Jena, of Napoleonic humiliation and
partition, and of the War of Liberation, were in the
national blood as nowhere else in Germany. The portrait
of Queen Louisa, the royal saint and martyr, hung in the
manor-houses of Junkertum and the cottages of the
peasantry; her tomb by Rauch at Charlottenburg was a
national vindication of her sufferings at French hands;
and there were thousands of Prussians on both sides of the
barricades in 1848 who had marched into Paris in 1814
after having liberated their country from French domina-
tion. The new King Frederick William iv. (born in 1795),
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? 44
BISMARCK
and his brother, the Prince of Prussia (born 1797), were
boys when the French entered Berlin in 1806, and they
had both served in the Prussian army of 1813. If France
was the hereditary enemy of Germany, she was the hated
and hateful oppressor of Prussia. Prussian Conservatives
and Liberals had common ground in their repudiation of
a French hegemony in Europe. It was the duty of
Prussian intellect to assist the superiority of Prussian
science, as it was the task of Prussian arms to maintain
intact the German territory in the west assigned to their
custody. A black cloud and the warning drops falling
anywhere in Europe, and Prussia instinctively faced to the
Rhine. War with. France--long before Bismarck sat in
the Wilhelmstrasse--would always have set Prussian
nationalism aflame; for deep and inarticulate in the
heart of every Prussian lay the desire to undo the work of
Louis xiv. , which Europe, callous to Prussian services and
sacrifices, had forbidden in 1815, when Prussia was
'robbed ' of the fruits of her victories.
Prussian Liberals recognised, but underrated, the
difficulties of liberal reform. Emphasis on the logical
and historical connection of the new liberal programme
with the reformers of the Stein-Scharnhorst period ignored
the cumulative force of facts. The inertia of the mon-
archy and the obstinacy of its ally, Junkertum, were the
real reasons for the failure to complete the reforms of 1808.
The conversion of Prussia into a constitutional state of
the French or Belgian type, with rights guaranteed in a
written constitution, was a reversal of two hundred years
of development in a precisely opposite direction. Yet
the mere demand for the conversion showed the strength
of the new elements in the Prussian State. But it was
clear that it could only be accomplished with the consent
of the monarchy, or by a military disaster, or by revolution.
In 1840 a revolution seemed as improbable as a second
Jena. Hence everything turned on the character of the
new sovereign, Frederick William iv.
Like his ancestor, Frederick 1. , Frederick William iv.
was 'a Hohenzollern with his back broken,' who be-
wildered his subjects and himself by the obstinacy and
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 45
contradiction of his convictions. His pride in the army,
his belief in his unfettered prerogative and the divine
right of his Crown, his conviction that the Prussian
sovereign in the scheme of human and divine things was
appointed to be the instrument of his people's good, and
earning their love and admiration, linked him with the
past. Nature had endowed him with an acquisitive, sym-
pathetic, and versatile intelligence, and no small share of
oratorical and artistic gifts. Essentially pious, he was
deeply stirred by the new religious forces at work in
Germany; a strong Protestant, he desired the union of
the Protestant churches both in Prussia and outside, yet
could sympathise with the Roman Catholic revival, for he
regarded religious belief and emotion as the basis and
sanction of political and social development. As Crown
Prince he had gladly cultivated the leaders of politics,
philosophy, literature and art. The friends of the Crown
Prince and King numbered personalities so various and
so different as the Gerlachs with the orthodox Conser-
vatives of the Gerlach circle, Radowitz, Bunsen, Rauch,
Cornelius, the Munich leader of the Romantic movement
in art, Stockmar, Humboldt and Ranke.
The rebirth of a national Germany, equipped with
organs rescued from the Middle Ages and reshaped to
express modern ideals, the reunion of Emperor and Church
in a revived Holy Roman Empire, the reconciliation of
modern Liberalism with historic Conservatism in the
spiritual, intellectual, and political life of the German
people, inspired the vision which haunted and fired his
imagination. Of this Restauratio Imperii combining the
fundamental unity of German culture with the unity of
German religion, Austria and Prussia were marked out by
Providence to be the co-architects and co-guarantors.
The German Imperial Crown must necessarily be recreated
as the hereditary prerogative of the House of Habsburg,
but beside the Imperial Throne would stand the Hohen-
zollern sovereign as Captain-General and Arch-Cham-
berlain of the restored Empire, and round these two
would be grouped the princes, dynasties, governments
and peoples of Germany in an ordered hierarchy.
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? 46
BISMARCK
Frederick William iv. saw political realities through a
magic and distorting screen of sentiment. His aversions
were as strong as his ideals. Liberal principles were tainted
at their source by French Jacobinism, and everything
French he abominated. Obstinate and impressionable,
he was always under the spell of characters with clearer
and narrower conceptions and stronger wills than his own.
'I am not a Frederick the Great,' he pathetically con-
fessed; and when revolution and then reaction rent the
web of sentiment asunder, he was helpless--the sullen and
disillusioned victim of fate, the reluctant agent of a policy
which, if it defeated the revolution, no less shattered the
dreams and ambitions of the German and Hohenzollern
king.
The summons to Berlin in 1847 of a united Diet--the
concentration in a single assembly of the unreformed
local Estates--brought to a head the issues between the
old Prussia and the new. To the liberal demands the
King replied that the royal creation of the united Diet
redeemed the pledge of his predecessor, and that the con-
stitutional reforms were now complete; he added that
his Crown was his by the grace of God, and that no written
sheet of paper (a constitution) should ever intervene
between his people and himself.
No less significant was the demand at Heppenheim in
October, 1847, for an elected national German Parliament,
repeated in a motion by Bassermann in the Diet at Baden
(February 12, 1848), in which the reform of the obsolete
and obstructive Federal Constitution was to be accom-
plished by and according to the will of the German
nation. In Prussia and in the south the two Germanies
--the Germany of princes and governments, the Germany
of their subjects over whom the liberal and nationalist
creeds were daily gaining a clearer mastery--were set in
array. The nationalist issue could not be burked. Poland
and the Poles within and without the German Con-
federation were in effervescence. From Schleswig-
Holstein came the imperious demand of 'unredeemed'
Germans to be freed from denationalisation by Danish
'tyranny'; and Holstein, as a member of the German
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? GERMANY AND THE GERMAN PROBLEM 47
Confederation, was within the jurisdiction of a federal
execution. At Paris and Prague and Buda-Pesth, in
Switzerland and Italy, the storm-cone was being hoisted.
How long could the German princes resist the pressure
from within? How long could a representative public
opinion acquiesce in an unrepresentative Federal Diet?
In 1847 Germany rang with the confusion of opposed
creeds and programmes; distinguished spokesmen there
were in plenty in every state, but as yet neither side had
produced a leader or a programme commanding an un-
divided allegiance. Well might Stockmar write: 'A
new epoch is in fusion, the particular metal and stamp
of which cannot be divined. '
It was into this Germany of 1815-47 that Bismarck was
born, and in it he grew up. It was in this Germany and
Prussia, on the eve of revolution, that, as a member of the
United Diet, he stepped on to the political stage, and into
the political history of his country.
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? CHAPTER II
THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
? I. Education and Entry into Politics
Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schonhausen,
born on April I, 1815, in the feverish month of renewed
war that followed Napoleon's escape from Elba, was the
third son of Ferdinand von Bismarck and Wilhelmina
Mencken. Of his two elder brothers only one, Bernhard
(born 1810) survived, and a third brother (born 1819)
did not reach manhood. Of his sisters only one, Malwine
(born 1827) reached womanhood. Schonhausen, the
ancestral home of his forefathers, lies to the west of Berlin
in the Old March (Alt Mark) of Brandenburg, which was
the original nucleus of the Electorate and the very core
of the future Prussian kingdom and the cradle of the
Prussian monarchy.
'Who are these Hohenzollerns? ' Bismarck once de-
manded. 'We were in the March long before they were. '
The claim that the Bismarcks settled in the March in the
reign of Charles the Great rests only on the pious autho-
rity of the genealogical table hanging in the hall of the
manor-house at Schonhausen; but two hundred years
before the first Hohenzollern, invested with the Electorate
by Imperial hands, set to work to tame the lawless inde-
pendence of noble and Junker in the March, the petty
village of Bismarck gave its name to a Brandenburg family;
and towards the end of the thirteenth century the Bis-
marcks were established in the guild and government of
Stendal, a township hard by. In 1345, as holders of the
fief of Burgstall, they were definitely registered in the
nobility of the March, and though they never reached
the status of the great aristocracy, they were henceforward
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
49
one of the many noble families who constituted the
governing class. In 1562 they were reluctantly obliged to
transfer Burgstall to the Hohenzollerns and to take in
exchange Schonhausen. Uninterruptedly in Bismarck's
possession from that date, it gave the family the name--
Bismarck-Schonhausen--which distinguished them alike
from other Bismarcks--noble, middle-class, or plebeian.
On his father's side Otto's family record was that of
most Brandenburg squires--military service in the elec-
toral and then the royal army of Brandenburg-Prussia.
Allegiance and devotion to the ruler were the traditional
duty of the manorial lords; and the ruler's prerogative
was reflected in the territorial prerogative of the servants
of the Crown, who administered the land, led their
peasants in battle, fought an unending struggle with
Nature and their own passions, a caste to whom the State
meant their Hohenzollern master and their own divine
right to govern under his guidance. Otto's father had
served, as usual, in the army; had seen Schonhausen
(built in 1700 to replace the original manor-house, de-
stroyed in the Thirty Years' War) in French possession
after Jena, and the sacred family tree pierced by French
bayonets. Love for the French was not, therefore, a
maxim taught to the young Otto. The Old March
nourished bitter memories of the French invaders, and
inspiriting records of the War of Liberation, and these
the young Otto imbibed as soon as he was breeched.
The tradition of the Menckens was very different.
They were not noble, but they could point in their lineage
to three professors of some celebrity in their day. Wil-
helmina Mencken's father served in the Civil Cabinet of
Frederick the Great and of his successor; was accused of
Jacobinism and displaced, to return under a more liberal
dispensation as Cabinets-chef of Frederick William in.
His daughter seems to have inherited the civil, literary,
and intellectual aptitudes of her race; she combined
them with an extravagant love of building, of Berlin, and
of the dilettante society of salons and fashionable watering-
places--all of them, save perhaps the building, tastes
detested by her son Otto.
B. D
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? BISMARCK
But until 1815 neither Bismarcks nor Menckens had
contributed to the dramatic annals of Hohenzollern
Prussia a statesman, a soldier, or a writer of the first, or
even the second, quality. Both families had a long and
creditable, but essentially parochial, record, research into
which could be safely left to the county antiquarian, had
the boy born in 1815 not made his name illustrious and his
ancestry an interesting study in the origins of genius.
These Bismarcks--and in Mendelian phraseology they
were the dominating strain--for four centuries simply did
their duty as squires and earnest Protestants, and they
planted, tilled, fought, drank, duelled, married, served as
sheriffs (Landrath), begat sons and daughters, and slept
their sleep beneath their blazoned arms, 'In Trinitate
Robur,' satisfied with being Bismarcks and Branden-
burger manorial lords. They ended, in the mystery of
human things, by producing a member of their ancient
house to whom they bequeathed in treble measure their
own fierce appetites, loves, and hates, an iron physique, a
brain, ambitions, and a force unique in the history of ^he
March and of their race.
In 1816 Otto's parents moved to Kniephof, the chief
of a group of family estates, inherited in that year, and at
Kniephof in Prussian Pomerania the little Otto grew up.
It was the Paradise of his boyhood, and there the heredi-
tary Bismarck link with the soil was forged. Towns and
the life of towns neither the lad, nor the ambassador, nor
the Imperial Chancellor ever liked. Streets were a prison,
townsfolk an unpleasant riddle. Whatever else changed
in Otto von Bismarck, the passion for rural nature--the
hunger for the land and the life of the land, forests, moor,
the blue spaces of an open sky, the wind across the pas-
tures, the hard-bitten men who lived, worked, and hunted
on the land--never changed. Pictures and sculpture
do not figure in his letters: he confessed when he was an
old man that once, only once, he had entered the Berlin
Museum; of books there is singularly little; there is
much of good food and good wine; but the earth and its
unceasing pageantry of beauty are never forgotten. Dawn
and sunset, the maturing sunshine of midday, snow under
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN
moonlight, mountains, crags, and wooded dales--these
things he always saw because he felt their message, their
contact with, or memory of, his own home. The grey-
haired Chancellor, with his wolf-hounds at his heels,
striding with the watchful eye of a master amongst the
sunlit- glades of his oaks and beeches at Varan or Fried-
richsruhe, was happier in his freedom from the fetters of
the State than the boy on holiday who galloped his pony
over the monotonous demesne of Kniephof, stalked snipe
and wild duck, or hunted hares through deep snow.
Otto's education was of the conventional German
humanistic and literary type. At seven years old he was
sent to a preparatory school (Plamann's Institute), and at
twelve passed on to a . gymnasium. At sixteen, as became
a young noble and Protestant, he was confirmed by
Schleiermacher, at the height of his celebrity, whose
brief injunction: 'Whatever you do, do it with all your
heart and as from the Lord,' is said to have made a deep
impression. In 1832 he entered the University of
Gottingen, where he spent two years, followed by one at
the University of Berlin. Instinct and tradition suggested
the army as a profession, but his mother apparently
desired a civil career for this passionate, self-willed and
robust son ;* whether because she feared the life of an
officer, or divined the power in her beloved Otto, is un-
certain; but she had her way, and after passing the neces-
sary examinations he entered the civil service on its
judicial side, and was attached for duty at the fashionable
Aix-la-Chapelle and at Berlin. One year had to be given
to military service, and this he spent with the Rifles of the
Guard (Garde-J'dger).
Until 1839, when he lost his mother, abruptly ter-
minated his State employment and, owing to financial
difficulties of his family, took over with his brother Bern-
hard the management of the family properties, his life
had shown little indication either of ambitions or excep-
tional abilities. As a university student, though not as
idle as legend subsequently pictured, he had failed to find
in academic studies either intellectual inspiration or prac-
tical utility. Heeren's lectures made some impression,
U. OF M. FLINT CC\ : FGE LIBRARY
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? 52
BISMARCK
but neither Dahlmann, the glory of G6ttingen, nor
Savigny at Berlin can be reckoned as formative influences
in his education as they were in the training of his con-
temporaries Windthorst and Beust. The truth is that
then, as throughout his career, Bismarck revolted against
discipleship or subordination of any kind. Life was the
only teacher from whom he was willing to learn, and the
lessons of life he hammered out for himself, and he refused
to take them ready-made. He joined a famous duelling
corps, the Hanoverana. Duelling, beer-drinking, and the
riotous escapades of undergraduate youth, provided an
outlet for his exuberant physical powers. In the punish-
ment book of the university his name figures more than
once. Friends he made in plenty, three in particular--
Moritz von Blanckenburg, Motley, the American historian,
and Roon, twelve years his senior. Little did either guess
what the latter friendship would signify for the history of
Prussia. There is a story that in 1832 he made a bet with
an American student that Germany would be unified in
twenty years; but if he made the bet, he lost it. Forty,
not twenty, years hence he could have asked from the
Wilhelmstrasse for repayment. He detested and neglected
his duties as a civil servant. The career of 'the animal
armed with a pen' behind closed windows and under
the orders of domineering, exacting, or ill-bred superiors,
stirred his Junker pride and independence to mutiny.
At Aix-la-Chapelle, crowded with fashionable pleasure-
seekers of all nations, he plunged into gambling, debt, and
dissipation. For four months he broke away altogether,
travelled to Wiesbaden and Switzerland, fell in love with
a pretty English girl, but whether he broke with her or
she with him is uncertain. The sap was running strongly
upwards, and in the dawn of superb physical vigour Bis-
marck, like many, sought in physical satisfaction an ano-
dyne for an incurable unrest. 'Yesterday,' he wrote to his
wife in 1851, ' I was in Wiesbaden. May it please God to
fill with His clear and strong wine this vessel in which then
the champagne of youth uselessly foamed and left stale
dregs. ' Neither politics nor religion came to his aid.
He had ceased to pray; he was practically an agnostic
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 53
with a vague Pantheism simmering in a brain that de-
manded positive reality. Republicanism as a political
creed had appealed to him, but the democratic excesses
at the Hambacher Fest (1832) disgusted him with radical-
ism and all its works. Prussia had no public life to offer
him. Service in the bureaucracy of an autocratic crown
and the army were the only two professions available, and
he had rejected the one and was too old now for the other.
He fell back gladly on the career of a landed proprietor.
