An understanding
with France would first secure the benevolent neutrality
of the most important Continental Power, secondly, pre-
vent a coalition between France and Russia, and thirdly,
leave Prussia with undiminished resources to settle her
relations with Austria.
with France would first secure the benevolent neutrality
of the most important Continental Power, secondly, pre-
vent a coalition between France and Russia, and thirdly,
leave Prussia with undiminished resources to settle her
relations with Austria.
Robertson - Bismarck
Hitherto, no one but 'Austria' dared smoke at
the meetings; but Bismarck lit his cigar at once, and before
long even the petty 'States followed his example. Re-
ceived by Count von Thurn in his shirt-sleeves, Bismarck
pulled off his coat. 'I agree,' he said, 'it is a hot day. '
These were trifles, but precious trifles. What was more
important was the thoroughness with which he mastered
his new profession. As with agriculture so with diplo-
macy, he was determined to penetrate to the heart of the
business. 'No human being,' he wrote to his wife, ' not
even the most malicious sceptic of a democrat, would
believe the. charlatanry and imposture hidden in this
Diplomacy. ' His power of work was inexhaustible; his
physique responded to any strain he chose to put on it,
and his brains were far superior to those of his rivals. It
is clear from his official reports, written with a verve, vivid-
ness, and command of the subject-matter that have made
them classical documents in German history, and from
his private correspondence, that he was reading, studying
and reflecting on much outside his official duties.
Frankfurt was not an education in itself; most of Bis-
marck's contemporaries there learned little that they did
not know already, and most of which was useless, or forgot
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? 8+
BISMARCK
what they had already learned; but Bismarck by self-
imposed toil turned the sand of routine into the gold
of political experience. He studied everything--men,
women, machinery. His dispatches are filled with vivid
vignettes--penetrating miniature and character sketches
of the diplomatists who made the Frankfurt world--de-
scriptions of a ball or a reception, in which he will note how
the celebrated actress, Henrietta Sontag, now the Countess
Rossi, has improved her face-powder since he saw her in
Berlin; or, with brief scorn, point out that the morals of
this or that figure in their society offends his German
standards. Bismarck knew that whatever the malicious
gossip of idle and irresponsible tongues might say of him-
self or his political methods his private life and personal
probity were invulnerable. His zeal and industry set him
tracking down Austrian intrigues in hidden bypaths and
the green-rooms of the political stage. It was at Frank-
furt that he learned to look for the ubiquitous and secret
hand of clerical and ultramontane wire-pullers, and to
understand how public opinion could be manipulated
through newspapers, if skilfully worked. This side of his
activities laid bare many sordid secrets, and the acquisition
and the experience weakened his belief--never very
strong--in human nature. The marked contempt of later
years for the sincerity of public opinion, for newspapers,
for journalists, who could always be bought, for all the
dark magic of an official press bureau, for diplomatic re-
connaissances by the circulation of lies, for lashing up
public sentiment by dictated paragraphs inserted in
avowedly independent journals--the whole sinister and
dirty stock-in-trade that exploited the servility and cun-
ning of a Busch or subsidised with appropriated funds a
Counter-Reptile-Press--all this can be traced to his
Frankfurt period. The vengeance that a policy of reality
--Realpolitik--exacts from its disciples is the necessity of
using an unclean world as it would use you, and of assum-
ing that the psychology of a nation is that of Tammany
Hall. Yet unquestionably as Bismarck was tainted and
degraded by the development of the coarser and more
brutal fibres in his autocratic personality, he never him-
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 85
self mistook intrigue for diplomacy, nor made the coining
of phrases a substitute for a policy. He evinced at Frank-
furt one of the most striking and permanent of his char-
acteristics. Passionate by nature, with a nervous system
that strung itself beyond the pitch of every affair or crisis,
he always remained uncannily cool in thought. His brain
worked as if packed in ice, when feeling within was red-hot,
and the words were ready to flow like lava.
He enjoyed his life, and he enjoyed his work, which
sharpened and heightened his physical appetites. Motley,
his Gdttingen friend, has described the large and generous
geniality of the Bismarcks' house in Frankfurt--the un-
assuming but lavish hospitality, the freedom of the house
where the guest became a member of the family, incited to
call for meat and drink in any quantities at any hour, the
children running in and out or sprawling on the floor,
books, papers, music, flowers, scattered about, the hostess
smiling and self-possessed, and her lord striding in and
out, sitting up half the night at his desk, yet as alert and
buoyant as if he had slept the clock round, always ready
to eat, drink, smoke, discuss politics or the merits of North
or South German cattle, dream through a Beethoven
sonata, or swim in the summer moonlight in the Main.
In a word, the German domesticities set in the atmosphere
of the grand manner. Bismarck did not have to pose in
order to be the aristocrat who belonged to a class born and
bred to command.
His travels were partly official, but largely voluntary.
In three years he saw most parts of non-Prussian Germany.
We find him at Darmstadt, Cassel, Hanover, Dresden and
Munich; he was twice in Vienna, stayed in Ostend, bathed
on the North German coasts, toured in Northern Italy,
and paid two visits (in 1855 and in 1857) to Paris. He
invariably met the men who had made, or were about
to make, the Europe of his day, and formed his judgment
on their ability and nerve. Gortschakov, Beust, Bach,
Schmerling, Rechberg, the Duke of Augustenburg, Prince
William at Coblenz, Persigny, Napoleon 1n. , and many
others came into the record. He presented himself to
the ex-chancellor, Metternich, at Johannisberg, and the
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BISMARCK
Princess notes both her own and her husband's pleasure
at the wit and sound Conservative principles of the tall and
soldierly Prussian noble. It was fitting that the veteran
Austrian who had known all the great men of a wonderful
past should place the wasted hand of the old diplomacy
in the relentless grasp of the new. In that polished
drawing-room, haunted by the ghosts of vanished empires
and the fair women whom its owner had loved and lost,
the Imperial Chancellor to come paid his homage to the
Imperial Chancellor fallen and an exile, and listened with
cynical deference to the political wisdom of ' a garrulous
old gentleman. ' Cavour was the one European statesman
of the first rank whom Bismarck never met. An Imagin-
ary Dialogue between the Minister-President of Sardinia
and the Prussian Plenipotentiary at Frankfurt, with
Austria and Liberalism as its theme, would be a fitting
tribute to Landor. But Napoleon in. he had already
come to know at the Tuileries. They were to meet often,
these two, between 1855 and 1870, and for the last time
at the weaver's cottage on the Donchery road on the grev
morrow after Sedan.
Bismarck's interest in the home politics of Prussia
Vincke, and presently declined re-election for the Lower
House; and though in 1854 he was created by the King a
member of the Upper House (Herrenhaus), he did not
often attend its debates. The growing alienation from
the creed and methods of Kreuzzeitung and Gerlach Con-
servatism completed his reluctance to waste his nights on
countless cigars in stuffy trains to and from Berlin. Not
in Prussia under Manteuffel were the lessons and the
realities of life to be found. One official task after another
was laid upon his shoulders. He endeavoured, but with-
out success, to persuade the Diet to accept and guarantee
the Protocol of 1852, which settled for ten years the fate
of Schleswig-Holstein, and which Bismarck himself was
later to fling into the waste-paper basket; he strove to
interest the Diet in the creation of a German Navy, and
the effort ended in the sale by auction of the ships in
existence; he wrestled with the question of a Federal Army
steadily evaporated.
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 87
and was defeated by the fear of Prussia and the jealousy
of Austria and her allies. The renewal of the Zoll-
verein brought him into the centre of the German
problem.
Austria, under the able guidance of Briick, aimed at
either securing her admittance into the Customs Union,
which Prussia had formed, or at persuading the Southern
Union to break away and unite with the Austrian Empire.
It was the ever-recurring riddle in an economic form of
German organisation. Austria in the economic, no less
than in the political, sphere demanded that the whole of
the Habsburg dominions must be included or she would
break up the inner unity achieved or demanded by
Prussia. The economic creed of the protectionist Austrian
Empire conflicted both with the free-trade policy of the
Zollverein and the tightening bonds between the Southern
and Northern Unions. Bismarck had the unravelling of
the tangle, and at Vienna he met the Austrian ministers
in their lair. It was his first struggle in big affairs, and he
won his first victory. The Austrians intended to isolate
and then coerce Prussia, by seducing the South from its
economic union with the North. Bismarck met the
Austrian menace with a courteous, but firm defiance.
Prussia would maintain the Zollverein at all costs. The
Southern Union was thereby left to choose between the
Northern Customs Union and Austria. Bismarck cor-
rectly reckoned that economic self-interest and not senti-
ment would decide the issue. Prussia had more to offer
to South Germany than Austria; she was strong enough
to stand on her own feet. Headquarters at Berlin were
timid, nervous, and irresolute. Bismarck brushed the
charge of disloyalty and anti-German separatism aside;
even if the charge were true, which it was not, the interest
of Prussia was the decisive criterion. This plain attempt
to sacrifice Prussia to Austrian manufacturers and agricul-
turists, and to rob her of the political influence behind the
Zollverein, must be defeated. And it was. Prussia made
one concession. Twelve years hence the arrangements
were to be reconsidered. In 1863, Bismarck was Minister-
President, and the power to determine Prussian policy was
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? 88
BISMARCK
in the hands, not of a Manteuffel, but of Austria's most
relentless foe.
The whole affair set Bismarck thinking with renewed
energy on cardinal problems--the principles of Prussian
foreign policy, the meaning and consequences of Austrian
ambitions, the relations of Prussia with the middle and
petty States, the defects of the Federal Diet as an organ-
isation for Germany. Under the stimulus of events he
was exploring and appreciating the European frame-
work, the new groupings of the Powers, the new forces
manifestly at work. Facts, and reflections always drove
him back on one supreme question: Was it possible for
Prussia to co-operate loyally with Austria? And if it
were not, what must be the consequences of a rupture for
both States?
There is no need to question the sincerity of Bismarck's
desire in 1851 to maintain an alliance between Austria and
Prussia for common ends. The policy and the principles
of the alliance satisfied his political creed and outlook;
antagonism to, and a breach with, Austria involved the
abandonment of a traditional creed and instincts, estrange-
ment from the friendships and ideals of his manhood, a
drastic and dislocating rearrangement of his political faith,
and the patient, painful, and perilous groping after a new
policy in ah unmapped and shifting future. We can catch
in the more personal documents many glimpses of doubt
and genuine regret. It would be so easy to renounce
intellectual independence, remain an obedient and un-
questioning servant of the monarchy, take the appropriate
reward for obedience in ribbons and stars, or retire to
Schonhausen, and under the blue sky of summer or the
wintry sleets cast off this festering world of politicians and
intrigues and live and die a Bismarck as his ancestors had
done. Opportunity, said Disraeli, is more powerful even
than conquerors or prophets. A demomc time-spirit
moulded Bismarck's environment and his character. 'I
am not a man,' pronounced Napoleon, 'I am a force. '
Bismarck hacked out his daily way, because he was a fierce
and proud Prussian, and because he was also becoming a
great German. In the air all round him the German
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 89
atmosphere vibrated with indefinable national aspirations,
and his spirit responded unconsciously to the spiritual
inspiration that fired his heart and steeled his brain. And
it was the decree of Providence. He believed in a God
Whose will ordered the world and chose the human instru-
ments of His purpose.
The Crimean War was a disconcerting searchlight in
an obscure night. The German intellectuals, no less than
the German courts, were bewildered: for in every party
sentiment was in antagonism to principles. The Conser-
vatives were torn between their hatred of the crowned
Jacobin at Paris, their distrust of Great Britain, which
had yielded to democratic reform, their horror of a rup-
ture with Conservative and Legitimist Russia, and their
anxiety to be the ally in shining armour of Austria, the
other great pillar in the Holy Alliance of the Three Mon-
archies. War on the side of Austria meant war with
Russia and a hateful alliance with the Liberal West.
Nationalism clamoured for settling with France and active
support to Austria, the champion of Germanism (Deutsch-
tum), but the opponent of nationalist rights and ideals.
The Liberals, as passionately anti-French as Conservatives
or Nationalists, could not forget Frankfurt, Vilagds, and
Olmiitz; Russia was reaction and autocracy combined;
yet Austria placed a permanent veto on unification and
constitutional government. The Prussian Court and
government were in the sorest straits. Hohenzollern and
Romanov were linked by the closest dynastic ties: a
breach with Russia imperilled the eastern frontier, a
breach with Austria imperilled the southern frontier; it
involved ' a family civil war' (Bruderkreig) in Germany;
yet refusal to join France and Great Britain would be fol-
lowed by a blockade of the North German coast by the
British fleet on its way to the Baltic. The ' Watch on the
Rhine' was met by the demand for a Watch on the Danube
and Vistula.
In this chaos of conflicting opinions, beneath which
surged the demand of a Germany, conscious of its im-
potence to make its dynasties obey a national will which
had no organs of expression, and thirsting to be a power
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? 90
BISMARCK
in the world like other nations, Bismarck grew cooler as
German sentiment developed a heated fretfulness. His
diagnosis cut right across all the parties and creeds. There
was only one question: What was Prussia's interest,
analysed without reference to any obligations of traditional
honour, dynastic family feeling, or sentimental likes or
dislikes of this nation or that? Prussia had no interest in
the Danubian principalities or the Balkans. Austria had,
but that was Austria's affair; and Austria was working to
involve Prussia in an Austrian quarrel, success in which
would bring all the credit and the profits to Austria and
nothing to Prussia but Austrian gratitude, a more insidious
danger than her open enmity. Prussia was really asked
to strengthen Austria's power and weaken her own in the
Diet. Why should Prussia break with Russia at Austria's
bidding? The English blockade was moonshine. Eng-
land was not so foolish as to drive Prussia into an offensive
alliance with Russia, which would compel the British ally,
France, to divert reinforcements for the Crimea to the
Rhine. * But France meant to attack Germany. ' If
Napoleon attacked Prussia, the Prussian army would see
to that, and France would not attack Germany. Why
not bring ' the man of sin' to terms? The relations of
States were determined by interests and not by misin-
terpreted and irrelevant ethical considerations. Utilise
the embarrassments of your friends above all to secure
solid advantage for yourself: do not let those embarrass-
ments be a bad reason for sharing in them and adding to
your own. In a word, let Prussia remain rigidly neutral:
hold fast to a real friend, Russia, and by skilful diplomacy
improve her relations with France and let Austria go--
not to the Devil, but to Frankfurt. The indispensability
of Prussia was precisely the opportunity for making
Austria pay Prussia's price.
Bismarck could only argue and advise; he could not
secure the adoption of his advice. His fear that his
government would be coerced into war on behalf of Austria
against Russia, and thereby mortgage its future and free-
dom of action beyond all chance of liquidation, caused him
many sleepless nights. 'The smart and seaworthy Prus-
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
9>>
sian frigate,' as he expressed it, ' was to tow in perpetuity
the water-logged and dry-rotted Austrian battleship. '
While Bismarck argued, Prussia vacillated irresolute,
yet fiery, with the sword half drawn, threatening every
State and giving ground to every minister who threatened
her. She was saved for the time from her tardy and
reluctant adhesion to the Austrian cause by the course of
events, and not by the amateurish inaction and fear of the
Prussian ministers. She earned neither the gratitude of
friends nor the respect of her foes; and when all was over
Russia and Austria informed her with contemptuous
politeness, that they would use their respective good offices
to secure her an invitation to the Congress which would
settle the affairs of Europe at Paris in 1856. Manteuffel,
who represented Prussia at the Congress, amused the diplo-
matists by his air of the poor relation included at the last
moment, because there was a vacant chair, and it might as
well be filled by Prussia as' by any other State. The next
great Congress after 1856 which settled the Near East was
at Berlin in 1878, presided over by Bismarck as Chancellor
of a German Empire.
Bismarck's sketch of a policy and explanation of the
principles underlying it pained and angered his friends.
He threshed it out at length with Prince William at Cob-
lenz--in three years to become the King of Prussia--and
not only failed to convince him, but filled him with sus-
picion of the adviser's sanity and loyalty. The Prince, as
in 1851, was ready to fight because the honour of Prussia
was involved: to leave Austria in the lurch was desertion;
France was an irreconcilable national enemy; Napoleon
was a Jacobin disguised as a sham Caesar. Bismarck's
advice, he pronounced, was not that of a statesman but of
an ignorant schoolboy.
That ignorant schoolboy was destined to have many
arguments with the simple soldier before he succeeded in
winning the surrender of the royal conscience; and the
respect which with Bismarck deepened in thirty years into
a sincere homage, began at Coblenz with this sharp
antagonism. William of Hohenzollern was not a great
intellect, but he was a man, and he had the strength that
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? 92
BISMARCK
character and simplicity of aim alone can give. In
Bismarck's eyes that quality atoned for many defects.
Independence he could both hate and love, but it always
earned his respect.
Bismarck's ideas were slowly consolidating into a co-
herent system. The issues raised by the Austrian war
were disentangling in his thought three cardinal and
governing considerations--the indispensability of an en-
tente with Russia, the necessity of coming to an under-
standing with France, and the impossibility of co-operation
with Austria. To adopt Napoleonic language, in the
strategy of her diplomacy Prussia was to manoeuvre from
a fixed point, and that fixed point was Russia. Prussia
could safely pivot on that. Central Europe was her
theatre of operations, and movements outside that decisive
theatre were eccentric or quixotic.
An understanding
with France would first secure the benevolent neutrality
of the most important Continental Power, secondly, pre-
vent a coalition between France and Russia, and thirdly,
leave Prussia with undiminished resources to settle her
relations with Austria. Bismarck did not as yet contem-
plate an open rupture, still less war with Austria. He was
perfectly ready to support Austria, provided that she would
give guarantees, and treat Prussia as an equal and not as a
rather larger Bavaria. He was no less clear that the tradi-
tional system continued by Manteuffel involved a humili-
ating and crippling subordination of Prussia to Austria's
needs and supremacy.
These ideas of policy necessitated a revision of principles
of political action, very clearly revealed in his remarkable
correspondence with Gerlach. The trite image of the
hen in consternation at the chicken fledged beneath her
protecting wings now taking to the water because it was
a duckling, is a faint picture of the pain and indignation
with which Gerlach discovered the apostasy of his disciple.
It was easy for Gerlach to concur in the necessity of an
entente with Russia; but when it was plain that the result
of the alliance was to be an entente with France and anta-
gonism to Austria, he recoiled with horror. 'Cynical'
and 'unprincipled' were colourless adjectives for such a
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 93
policy. The stability of European society, and of Prussia
in particular, depended, in Gerlach's view, on legitimate
monarchical rule, and on the maintenance throughout
Europe of Conservative principles which were of universal
validity; the moral duty of combating ' the Revolution'
was a necessity of existence, no less than an obedience to
divine law and authority. Austria represented every
sound principle as clearly as Russia: France was the
negation of everything sacred and solid--she was 'the
Revolution,' with Napoleon crowned on a throne picked
from the Jacobin gutters and placed on his head by per-
jury and bloodshed. How could it be statesmanship and
right--for a Prussian above all, loyal to his sovereign by
the grace of God and freed from the superstitions of
Liberalism--to desert and impugn Austria and to seek for
an unholy partnership at Paris?
Bismarck took up the challenge. In the tactics of
statesmanship, interests, he maintained, were more im-
portant than principles: policy demanded flexibility and
not rigidity of principles. Understandings were simply
temporary bargains. Napoleon was not so bad as he was
painted. Austria was a great deal worse than she pro-
fessed to be. A bargain with Napoleon was not a surrender
to the Revolution, but an exploitation of it for Prussia's
interest. And, to secure Prussia's interest, if an alliance
with the Devil were desirable, it should be made with a
light conscience. All this high-faluting talk about Conser-
vative principles of universal validity was irrelevant and
unreal. There were no such principles, Conservative,
Liberal or Revolutionary. Reason of state--for Bismarck
the reason of the Prussian State--was the one abiding
reality in a world of uncontrollable facts and fluctuating
situations. The true statesman must be prepared to be
Conservative at home and Liberal abroad, or vice versa;
to be a Jacobin in Paris and an Absolutist at Petersburg, if
necessary, and must seek to wring out of every opportunity
the maximum of advantage for his country, otherwise he
was a doctrinaire or a bungler, a professor or a bureau-
cratic automaton.
He invited Gerlach to study history impartially. The
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BISMARCK
Conservative interpretation of the origin and evolution
of legitimism and revolution would not stand the test of
facts. All thrones and forms of government were in origin
revolutionary or founded on usurpation. Even the Prus-
sian monarchy had usurped the rights of those it had
dispossessed. Legitimism was a new-fangled doctrine,
created as a result of the Revolution of 1789, to meet the
conditions of a once existent but now vanished situation.
It was this obstinate obsession of unverifiable assumptions
and this irrational refusal to recognise realities which had
ruined Conservatism in the past, and would ruin it in the
future. It was time for Prussia to free herself from the
fetters of a system which clogged her independence and
to return to the sounder system of Frederick who had made
himself and his State great. If it was right for Frederick
to ally with France and withstand Austria in season and
out of season, because Prussia's interest required it, the
same reason of State and imperishable interest no less
required it to-day.
The correspondence, in short, widened, while it demon-
strated, the gulf between the old Conservatism and the
new. Bismarck had indeed travelled far from the stand-
point of his youth: Gerlach had remained unchanged.
And Gerlach was correct in his assertion, that master and
disciple no longer spoke the same language. Bismarck
was content to leave it at that.
The German problem slowly intertwined itself into the
problem of Prussia's true foreign policy. Bismarck's
maturing thought, continually reinforced by freshets of
experience, groped its way through the thickets of youthful
prejudice. The process can be traced in the State papers
(confirmed by his letters) which pressed upon his govern-
ment Bismarck's weighed and tested conclusions.
In 1851 he wrote: 'I do not believe that the Federal
Diet in its present form can be the last word in our politics;
rather I see in it only a shell within which can develop all
the sound and practical elements of the union (Erfurt)
policy, a shell that will drop off when the kernel is ripe. '
In 1853, he pointed out that 'unless Austria renounced
the policy of Schwarzenberg . . . sooner or later the
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
federal wagon, pulled by the Prussian horse forwards and
by the Austrian horse backwards, would go to pieces. '
From 1853 onwards dispatch after dispatch emphasised
'the restless effort of Austria to compel Prussia by the
organisation of a majority of votes in the Diet' to accept
the will of Vienna. Prussia was driven to a defensive
attitude. In the notable 'splendid report,''Prachtbericht,'
of 1856 he wrote: 'The Emperor Francis Joseph is not
master of his lands and subjects in the same measure as our
all gracious Lord. . . . Austria on the defensive I consider
weak, and at the first successful stroke of a rival the whole
of the internal artificial fabric of the centralised scribbling
bureaucracy of Bach and Buol would tumble in like a pack
of cards . . . the traditional policy of Austria and its
jealousy of us cannot be removed, and I would trust the
old fox in his new coat as little as in his summer bristles.
. . . I will express my conviction that in no long time we
shall have to fight for our existence against Austria, and
that it is not in our power to avoid the fight, because the
course of events in Germany admits of no other develop-
ment. '
'Austria,' he wrote in 1857, 'does not wish us to in-
crease our importance in Germany, and England cannot
favour our development either on the sea or in trade. In
politics no one acts unselfishly, unless it is his interest to
do so. ' 'Your Excellency is aware,' he wrote in 1858,
'that the Federal Diet and our disadvantageous position
in it is Austria's best weapon . . . the whole of my seven
years' service at Frankfurt has been an unbroken struggle
with efforts of every kind and the relentless attempts to
exploit the Federal Diet as an instrument to aggrandise
Austria and humiliate Prussia. ' 'We must,' he urged,
'establish a Customs Parliament . . . our Parliament and
press must discuss tariff policy without reserve from the
Prussian point of view; it will thus divert the exhausted
attention of Germany to itself, and our Prussian Parliament
will become a power in Germany. ' From Petersburg in
1859 he wrote to Schleinitz: 'The federal machinery in
normal times is an oppressive, in crises a dangerous, hand-
cuff for Prussia. . . . I believe we should take up the chal-
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BISMARCK
lenge and consider it no misfortune if we found in a
resolution of the majority at Frankfurt . . . a breach of
the Federal treaties. ' This is precisely what Bismarck did
in 1866. 'The word "German" for "Prussian" I would
gladly see inscribed on our banners, if we had first a closer
and practical unity with our other fellow-Germans than
hitherto; it loses all its charm if it is employed as now to
support the Federal bond. . . . I see in our Federal relations
a Prussian malady which sooner or later will have to be
healed by iron and fire, if we do not in good time find
another cure for it. '
In 1861 he wrote: 'The system of the solidarity of the
Conservative interests of all countries is a dangerous fiction,
so long as there is not the most complete and honourable
reciprocity. Pursued by Prussia alone, it is pure Don
Quixotism which weakens our King and his government in
the execution of its proper duty. It brings us to the abso-
lutely unhistorical, godless and lawless swindle of sove-
reignty in the German princes, which employs the Federal
system as its pedestal, and with which the European
Powers play to make it the darling of the Prussian Conser-
vative party . . . we protect foreign prerogatives with
more obstinacy than our own, and get enthusiastic for the
paltry sovereignties created by Napoleon and guaranteed
by Metternich. . . . So long as the folly of the present
Federal system lasts, which is simply a forcing-house of
dangerous and republican party struggles . . . we need a
stronger consolidation of German arms as much as our
daily bread; we need a new and plastic establishment in
the sphere of tariff policy to protect our material interests
against the disadvantages arising from the unnatural con-
figuration of our German frontiers . . . Moreover I
cannot see why we should so coyly shrink from the idea of
popular representation alike in the Federal League, the
Tariff, and the Union Parliament; an institution which
has a legitimate validity in every German State, which we
Conservatives in Prussia could not dispense with, cannot
be resisted as revolutionary. '1
1 The student who wishes to master Bismarck's views should study in Preusien in
Bundestag the dispatches of the following dates:--November 19, i8jt, April 23,
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
The substance of Bismarck's thought and principles at
this stage can be summarised. Prussia must find her own
solution of the German problem; she must combine a
satisfaction of the claims of Germany with the satisfaction
of the claims of the historic and characteristic Prussian
State. A radical reform of the Diet brought about by
Prussian initiative must be such as to guarantee beyond
dispute the supremacy of Prussia in Germany and her
position as a great Power. There must be an end to the
system by which Austria could manipulate the middle and
petty States into a permanent and hostile majority in the
Federal Diet, and by which kingdoms or landgraviates, of
inferior extent, population, military and economic re-
sources, voted down Prussia, and ' mediatised'1 her. The
root of the mischief lay in the pretensions of dynastic
particularism to political equality with Prussia and Austria,
based on a 4 swindling ' and mushroom theory of legitimist
sovereignty. Co-operation with Austria, as Austria inter-
preted it, was impossible. In the interest of Germany
and of Prussia, Austria must be resisted. Prussian foreign
policy and the German problem were inseparable elements
1852, June 18, 1852, January 13, 1853, August 9, 1853, November 14, 1853,
February 15, 1854, February ", *%S5, April 26, 1856, May 12, 1857, June 2,
1857, March 14, 1858, April 10, 1858. They are all too long to be quoted
in txttnso, and they should be compared with the Baden Denkschrift, printed
in Bismarck Jahrbuch, iii. 193.
1 'Mediatised. '--This term so frequently occurs in Bismarck's writings and
German historians that, as there is no single English equivalent, it is desirable
to explain it for those not familiar with its technical and derivative meaning.
Technically, 'to mediatise' was a term derived from the old Holy Roman
Empire of the German nation which came to an end in 1806. The sovereign
princedoms of that Empire--whether ecclesiastical or secular--were held to be
immediate vassals of the Emperor. To 'mediatise' them meant, therefore, to
deprive them of the status of being immediate vassals, and to reduce them to the
position of being ' mediate," or secondary vassals, i. e. with one or more author-
ities between them and the supreme fount of imperial power--a process equiva-
lent to reduction from being a tenant-in-chiet to subordinate tenancy. By
degrees the term 'to mediatise' or 'mediatisation' derivatively came to imply
an act or a result by which a sovereign prince or state retained a titular inde-
pendence, but lost, or was deprived of, the rights and powers of sovereignty.
Hence, in Bismarck's time, the term was commonly used of a result by which
a state lost its true political independence and initiative and became dependent
on some power or powers, sovereign in theory and in fact. 'Mediatisation,'
therefore, broadly implied the retention of a titular sovereignty which conflicted
with the practical political dependence of the 'sovereign' on other sovereigns
or states.
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BISMARCK
of a single and larger unity. The benevolent neutrality
of France must be secured; with the friendship of Russia
and the goodwill of Napoleon, Prussia could throw her
individual strength into the decisive theatre--Germany
and Central Europe--concentrate, in short, on the over-
throwal of Austria in Germany.
These were conclusions calculated to dismay Conser-
vatives and Liberals alike, for they challenged the dearest
traditions of both parties. Bismarck did not either then
or subsequently speak out the whole of his mind. He did
not wish to alarm friends Or cause his opponents to blas-
pheme unnecessarily. Much was deliberately hidden in
his heart. But much also he could not have spoken out,
for he saw, and he recognised it, through a glass darkly.
'The longer I live,' he said later, ' the more incalculable
the future in politics proves to be. ' There are no indica-
tions of how or when or by whom precisely this programme
could be realised. Not a word of war or annexations. It
is the quintessence of his statecraft that the opportunity
would create the means; that in policy as in war a lucid
comprehension of ends was the one indispensable pre-
requisite, and that the major and minor tactics must be
settled by the situation of the moment and the character
and disposition of the enemy's forces. Success would come
to the side that made the fewest mistakes. Opportunity
was everything. The right stroke at the right moment
would give the decision. A lost opportunity was worse
than a defeat, for it implied a failure of judgment in the
commander. No tactical skill could compensate for in-
ferior intelligence in the supreme direction, and the
persistent will to persevere once the policy had been
made.
Bismarck's letters and memoranda are like Beethoven's
notebooks. In both we can trace a mind at work, the
patient elaboration of an idea, the jotting down of flashes
of insight which in due time may be developed into a com-
pleted composition. Some, however, are never worked
out; time and life failed, or the idea failed because the
mood that gave it birth never returned: others give us
the genesis of a perfected scheme: others merely indicate
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
a thought, a premonition of what will come but in another
form. Genius is talking aloud to itself in the workshop of
the human spirit, and it is the prerogative of genius to be
fertile in contradictions and to nourish its strength on in-
consistencies: and the winged word and glory of emotion
may never soar beyond that free, inner mansion of person-
ality, never carry its message beyond the chambers of
feeling that divide, into the kingdom of action that unites,
all thought.
Bismarck had divined the real weakness of Austria--the
vulnerability of her European position, the competition in
her councils between the concentrated egoism of the
dynasty and the dissipated interests of the Empire, the
administrative dry rpt, the lack of vision and the absence
of moral imagination in her ministers, and the insoluble
antagonism between the ambition for supremacy in
Germany and her historic claims in Italy and Hungary.
No less had he divined the strength of Prussia, economic,
political, and military. Prussia so far had been handi-
capped by slavish adherence to a false tradition, by a sick
ancf irresolute sovereign, and by ministers whose wills and
courage were as weak as their intellectual powers. She
had neither developed her strength nor unified it under a
driving control. There already floated in Bismarck's mind
the conception of a reorganised Central Europe in which
Prussia should have superseded Austria in Germany, and
the Austrian Empire would reconsolidate itself as a
Danubian State between the twin capitals of Vienna and
Buda-Pesth. 'Un maitre des indiscretions savantes,' as
M. de la Gorce felicitously terms him, Bismarck was con-
tinually expressing ideas which ministers and diplomatists
regarded as a bad jest or the gaucherie of an incurable
amateur, but which were really sincere and intended to
probe a difficulty, or indicate an end. At Vienna he said
outright in 1864 that Austria should transfer its centre of
gravity to Buda-Pesth. 'At Berlin,' he told Rechberg,' we
Germans do not consider Vienna as a German city, and
what happens at Vienna as related to Germany.
the meetings; but Bismarck lit his cigar at once, and before
long even the petty 'States followed his example. Re-
ceived by Count von Thurn in his shirt-sleeves, Bismarck
pulled off his coat. 'I agree,' he said, 'it is a hot day. '
These were trifles, but precious trifles. What was more
important was the thoroughness with which he mastered
his new profession. As with agriculture so with diplo-
macy, he was determined to penetrate to the heart of the
business. 'No human being,' he wrote to his wife, ' not
even the most malicious sceptic of a democrat, would
believe the. charlatanry and imposture hidden in this
Diplomacy. ' His power of work was inexhaustible; his
physique responded to any strain he chose to put on it,
and his brains were far superior to those of his rivals. It
is clear from his official reports, written with a verve, vivid-
ness, and command of the subject-matter that have made
them classical documents in German history, and from
his private correspondence, that he was reading, studying
and reflecting on much outside his official duties.
Frankfurt was not an education in itself; most of Bis-
marck's contemporaries there learned little that they did
not know already, and most of which was useless, or forgot
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? 8+
BISMARCK
what they had already learned; but Bismarck by self-
imposed toil turned the sand of routine into the gold
of political experience. He studied everything--men,
women, machinery. His dispatches are filled with vivid
vignettes--penetrating miniature and character sketches
of the diplomatists who made the Frankfurt world--de-
scriptions of a ball or a reception, in which he will note how
the celebrated actress, Henrietta Sontag, now the Countess
Rossi, has improved her face-powder since he saw her in
Berlin; or, with brief scorn, point out that the morals of
this or that figure in their society offends his German
standards. Bismarck knew that whatever the malicious
gossip of idle and irresponsible tongues might say of him-
self or his political methods his private life and personal
probity were invulnerable. His zeal and industry set him
tracking down Austrian intrigues in hidden bypaths and
the green-rooms of the political stage. It was at Frank-
furt that he learned to look for the ubiquitous and secret
hand of clerical and ultramontane wire-pullers, and to
understand how public opinion could be manipulated
through newspapers, if skilfully worked. This side of his
activities laid bare many sordid secrets, and the acquisition
and the experience weakened his belief--never very
strong--in human nature. The marked contempt of later
years for the sincerity of public opinion, for newspapers,
for journalists, who could always be bought, for all the
dark magic of an official press bureau, for diplomatic re-
connaissances by the circulation of lies, for lashing up
public sentiment by dictated paragraphs inserted in
avowedly independent journals--the whole sinister and
dirty stock-in-trade that exploited the servility and cun-
ning of a Busch or subsidised with appropriated funds a
Counter-Reptile-Press--all this can be traced to his
Frankfurt period. The vengeance that a policy of reality
--Realpolitik--exacts from its disciples is the necessity of
using an unclean world as it would use you, and of assum-
ing that the psychology of a nation is that of Tammany
Hall. Yet unquestionably as Bismarck was tainted and
degraded by the development of the coarser and more
brutal fibres in his autocratic personality, he never him-
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 85
self mistook intrigue for diplomacy, nor made the coining
of phrases a substitute for a policy. He evinced at Frank-
furt one of the most striking and permanent of his char-
acteristics. Passionate by nature, with a nervous system
that strung itself beyond the pitch of every affair or crisis,
he always remained uncannily cool in thought. His brain
worked as if packed in ice, when feeling within was red-hot,
and the words were ready to flow like lava.
He enjoyed his life, and he enjoyed his work, which
sharpened and heightened his physical appetites. Motley,
his Gdttingen friend, has described the large and generous
geniality of the Bismarcks' house in Frankfurt--the un-
assuming but lavish hospitality, the freedom of the house
where the guest became a member of the family, incited to
call for meat and drink in any quantities at any hour, the
children running in and out or sprawling on the floor,
books, papers, music, flowers, scattered about, the hostess
smiling and self-possessed, and her lord striding in and
out, sitting up half the night at his desk, yet as alert and
buoyant as if he had slept the clock round, always ready
to eat, drink, smoke, discuss politics or the merits of North
or South German cattle, dream through a Beethoven
sonata, or swim in the summer moonlight in the Main.
In a word, the German domesticities set in the atmosphere
of the grand manner. Bismarck did not have to pose in
order to be the aristocrat who belonged to a class born and
bred to command.
His travels were partly official, but largely voluntary.
In three years he saw most parts of non-Prussian Germany.
We find him at Darmstadt, Cassel, Hanover, Dresden and
Munich; he was twice in Vienna, stayed in Ostend, bathed
on the North German coasts, toured in Northern Italy,
and paid two visits (in 1855 and in 1857) to Paris. He
invariably met the men who had made, or were about
to make, the Europe of his day, and formed his judgment
on their ability and nerve. Gortschakov, Beust, Bach,
Schmerling, Rechberg, the Duke of Augustenburg, Prince
William at Coblenz, Persigny, Napoleon 1n. , and many
others came into the record. He presented himself to
the ex-chancellor, Metternich, at Johannisberg, and the
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BISMARCK
Princess notes both her own and her husband's pleasure
at the wit and sound Conservative principles of the tall and
soldierly Prussian noble. It was fitting that the veteran
Austrian who had known all the great men of a wonderful
past should place the wasted hand of the old diplomacy
in the relentless grasp of the new. In that polished
drawing-room, haunted by the ghosts of vanished empires
and the fair women whom its owner had loved and lost,
the Imperial Chancellor to come paid his homage to the
Imperial Chancellor fallen and an exile, and listened with
cynical deference to the political wisdom of ' a garrulous
old gentleman. ' Cavour was the one European statesman
of the first rank whom Bismarck never met. An Imagin-
ary Dialogue between the Minister-President of Sardinia
and the Prussian Plenipotentiary at Frankfurt, with
Austria and Liberalism as its theme, would be a fitting
tribute to Landor. But Napoleon in. he had already
come to know at the Tuileries. They were to meet often,
these two, between 1855 and 1870, and for the last time
at the weaver's cottage on the Donchery road on the grev
morrow after Sedan.
Bismarck's interest in the home politics of Prussia
Vincke, and presently declined re-election for the Lower
House; and though in 1854 he was created by the King a
member of the Upper House (Herrenhaus), he did not
often attend its debates. The growing alienation from
the creed and methods of Kreuzzeitung and Gerlach Con-
servatism completed his reluctance to waste his nights on
countless cigars in stuffy trains to and from Berlin. Not
in Prussia under Manteuffel were the lessons and the
realities of life to be found. One official task after another
was laid upon his shoulders. He endeavoured, but with-
out success, to persuade the Diet to accept and guarantee
the Protocol of 1852, which settled for ten years the fate
of Schleswig-Holstein, and which Bismarck himself was
later to fling into the waste-paper basket; he strove to
interest the Diet in the creation of a German Navy, and
the effort ended in the sale by auction of the ships in
existence; he wrestled with the question of a Federal Army
steadily evaporated.
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 87
and was defeated by the fear of Prussia and the jealousy
of Austria and her allies. The renewal of the Zoll-
verein brought him into the centre of the German
problem.
Austria, under the able guidance of Briick, aimed at
either securing her admittance into the Customs Union,
which Prussia had formed, or at persuading the Southern
Union to break away and unite with the Austrian Empire.
It was the ever-recurring riddle in an economic form of
German organisation. Austria in the economic, no less
than in the political, sphere demanded that the whole of
the Habsburg dominions must be included or she would
break up the inner unity achieved or demanded by
Prussia. The economic creed of the protectionist Austrian
Empire conflicted both with the free-trade policy of the
Zollverein and the tightening bonds between the Southern
and Northern Unions. Bismarck had the unravelling of
the tangle, and at Vienna he met the Austrian ministers
in their lair. It was his first struggle in big affairs, and he
won his first victory. The Austrians intended to isolate
and then coerce Prussia, by seducing the South from its
economic union with the North. Bismarck met the
Austrian menace with a courteous, but firm defiance.
Prussia would maintain the Zollverein at all costs. The
Southern Union was thereby left to choose between the
Northern Customs Union and Austria. Bismarck cor-
rectly reckoned that economic self-interest and not senti-
ment would decide the issue. Prussia had more to offer
to South Germany than Austria; she was strong enough
to stand on her own feet. Headquarters at Berlin were
timid, nervous, and irresolute. Bismarck brushed the
charge of disloyalty and anti-German separatism aside;
even if the charge were true, which it was not, the interest
of Prussia was the decisive criterion. This plain attempt
to sacrifice Prussia to Austrian manufacturers and agricul-
turists, and to rob her of the political influence behind the
Zollverein, must be defeated. And it was. Prussia made
one concession. Twelve years hence the arrangements
were to be reconsidered. In 1863, Bismarck was Minister-
President, and the power to determine Prussian policy was
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BISMARCK
in the hands, not of a Manteuffel, but of Austria's most
relentless foe.
The whole affair set Bismarck thinking with renewed
energy on cardinal problems--the principles of Prussian
foreign policy, the meaning and consequences of Austrian
ambitions, the relations of Prussia with the middle and
petty States, the defects of the Federal Diet as an organ-
isation for Germany. Under the stimulus of events he
was exploring and appreciating the European frame-
work, the new groupings of the Powers, the new forces
manifestly at work. Facts, and reflections always drove
him back on one supreme question: Was it possible for
Prussia to co-operate loyally with Austria? And if it
were not, what must be the consequences of a rupture for
both States?
There is no need to question the sincerity of Bismarck's
desire in 1851 to maintain an alliance between Austria and
Prussia for common ends. The policy and the principles
of the alliance satisfied his political creed and outlook;
antagonism to, and a breach with, Austria involved the
abandonment of a traditional creed and instincts, estrange-
ment from the friendships and ideals of his manhood, a
drastic and dislocating rearrangement of his political faith,
and the patient, painful, and perilous groping after a new
policy in ah unmapped and shifting future. We can catch
in the more personal documents many glimpses of doubt
and genuine regret. It would be so easy to renounce
intellectual independence, remain an obedient and un-
questioning servant of the monarchy, take the appropriate
reward for obedience in ribbons and stars, or retire to
Schonhausen, and under the blue sky of summer or the
wintry sleets cast off this festering world of politicians and
intrigues and live and die a Bismarck as his ancestors had
done. Opportunity, said Disraeli, is more powerful even
than conquerors or prophets. A demomc time-spirit
moulded Bismarck's environment and his character. 'I
am not a man,' pronounced Napoleon, 'I am a force. '
Bismarck hacked out his daily way, because he was a fierce
and proud Prussian, and because he was also becoming a
great German. In the air all round him the German
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 89
atmosphere vibrated with indefinable national aspirations,
and his spirit responded unconsciously to the spiritual
inspiration that fired his heart and steeled his brain. And
it was the decree of Providence. He believed in a God
Whose will ordered the world and chose the human instru-
ments of His purpose.
The Crimean War was a disconcerting searchlight in
an obscure night. The German intellectuals, no less than
the German courts, were bewildered: for in every party
sentiment was in antagonism to principles. The Conser-
vatives were torn between their hatred of the crowned
Jacobin at Paris, their distrust of Great Britain, which
had yielded to democratic reform, their horror of a rup-
ture with Conservative and Legitimist Russia, and their
anxiety to be the ally in shining armour of Austria, the
other great pillar in the Holy Alliance of the Three Mon-
archies. War on the side of Austria meant war with
Russia and a hateful alliance with the Liberal West.
Nationalism clamoured for settling with France and active
support to Austria, the champion of Germanism (Deutsch-
tum), but the opponent of nationalist rights and ideals.
The Liberals, as passionately anti-French as Conservatives
or Nationalists, could not forget Frankfurt, Vilagds, and
Olmiitz; Russia was reaction and autocracy combined;
yet Austria placed a permanent veto on unification and
constitutional government. The Prussian Court and
government were in the sorest straits. Hohenzollern and
Romanov were linked by the closest dynastic ties: a
breach with Russia imperilled the eastern frontier, a
breach with Austria imperilled the southern frontier; it
involved ' a family civil war' (Bruderkreig) in Germany;
yet refusal to join France and Great Britain would be fol-
lowed by a blockade of the North German coast by the
British fleet on its way to the Baltic. The ' Watch on the
Rhine' was met by the demand for a Watch on the Danube
and Vistula.
In this chaos of conflicting opinions, beneath which
surged the demand of a Germany, conscious of its im-
potence to make its dynasties obey a national will which
had no organs of expression, and thirsting to be a power
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? 90
BISMARCK
in the world like other nations, Bismarck grew cooler as
German sentiment developed a heated fretfulness. His
diagnosis cut right across all the parties and creeds. There
was only one question: What was Prussia's interest,
analysed without reference to any obligations of traditional
honour, dynastic family feeling, or sentimental likes or
dislikes of this nation or that? Prussia had no interest in
the Danubian principalities or the Balkans. Austria had,
but that was Austria's affair; and Austria was working to
involve Prussia in an Austrian quarrel, success in which
would bring all the credit and the profits to Austria and
nothing to Prussia but Austrian gratitude, a more insidious
danger than her open enmity. Prussia was really asked
to strengthen Austria's power and weaken her own in the
Diet. Why should Prussia break with Russia at Austria's
bidding? The English blockade was moonshine. Eng-
land was not so foolish as to drive Prussia into an offensive
alliance with Russia, which would compel the British ally,
France, to divert reinforcements for the Crimea to the
Rhine. * But France meant to attack Germany. ' If
Napoleon attacked Prussia, the Prussian army would see
to that, and France would not attack Germany. Why
not bring ' the man of sin' to terms? The relations of
States were determined by interests and not by misin-
terpreted and irrelevant ethical considerations. Utilise
the embarrassments of your friends above all to secure
solid advantage for yourself: do not let those embarrass-
ments be a bad reason for sharing in them and adding to
your own. In a word, let Prussia remain rigidly neutral:
hold fast to a real friend, Russia, and by skilful diplomacy
improve her relations with France and let Austria go--
not to the Devil, but to Frankfurt. The indispensability
of Prussia was precisely the opportunity for making
Austria pay Prussia's price.
Bismarck could only argue and advise; he could not
secure the adoption of his advice. His fear that his
government would be coerced into war on behalf of Austria
against Russia, and thereby mortgage its future and free-
dom of action beyond all chance of liquidation, caused him
many sleepless nights. 'The smart and seaworthy Prus-
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
9>>
sian frigate,' as he expressed it, ' was to tow in perpetuity
the water-logged and dry-rotted Austrian battleship. '
While Bismarck argued, Prussia vacillated irresolute,
yet fiery, with the sword half drawn, threatening every
State and giving ground to every minister who threatened
her. She was saved for the time from her tardy and
reluctant adhesion to the Austrian cause by the course of
events, and not by the amateurish inaction and fear of the
Prussian ministers. She earned neither the gratitude of
friends nor the respect of her foes; and when all was over
Russia and Austria informed her with contemptuous
politeness, that they would use their respective good offices
to secure her an invitation to the Congress which would
settle the affairs of Europe at Paris in 1856. Manteuffel,
who represented Prussia at the Congress, amused the diplo-
matists by his air of the poor relation included at the last
moment, because there was a vacant chair, and it might as
well be filled by Prussia as' by any other State. The next
great Congress after 1856 which settled the Near East was
at Berlin in 1878, presided over by Bismarck as Chancellor
of a German Empire.
Bismarck's sketch of a policy and explanation of the
principles underlying it pained and angered his friends.
He threshed it out at length with Prince William at Cob-
lenz--in three years to become the King of Prussia--and
not only failed to convince him, but filled him with sus-
picion of the adviser's sanity and loyalty. The Prince, as
in 1851, was ready to fight because the honour of Prussia
was involved: to leave Austria in the lurch was desertion;
France was an irreconcilable national enemy; Napoleon
was a Jacobin disguised as a sham Caesar. Bismarck's
advice, he pronounced, was not that of a statesman but of
an ignorant schoolboy.
That ignorant schoolboy was destined to have many
arguments with the simple soldier before he succeeded in
winning the surrender of the royal conscience; and the
respect which with Bismarck deepened in thirty years into
a sincere homage, began at Coblenz with this sharp
antagonism. William of Hohenzollern was not a great
intellect, but he was a man, and he had the strength that
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BISMARCK
character and simplicity of aim alone can give. In
Bismarck's eyes that quality atoned for many defects.
Independence he could both hate and love, but it always
earned his respect.
Bismarck's ideas were slowly consolidating into a co-
herent system. The issues raised by the Austrian war
were disentangling in his thought three cardinal and
governing considerations--the indispensability of an en-
tente with Russia, the necessity of coming to an under-
standing with France, and the impossibility of co-operation
with Austria. To adopt Napoleonic language, in the
strategy of her diplomacy Prussia was to manoeuvre from
a fixed point, and that fixed point was Russia. Prussia
could safely pivot on that. Central Europe was her
theatre of operations, and movements outside that decisive
theatre were eccentric or quixotic.
An understanding
with France would first secure the benevolent neutrality
of the most important Continental Power, secondly, pre-
vent a coalition between France and Russia, and thirdly,
leave Prussia with undiminished resources to settle her
relations with Austria. Bismarck did not as yet contem-
plate an open rupture, still less war with Austria. He was
perfectly ready to support Austria, provided that she would
give guarantees, and treat Prussia as an equal and not as a
rather larger Bavaria. He was no less clear that the tradi-
tional system continued by Manteuffel involved a humili-
ating and crippling subordination of Prussia to Austria's
needs and supremacy.
These ideas of policy necessitated a revision of principles
of political action, very clearly revealed in his remarkable
correspondence with Gerlach. The trite image of the
hen in consternation at the chicken fledged beneath her
protecting wings now taking to the water because it was
a duckling, is a faint picture of the pain and indignation
with which Gerlach discovered the apostasy of his disciple.
It was easy for Gerlach to concur in the necessity of an
entente with Russia; but when it was plain that the result
of the alliance was to be an entente with France and anta-
gonism to Austria, he recoiled with horror. 'Cynical'
and 'unprincipled' were colourless adjectives for such a
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 93
policy. The stability of European society, and of Prussia
in particular, depended, in Gerlach's view, on legitimate
monarchical rule, and on the maintenance throughout
Europe of Conservative principles which were of universal
validity; the moral duty of combating ' the Revolution'
was a necessity of existence, no less than an obedience to
divine law and authority. Austria represented every
sound principle as clearly as Russia: France was the
negation of everything sacred and solid--she was 'the
Revolution,' with Napoleon crowned on a throne picked
from the Jacobin gutters and placed on his head by per-
jury and bloodshed. How could it be statesmanship and
right--for a Prussian above all, loyal to his sovereign by
the grace of God and freed from the superstitions of
Liberalism--to desert and impugn Austria and to seek for
an unholy partnership at Paris?
Bismarck took up the challenge. In the tactics of
statesmanship, interests, he maintained, were more im-
portant than principles: policy demanded flexibility and
not rigidity of principles. Understandings were simply
temporary bargains. Napoleon was not so bad as he was
painted. Austria was a great deal worse than she pro-
fessed to be. A bargain with Napoleon was not a surrender
to the Revolution, but an exploitation of it for Prussia's
interest. And, to secure Prussia's interest, if an alliance
with the Devil were desirable, it should be made with a
light conscience. All this high-faluting talk about Conser-
vative principles of universal validity was irrelevant and
unreal. There were no such principles, Conservative,
Liberal or Revolutionary. Reason of state--for Bismarck
the reason of the Prussian State--was the one abiding
reality in a world of uncontrollable facts and fluctuating
situations. The true statesman must be prepared to be
Conservative at home and Liberal abroad, or vice versa;
to be a Jacobin in Paris and an Absolutist at Petersburg, if
necessary, and must seek to wring out of every opportunity
the maximum of advantage for his country, otherwise he
was a doctrinaire or a bungler, a professor or a bureau-
cratic automaton.
He invited Gerlach to study history impartially. The
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BISMARCK
Conservative interpretation of the origin and evolution
of legitimism and revolution would not stand the test of
facts. All thrones and forms of government were in origin
revolutionary or founded on usurpation. Even the Prus-
sian monarchy had usurped the rights of those it had
dispossessed. Legitimism was a new-fangled doctrine,
created as a result of the Revolution of 1789, to meet the
conditions of a once existent but now vanished situation.
It was this obstinate obsession of unverifiable assumptions
and this irrational refusal to recognise realities which had
ruined Conservatism in the past, and would ruin it in the
future. It was time for Prussia to free herself from the
fetters of a system which clogged her independence and
to return to the sounder system of Frederick who had made
himself and his State great. If it was right for Frederick
to ally with France and withstand Austria in season and
out of season, because Prussia's interest required it, the
same reason of State and imperishable interest no less
required it to-day.
The correspondence, in short, widened, while it demon-
strated, the gulf between the old Conservatism and the
new. Bismarck had indeed travelled far from the stand-
point of his youth: Gerlach had remained unchanged.
And Gerlach was correct in his assertion, that master and
disciple no longer spoke the same language. Bismarck
was content to leave it at that.
The German problem slowly intertwined itself into the
problem of Prussia's true foreign policy. Bismarck's
maturing thought, continually reinforced by freshets of
experience, groped its way through the thickets of youthful
prejudice. The process can be traced in the State papers
(confirmed by his letters) which pressed upon his govern-
ment Bismarck's weighed and tested conclusions.
In 1851 he wrote: 'I do not believe that the Federal
Diet in its present form can be the last word in our politics;
rather I see in it only a shell within which can develop all
the sound and practical elements of the union (Erfurt)
policy, a shell that will drop off when the kernel is ripe. '
In 1853, he pointed out that 'unless Austria renounced
the policy of Schwarzenberg . . . sooner or later the
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
federal wagon, pulled by the Prussian horse forwards and
by the Austrian horse backwards, would go to pieces. '
From 1853 onwards dispatch after dispatch emphasised
'the restless effort of Austria to compel Prussia by the
organisation of a majority of votes in the Diet' to accept
the will of Vienna. Prussia was driven to a defensive
attitude. In the notable 'splendid report,''Prachtbericht,'
of 1856 he wrote: 'The Emperor Francis Joseph is not
master of his lands and subjects in the same measure as our
all gracious Lord. . . . Austria on the defensive I consider
weak, and at the first successful stroke of a rival the whole
of the internal artificial fabric of the centralised scribbling
bureaucracy of Bach and Buol would tumble in like a pack
of cards . . . the traditional policy of Austria and its
jealousy of us cannot be removed, and I would trust the
old fox in his new coat as little as in his summer bristles.
. . . I will express my conviction that in no long time we
shall have to fight for our existence against Austria, and
that it is not in our power to avoid the fight, because the
course of events in Germany admits of no other develop-
ment. '
'Austria,' he wrote in 1857, 'does not wish us to in-
crease our importance in Germany, and England cannot
favour our development either on the sea or in trade. In
politics no one acts unselfishly, unless it is his interest to
do so. ' 'Your Excellency is aware,' he wrote in 1858,
'that the Federal Diet and our disadvantageous position
in it is Austria's best weapon . . . the whole of my seven
years' service at Frankfurt has been an unbroken struggle
with efforts of every kind and the relentless attempts to
exploit the Federal Diet as an instrument to aggrandise
Austria and humiliate Prussia. ' 'We must,' he urged,
'establish a Customs Parliament . . . our Parliament and
press must discuss tariff policy without reserve from the
Prussian point of view; it will thus divert the exhausted
attention of Germany to itself, and our Prussian Parliament
will become a power in Germany. ' From Petersburg in
1859 he wrote to Schleinitz: 'The federal machinery in
normal times is an oppressive, in crises a dangerous, hand-
cuff for Prussia. . . . I believe we should take up the chal-
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BISMARCK
lenge and consider it no misfortune if we found in a
resolution of the majority at Frankfurt . . . a breach of
the Federal treaties. ' This is precisely what Bismarck did
in 1866. 'The word "German" for "Prussian" I would
gladly see inscribed on our banners, if we had first a closer
and practical unity with our other fellow-Germans than
hitherto; it loses all its charm if it is employed as now to
support the Federal bond. . . . I see in our Federal relations
a Prussian malady which sooner or later will have to be
healed by iron and fire, if we do not in good time find
another cure for it. '
In 1861 he wrote: 'The system of the solidarity of the
Conservative interests of all countries is a dangerous fiction,
so long as there is not the most complete and honourable
reciprocity. Pursued by Prussia alone, it is pure Don
Quixotism which weakens our King and his government in
the execution of its proper duty. It brings us to the abso-
lutely unhistorical, godless and lawless swindle of sove-
reignty in the German princes, which employs the Federal
system as its pedestal, and with which the European
Powers play to make it the darling of the Prussian Conser-
vative party . . . we protect foreign prerogatives with
more obstinacy than our own, and get enthusiastic for the
paltry sovereignties created by Napoleon and guaranteed
by Metternich. . . . So long as the folly of the present
Federal system lasts, which is simply a forcing-house of
dangerous and republican party struggles . . . we need a
stronger consolidation of German arms as much as our
daily bread; we need a new and plastic establishment in
the sphere of tariff policy to protect our material interests
against the disadvantages arising from the unnatural con-
figuration of our German frontiers . . . Moreover I
cannot see why we should so coyly shrink from the idea of
popular representation alike in the Federal League, the
Tariff, and the Union Parliament; an institution which
has a legitimate validity in every German State, which we
Conservatives in Prussia could not dispense with, cannot
be resisted as revolutionary. '1
1 The student who wishes to master Bismarck's views should study in Preusien in
Bundestag the dispatches of the following dates:--November 19, i8jt, April 23,
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
The substance of Bismarck's thought and principles at
this stage can be summarised. Prussia must find her own
solution of the German problem; she must combine a
satisfaction of the claims of Germany with the satisfaction
of the claims of the historic and characteristic Prussian
State. A radical reform of the Diet brought about by
Prussian initiative must be such as to guarantee beyond
dispute the supremacy of Prussia in Germany and her
position as a great Power. There must be an end to the
system by which Austria could manipulate the middle and
petty States into a permanent and hostile majority in the
Federal Diet, and by which kingdoms or landgraviates, of
inferior extent, population, military and economic re-
sources, voted down Prussia, and ' mediatised'1 her. The
root of the mischief lay in the pretensions of dynastic
particularism to political equality with Prussia and Austria,
based on a 4 swindling ' and mushroom theory of legitimist
sovereignty. Co-operation with Austria, as Austria inter-
preted it, was impossible. In the interest of Germany
and of Prussia, Austria must be resisted. Prussian foreign
policy and the German problem were inseparable elements
1852, June 18, 1852, January 13, 1853, August 9, 1853, November 14, 1853,
February 15, 1854, February ", *%S5, April 26, 1856, May 12, 1857, June 2,
1857, March 14, 1858, April 10, 1858. They are all too long to be quoted
in txttnso, and they should be compared with the Baden Denkschrift, printed
in Bismarck Jahrbuch, iii. 193.
1 'Mediatised. '--This term so frequently occurs in Bismarck's writings and
German historians that, as there is no single English equivalent, it is desirable
to explain it for those not familiar with its technical and derivative meaning.
Technically, 'to mediatise' was a term derived from the old Holy Roman
Empire of the German nation which came to an end in 1806. The sovereign
princedoms of that Empire--whether ecclesiastical or secular--were held to be
immediate vassals of the Emperor. To 'mediatise' them meant, therefore, to
deprive them of the status of being immediate vassals, and to reduce them to the
position of being ' mediate," or secondary vassals, i. e. with one or more author-
ities between them and the supreme fount of imperial power--a process equiva-
lent to reduction from being a tenant-in-chiet to subordinate tenancy. By
degrees the term 'to mediatise' or 'mediatisation' derivatively came to imply
an act or a result by which a sovereign prince or state retained a titular inde-
pendence, but lost, or was deprived of, the rights and powers of sovereignty.
Hence, in Bismarck's time, the term was commonly used of a result by which
a state lost its true political independence and initiative and became dependent
on some power or powers, sovereign in theory and in fact. 'Mediatisation,'
therefore, broadly implied the retention of a titular sovereignty which conflicted
with the practical political dependence of the 'sovereign' on other sovereigns
or states.
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BISMARCK
of a single and larger unity. The benevolent neutrality
of France must be secured; with the friendship of Russia
and the goodwill of Napoleon, Prussia could throw her
individual strength into the decisive theatre--Germany
and Central Europe--concentrate, in short, on the over-
throwal of Austria in Germany.
These were conclusions calculated to dismay Conser-
vatives and Liberals alike, for they challenged the dearest
traditions of both parties. Bismarck did not either then
or subsequently speak out the whole of his mind. He did
not wish to alarm friends Or cause his opponents to blas-
pheme unnecessarily. Much was deliberately hidden in
his heart. But much also he could not have spoken out,
for he saw, and he recognised it, through a glass darkly.
'The longer I live,' he said later, ' the more incalculable
the future in politics proves to be. ' There are no indica-
tions of how or when or by whom precisely this programme
could be realised. Not a word of war or annexations. It
is the quintessence of his statecraft that the opportunity
would create the means; that in policy as in war a lucid
comprehension of ends was the one indispensable pre-
requisite, and that the major and minor tactics must be
settled by the situation of the moment and the character
and disposition of the enemy's forces. Success would come
to the side that made the fewest mistakes. Opportunity
was everything. The right stroke at the right moment
would give the decision. A lost opportunity was worse
than a defeat, for it implied a failure of judgment in the
commander. No tactical skill could compensate for in-
ferior intelligence in the supreme direction, and the
persistent will to persevere once the policy had been
made.
Bismarck's letters and memoranda are like Beethoven's
notebooks. In both we can trace a mind at work, the
patient elaboration of an idea, the jotting down of flashes
of insight which in due time may be developed into a com-
pleted composition. Some, however, are never worked
out; time and life failed, or the idea failed because the
mood that gave it birth never returned: others give us
the genesis of a perfected scheme: others merely indicate
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
a thought, a premonition of what will come but in another
form. Genius is talking aloud to itself in the workshop of
the human spirit, and it is the prerogative of genius to be
fertile in contradictions and to nourish its strength on in-
consistencies: and the winged word and glory of emotion
may never soar beyond that free, inner mansion of person-
ality, never carry its message beyond the chambers of
feeling that divide, into the kingdom of action that unites,
all thought.
Bismarck had divined the real weakness of Austria--the
vulnerability of her European position, the competition in
her councils between the concentrated egoism of the
dynasty and the dissipated interests of the Empire, the
administrative dry rpt, the lack of vision and the absence
of moral imagination in her ministers, and the insoluble
antagonism between the ambition for supremacy in
Germany and her historic claims in Italy and Hungary.
No less had he divined the strength of Prussia, economic,
political, and military. Prussia so far had been handi-
capped by slavish adherence to a false tradition, by a sick
ancf irresolute sovereign, and by ministers whose wills and
courage were as weak as their intellectual powers. She
had neither developed her strength nor unified it under a
driving control. There already floated in Bismarck's mind
the conception of a reorganised Central Europe in which
Prussia should have superseded Austria in Germany, and
the Austrian Empire would reconsolidate itself as a
Danubian State between the twin capitals of Vienna and
Buda-Pesth. 'Un maitre des indiscretions savantes,' as
M. de la Gorce felicitously terms him, Bismarck was con-
tinually expressing ideas which ministers and diplomatists
regarded as a bad jest or the gaucherie of an incurable
amateur, but which were really sincere and intended to
probe a difficulty, or indicate an end. At Vienna he said
outright in 1864 that Austria should transfer its centre of
gravity to Buda-Pesth. 'At Berlin,' he told Rechberg,' we
Germans do not consider Vienna as a German city, and
what happens at Vienna as related to Germany.
