Bismarck Suffers a Great Shock
27
Wherein it is shown that Bismarck’s protest against disrespect for constituted authority was based on certain tragic historical instances he would not repeat.
¶ It is freely granted that ideas of “Liberty!” that many German patriots desired to see come to pass, in 1848, were not those of 1789; but elements of lawlessness, of mob-rule, of marchings to “Ca Ira!” of absurd glorification of the common man, and of snarlings at kings as kings, were largely in the spirit laid down by Robespierre, Danton, Marat and that crew, with their chosen gangsters of the guillotine. Bismarck would have none of it!
True, many of the old-line excesses were no longer used for political purposes, but Bismarck was too well-balanced, had too much common sense, in short was too strongly aligned with landed interests to endorse “popular” government on the old type from over the Vosges. His protests were all in support of authority, discipline, duty, devotion to a deliberately chosen monarch, who ruled by the will of God.
¶ In ’48 the talk of the “Rights of Man” really meant the rights of individual men—the tailor, the barber, the shoemaker—each of whom felt that the time had now come to overturn the political system of kings and to bring on the rule of the common people.
Old-line hatred of Napoleon had passed away. The French military despot of the early part of the century was now figured as a “great democrat,” whose wars had “all” been in the interest of the people. Could anything have been more absurd? The literary speculations of Rousseau, as to the status of a new society (such, for example, as running naked in the grove and rolling on the grass) were now replaced by loud discussions not on the Rights of Man, as a form of idealism, but the rights of all manner of men, each of whom felt that, under the new dispensation, hastened if necessary by bomb, dagger and poison-cup, the human race was to rise to nobler political ideals. It is not difficult to see that political theories of this sort have been indulged, in one way or other, by every generation in revolt against the settled ways of the fathers.
¶ Let us, therefore, go back to original sources and see for ourselves just what account the common people had given of themselves, in a political way, in France at the time of her so-called political millennium. We shall then be able to grasp Bismarck’s position clearly and be able at least to understand, if we do not support, his attitude of uncompromising severity toward popular rule, as understood at this moment in the political evolution of Germany.
¶ If it be a mark of progress to call God a superstitious idol and to endeavor by the guillotine to enforce political rights, then the precious French key to the Door of Destiny for this human race should be duplicated and placed in the possession of nations, far and wide, as the final expression of man’s best idea of himself, his wife, his child and his country.
This 1789-93 return to National paganism, both political and social, is the mockery that Bismarck decided with all his almighty strength, nay his supreme rage, to set aside; and for him Prussian Militarism, which he so jealously set his heart on, against the rising tides of French constitutionalism, otherwise mob-rule, was at once to prove the sharp cure and the dreadful counter-blow.
¶ It was only after St. Helena that the Napoleonic legend, presenting Napoleon as the great democrat, was brought forward, to wit, that the Emperor’s many brutal campaigns were in the interest of the “common people” instead of gratification of his obsession for wars.
The transition came about in a simple way. The Emperor was dead and gone; his fate on a distant black rock added romantic interest to his lost cause; and the return of the old-line French kings after Waterloo, under the bayonets of Britain and the Allies, had proved a keen disappointment, politically, to France. It is conceded that Napoleon had promised and in many cases had applied liberal principles in his conquered domains; but now that the man was dead, agitators of many lands, including the 39 distracted German states, began to take literally what the Emperor had said in a sort of huge politico-military satire, to wit, that his blood-letting was truly in the interest of the masses.
¶ Hence, between 1815 and 1848, agitators of Germany began ringing the changes on the glories of the French Revolution. True, the Emperor had been dead some 20-odd years; a new generation found surprising merits in his military plans, forgetful of the lure of loot that had been the foundation of it all; yes, for one thing the hungry desire of the landless for the lands of the Catholic church.
¶ The exaggerated fact has been falsely set forth again and again that the French peasant of 1789 was down in the very mire of political despond, without a sou to his name; the cock called him to work at dawn, and all for the good of the aristocrats; he was penniless, he was an absurd figure, he was not a man but a beast;—hence his righteous revolt in the sacred name of Liberty.
¶ The fact is that at this time the French peasant was in no worse condition than the working classes of other lands, including Britain, Italy and Germany. That the Revolution first broke out in France and not in the other countries named is to be traced to journalistic and oratorical agitators of the ward-politician type.
¶ The special taxes of which the peasantry complained did not exceed two per cent of the products of the soil; and it is also a fact that France had a large and profitable foreign trade; but French political and journalistic agitators were afield, and the plain truth is that the landless desired to confiscate, and did confiscate, the titles of those in possession.
No sooner was the gigantic confiscation of Catholic church lands, amounting to about one-third of the soil of France, or two billion five hundred million of francs in nominal value, ordered by Mirabeau, backed up by the Revolutionary tribunals, than the supposedly impecunious French peasants came forward and purchased to the extent of millions of francs; and it is a fact today (1915) that one of the secret dreads of the French peasantry is that some sensational political change may come in the stability of the French Government, a change that will forfeit these old land titles, based on confiscation in Revolutionary days.
¶ The French peasantry wants no great National military hero to emerge from the war of 1915; and it is not unthinkable that should a very strong French general suddenly come forward, he would be removed by assassination; a thing that has happened at least once before, in latter-day French politics.
This confession of politico-social fears on the part of the French peasantry explains why in France, take them as a group, the candidates invested with the honors of the Presidency are timid men, without ambitious political bias, and why, on the whole, the modern French National instinct lives in dread of a military hero, who with a turn of his wrist might on the vote of his soldiers declare himself, let us say, Emperor.
¶ Loaded down with debts incurred for various reasons, the French of 1789 were on the verge of National bankruptcy.
This condition has usually been charged up against the excesses of the French kings, such, for example, as expending some 200,000,000 francs for pleasure-palaces, for the pretty women around Louis XIV; but this charge will not bear the light of modern research.
It is also a fact, on the practical side, that the much-boasted support given to America by the French in America’s Revolutionary War, in a degree helped to bankrupt the French government; but Americans have forgotten or wink at this plain financial obligation.
¶ Also, the French Revolution had promised in its every utterance the dawn of the political millennium, whereas instead it brought an era of blood, idol-worship and free-love. We are not discussing here those poetical French surveys of the Rights of Man. Every ward-politician in Paris had the list at his tongue’s end. There was some truth, much truth, in many of these expressions, no doubt, as mere expressions of humane sentiments. That, however, is another story.
¶ One has but to read the Memoirs of President Bailly of the Revolutionary Assembly to find that mob-rule predominated from the first day of the supposed “Dawn of the political Millennium.” The mob in the gallery hissed or applauded each speech, and deputies were intimidated.
¶ Bismarck in his united Germany wanted no Jacobin Clubs, largely composed of ward-politicians, and Bismarck wanted no Marat with his vile newspaper, “Friend of the People,” setting class against class.
¶ He wanted no guillotine as the German symbol of political liberty. This political method of the guillotine was at best only a cowardly form of assassination, ineffectual, barbarous. First one side used it, then the other; then still another group; each set of French political assassins prating of Liberty had recourse to the guillotine to be well rid of rivals much as in Cæsar’s time the women of Cæsar’s family, that their own might be exalted, in turn proceeded to poison prospective collateral heirs to the Imperial throne.
¶ Bismarck knew all about this dirty French mess, parading itself as the “voice of the people.” He was a strong man himself and he was guilty of gross ambitions in his rise to power, but on the whole Bismarck stood for self-possession and for manly audacity, certainly not the French Revolution type of audacity. It is a fact that Bismarck, as a human being, was a vast egotist, and had his own, ofttimes unscrupulous, way of gaining his ends, but his conception of Militarism, the force he did eventually use, was at bottom a virtuous effort to support, liberate and unify the Fatherland, not drag it into the mire of idolatry and bestiality.
¶ We shall frequently say harsh things about Bismarck, in this book; we do not wish to follow French methods and endeavor to make an impossible hero of a man of clay. Bismarck, as a man and in the methods of his rise to great glory, had his gross faults, and we fearlessly point them out.
¶ But here are some of the facts that Bismarck can never stand accused of, in the light of this much-boasted French political “Millennium” of 1789-93, and here, likewise we find the real reasons why he did struggle with all his might against a reluctant people to enforce Militarism throughout the jealous clashing 39 German states; and if Bismarck’s exercise of the strong hand, in the bosom of the German family was a fault, then at least it did not include these French conditions, set up to cause the world to gasp in admiration.
¶ The bull-necked Danton, the Parisian ward-heeler, in control of public opinion, came on with his guillotine; and closed the city’s gates against any man that had a dollar to pay his debts or buy a dinner.
¶ The so-called “will of the people” was in short a spurious affair, unnaturally created by a political morphine that gave glorious dreams; and this wretched drug was supplied by the mob-leaders.
All the blood-letting was represented as a harmless affair, tending toward liberty and equality; all the confiscations of church-lands and redistribution among the peasants was declared a “great” political triumph.
Throughout even the loneliest country districts the word was passed that the political millennium was about to break.
¶ The King was represented as a “monster fattening on crime.” His wife was called an Austrian “panthress,” and vile pamphlets were secretly passed around reflecting on her character. God was represented as judging the King, and the guillotine was awaiting Louis, by Heaven’s decree.
¶ The 26,000 priests who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the monstrous political farce were visited with all manner of persecutions; one section of Revolutionary opinion decreed that death was the just due of all offending pastors.
¶ The assertion of kept-historians that there was “political justification” is at once spurious and an insult to common sense.
¶ In justice to the better French element it is granted freely that the dreadful September massacres did not express the real beliefs of the great decent body of the French people; but the Nation was dragged through the mire and the Nation has for years been endeavoring to explain this political Millennium of riots, murders, midnight assassinations, despoilings of land titles.
¶ Bismarck would have drained the poison cup rather than stand for such French Constitutional nonsense in his beloved Germany, the Germany of his dreams, the Germany for which he labored so many years, the Germany which he would save from itself, so to speak.
He purposed to build up German political opinion, not through blatherskite ward-heelers, in Berlin, Frankfort or Hamburg, but by a manly appeal to German common sense and German sense of respect for authority; and if Bismarck overworked his idea of Divine-right of kings, then at least this may be said: that he issued no appeal to the German people “Who Laughs on Friday, Weeps on Sunday!” (The massacres had come between!) And as to Danton, who glories in being the immediate instigator of the massacres we have these, Danton’s own words: “It was I who caused them. Rivers of blood had to flow between me and our enemies!” Finally, after these rivers of blood, the word was passed, “That the entire Nation will hasten to adopt this (guillotine) most-necessary means of public salvation.”
28
Viewing at closer range the work of the legislators of the great republic of liberty and equality; these facts Bismarck well knew, explaining his belief in militarism.
¶ After reading five hundred pamphlets on the Revolution (as she testified at her trial) Charlotte Corday struck down Marat with a dagger; and her act has been generally condoned by men with a sense of fair-play. It was indeed a bloody murder; but when a mad-dog is running wild, a beast fattening on human blood, one passion feeds on another—and Corday is no exception. (Henderson, Symbol and Satire of the French Revolution).
Heroine or monster, take your choice; at least in her time such was the frenzy of the alleged political Millennium that Marat was soon worshipped as a martyr. This atrocious political quack, with all his daggers and his blackjacks, was likened to Jesus Christ; and among the sentiments of the hour we read, “A perfidious hand has snatched him away from his beloved people”; “To the immortal glory of Marat, the people’s friend”; “Unable to corrupt me, they have assassinated me!” “Marat, rare and sublime soul, we will imitate thee; we swear it on thy bloody corpse.”
Such are some of the expressions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that followers of French Constitutionalism had years later decreed to re-enact in Germany; but Bismarck stood as a master with a rod of iron to lay over the backs of fanatical German Radicals, who would come on with their drunken calls of “Liberty!”
¶ All this, however, is only the mild opening chapter of this much glorified French Constitutionalism. The French prisons soon held about all there was of French intelligence and moderation; the brains, the blood and the beauty. It is not necessary to mention names.
If you wish to become hysterical, read your fill of this drunken era of French Constitutionalism.
At the height of the Terror, there were 8,000 political prisoners in French dungeons; and the mobs still came on with their cries for fresh blood. One day, this expression was made: “The town of Lyons shall be destroyed; the name Lyons shall be effaced,” etc. All this meant that Lyons, weary of blood, had decided on raising an army to beat back the sons of spurious liberty.
¶ Any man who, in the Terror, dared disagree with the mob-rulers was called a “conspirator.” In a letter from Herbois, we find this plain evidence of political lunacy masquerading as inspiration: “There are 60,000 individuals here who will never make good republicans; we must have them sent away. I have new measures in mind, weighty and effectual,* * * Heads, more heads, heads every day! * * * How you would have enjoyed seeing National justice meted out to two hundred and nine rogues. What cement for the Republic! I say fete, yes, citizen president, fete is the right word. The guillotining and fusillading are not going badly!”
¶ The Queen, now in her dungeon, was treated with wretched dishonor. Even the petty expenses of bread and salt were begrudged: 15 francs a day for food; three francs and 18 sous for trimming a skirt, 18 sous for a ribbon and shoe-strings; three francs for a tooth wash;—all this was kept track of. Yet in years gone by France had allowed her four million francs of pin money, and the royal allowance was twenty-five millions of francs per annum.
¶ “Through a small window in her cell comes the light of day. * * * She is accused of being a leech, a scourge, a harpy and a free-lover; she is condemned to death.”
¶ The political assassins, known as the Mountain, and that known as the Girondists, now began destroying each other; every patriotic action of the Girondists was set forth as having been instigated by love of vulgar applause. After some days, the Jacobin Club petitioned for freer trials, less hindered by legal formalities.
¶ “Long live the Republic!” was the cry. “Perish all traitors!” Executions continued, day by day.
¶ The poor king was long since dead and gone, yet his memory was detested.
On a certain day of horrors, the tombs of his ancestors were broken open by the mob, and the bones scattered. One corpse (or what remained of it) was stood up against a wall and the beard hacked off by a patriot of the new Regime.
¶ All authority was now overthrown; and as one writer adds, “the most daring enterprise of the Revolution remains to be chronicled: the storming of Heaven!” (Henderson.)
¶ The leaders decided next to attack God on His throne; God was officially declared a superstitious myth.
The altars of France were hurled over; the Christian era was abolished by political decree; the Sabbath day was officially proclaimed done away with; Christ was to be henceforth banished, officially; churches closed, pagan rites substituted.
¶ Bismarck, the thinker, Bismarck, the builder, with his dream of political responsibility, of vested Authority, stood for no such facts in his protests against the rising tide of Radicalism, in the German states.
He knew his history too well; he knew the satire of the French Revolution, the folly of meeting it in any way except by the sword.
¶ Yes, Bismarck believed strongly in what has since been called Militarism; but his idea was that power was needed for the liberation and the unification of his country; and he hated French Constitutionalism and fought by fair means and by foul all efforts to warp upon Germans the political ideals of the French Revolution. So you must here and now make up your mind whether or not Bismarck was a great statesman or a great fool.
¶ The French Convention, weary of blood-letting, began maundering in the psychology of religion.
It was officially set forth by one of the Deputies that, after all, the idea was to invent some new form of religion, without which the proposed political Millennium had fallen short.
Marat was turned to, that choice spirit of the height of the era; though in his tomb, he was called upon in this strange language, despite his bringing in the Terror:
¶ “O, heart of Jesus, O heart of Marat, you have an equal right to our homage!”
¶ A New Era was now decreed, taken in the main from the paganism of early France. The four seasons were symbolized by the hunt of the man for his mate: he is afield in Autumn, on horseback; in Winter, he first finds his new mate; in the Spring, the maid watches her sheep feeding on the hills; and in Summertime, the man is seen leading his mate to a couch, his arms already around her waist.
¶ One of the leading symbols was Reason, presented as a lady petting a lion; saints’ days were replaced by days for animals, one for the cat, the dog, the sheep, and what you will; but no longer St. John’s, St. James, St. Louis.
Certain other days, dedicated to the “Spirit of the Revolution,” were termed “Sans culotte,” or without trousers, to wit, the French version of that great idol of the American yellow editor, who cries for justice in behalf of the man with the seat out of his trousers.
¶ On a certain day, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was used as a background for the great French political drama; a mountain was erected, a figure known as Truth was present. The Goddess Reason was also carried to the Tuileries; and later as a report written at the time says, “The President of the Convention gave the Goddess a fraternal kiss, whereupon his secretaries asked and obtained a similar privilege.”
¶ At Rochefort the orator of the hour began, “Citizens, there is no future life!”
¶ The images of saints were replaced by men of the stripe of Marat, Brutus and other tyrants.
¶Also, an ass was dressed in pontifical robes at a sort of National fete, and a few days later at a public masquerade, the President replying to praises of the New Era explained himself as follows: “In one single instant you make vanish into nothingness the errors of eighteen centuries”; by which he meant to honor the paganism of the new French political Millennium.
¶ Now comes that dangerous man, king of political charlatans, Robespierre, who offers a private religion of his own.
¶ The queer thing about this Robespierre, the new dictator, is his belief that he and he alone is the fountain of all political virtues. One must be willing to sacrifice brothers, mother, sister, father to the guillotine—for the good of one’s country.
The Robespierre idea is that the supreme duty of a Nation is to repress “crime,” as well as to uphold “virtue” and “crime” consists largely in not agreeing with the great central authority. He has had many followers since that day.
¶ Robespierre was really a great man gone wrong; he had in many respects a brilliant mind; he was a profound orator; a born leader; but he was unsound at the core, like a rotten apple; taught bloodshed and violence, as expressions of National honor.
¶ In one picture of the hour, he is represented as the Sun, rising over the Mountain, and Giving Light to the Universe.
¶ The day dawns when Robespierre has his old friend and rival Danton on the scaffold. This was to be expected. Then followed many executions of Dantonists.
¶ Robespierre now came on with his “new” religion; he boldly announced a Supreme Being and belief in immortality!
¶ He applied the torch to the wooden images set up by his political predecessors. He made a speech that is unintelligible, all wind, sound and bombast, but was cheered to the echo.
¶ Are you not growing weary of all these absurdities? Perhaps you think the details taken from the records of Bloomingdale Asylum?
No; French Constitutionalism of 1789-93, the sort that the Radicals of Germany had in mind, (with some variations), and often extolled in fiery speeches of the German Liberal party that Bismarck decided to crush down, with a rod of iron. True, the old offensive historical details were kept out of sight and were not fresh in men’s minds;—except reading men and thinking men, like Bismarck; men bold enough to stand out against mob-violence, called by whatever soft name you please.
¶ A French cartoon of the Robespierre Regime made at the time by an admirer shows the earth around the guillotine heaped with heads, and at last the over-weary executioner, failing to find further victims, decides to execute himself! He is therefore seen lying under the axe, his head rolling on the floor.
¶ Robespierre in the end went the way of all the other political fanatics; the day came when he was spat upon, struck, beaten by mobs, pricked with knives.
According to his own theory, he needed no trial (said his new rivals and enemies in their lust for power), for he has by his acts shown himself to be an enemy of his country.
They carried him down the great staircase; he fought back savagely, like the frightful animal that he was.
¶ Eighty-two of his followers died that day, on the guillotine.
¶ “Long live the Republic! Long live Liberty!” was the loud cry of the rabble.
¶ Such is some of the work of the great legislators of the Republic of Equality as set forth by the various authors of the new French “political Millennium,” during those terrible years 1789-93; we have seen their ideas on a grand scale; and it is for you to judge whether in setting himself squarely in favor of Discipline and respect for constituted Authority, as exemplified by the line of Prussian kings, and the Prussian system of education, Bismarck was to show himself a man or a mouse.
¶ Bismarck, who was a deep reader on politics, knew well the frightful excesses of French mob-rule. He may also have recognized certain general excellent principles, but he would have nothing to do with the fungous growth. And as we follow his career, we see the virtue in his strong reliance on Militarism, as an arm to keep in check the turbulent German masses, also, later, this same Militarism to be used to do battle for the German Empire.
¶ For many years, all manner of rosy democratic plans had been voiced by the Liberals.
The thing had been done to death. Every manner of political Utopia had been planned by theorists, but Bismarck met them all with his ironical speeches, and bided his time.
¶ Bismarck’s idea was that the only hope for German unity came through accepting the King of Prussia as ordained of heaven.
In his arguments, he ignored the masses, the villagers, the workers, the busy-bees, the regard for individual rights.
His whole programme seemed to the masses to be anti-Christ in conception, that is to say, it harked back to political paganism.
¶ It is very difficult for an American to comprehend this Prussian conception of Divine-right, as a political principle—but it should not be difficult from the point of human experience. Bismarck had no illusions concerning the power of the average man, and he held that the phrase “the people” was used by every political quack in Europe for any one of a thousand selfish motives.
Bismarck had absolutely no faith in the power of the average man to govern himself—much less to govern others!—or faith in the average man doing anything above the average, outside his own small trade or craft.
¶ Americans are accustomed to make much of an alleged saying of Lincoln: “No man is good enough to govern another without that man’s consent.” It is all a beautiful dream, false in theory and false in fact, belied by every record since the Lord drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.
Beginning with that stupendous episode, certain it is that this act of government was not carried out with, but against the will of the ruled; and the point at issue was not the supreme goodness of the ruler, but the power to station an angel with a flaming sword at the gates, toward which Adam ever after looked backward with longing eyes—but looked in vain!
¶ In the innumerable dynasties of Babylon, Nineveh, Egypt, Greece, Arabia, Armenia, what man ruled who did not force his leadership?
It is not in the nature of human beings to accept new ideas without hostile objection.
This holds true also in the evolution of governments, for all life is founded on struggle, and the man who would rule must force his leadership or remain unknown.
¶ Lincoln is absolutely in error, and his much-quoted words are folly. It is not a question of goodness, or badness, or fitness, on part of the man who has the ambition to rule, but it is very much a question of his courage, his craft or his cunning in compelling others to do his bidding.
Julius Cæsar was not selected to rule, but he selected himself; and so did Charlemagne, and Bismarck—and so Lincoln, himself.
¶ If some concession to the democratic system is sought on the ground that the voice of the people loudly “called” Lincoln, then it is to be set up that Lincoln on his part was one of the shrewdest political log-rollers this nation has ever seen; and if he did not originate the canvass that busies itself kissing the babies, congratulating the wives and shaking hands with the farmers, then at least Lincoln was an apt pupil.
It is inconceivable that, without his own high ambition, his long and painstaking endeavors to trim sail to every favoring gale (for example his shifting positions on the slavery question), he would have been nominated for President of these United States.
¶ It is an amiable conceit of human nature, looking backward, to profess to see what it blindly ignored, looking forward; and go to any penitentiary in America, ask the convicts, and you will find that, according to the stories, there are no guilty men behind the bars; invariably a peculiar complication of circumstances enabled the guilty man to escape, and justice was thereupon avenged by a human sacrifice; likewise in the United States Senate or in the House of Representatives, ask whom you please, “How came you to hold your seat?” and you will find no ambitious man. Some were forced to stand against their protests; others were away traveling when word was received, by telegraph, “You have been elected!” Still others appealed to the nominating committee, “For the love of God desist!”—but in vain.
Thus, without raising a finger to direct the movement of events, our leaders were selected by an omnipotent democracy to occupy the seats of the mighty.
¶ Truly, no man is good enough to rule another without that other man’s consent! Recast in terms of human experience, it would mean that we would go unruled; for no man yet has willingly selected his ruler, but has had dominion over him thrust upon him—even as Bismarck expressed his right to rule, backed by blood and iron.
Such is human nature since the world began; otherwise why was Christ, the gentlest ruler of all time, brought to the tree; Socrates forced to drink the hemlock by the very wise justice of his day; and Columbus called a madman because he wished to rule men’s minds with a new truth, showing clearly that the world is not square or flat, but round like a ball?
¶ Bismarck had the real clue—and forced his purpose through the power of his commanding personality.
29
In spite of the dyke-captain’s denunciation of French Constitutionalism, King Fr: Wm. IV marches with the Democrats!
¶ The uprising of ’48 was primarily a students’ demonstration; the hot-bloods of the universities, aided by various political enthusiasts, were intent on doing something—and doing it right away. There had been a preliminary meeting at Heidelberg, and this led to the Frankfort Convention; 600 disputatious delegates were going to build a liberal German constitution—at last!
¶ Thus, between 1815 and 1848 German Unity had been stimulated by a dozen causes, religious, commercial, literary, social—but the political lagged, for the fact is that about the last thing a man learns is to govern himself.
There was a rising sense of National faith, as predicted by Arndt, the poet of German brotherhood; also the call of blood, based on language; likewise a deep yearning, as yet unsatisfied, for a constitutional form of government, as against the warring, insolent 39 states.
¶ By 1848 there were Constitutions in 23 of the states; many of these documents illiberal to be sure; but nevertheless a step in representative government.
¶ But the Germans are a peculiar people. They wish to refer everything to ultimate philosophical causes; hence the fruitless debates of the Frankfort Convention, in which all manner of prospective Constitutions were tried by the formal rules of philosophy and ethics. Such questions as “What is a Federal state?” were angrily debated, and the changes rung on “federation of states.”
¶ After worlds of talking, unseen hands decided to offer to some powerful prince the German crown. How is that for democrats? William IV was the man selected.
¶ Prodded by Bismarck, who was always explosive and satirical about democratic crowns, William spunkily refused to “pick a crown out of the gutter!” His dignity, as a Hohenzollern was offended; but Bismarck was playing for larger stakes. William now went about canvassing the German princes for a crown; twenty-eight replied, one way or another; others, sticking to selfish interests, made no acknowledgment.
¶ Now Bismarck, bellowing like a mastiff, set up the cry that if William accepted that democratic crown out of the Frankfort gutter, Prussia would become involved in civil war. And it was a fact! The old-line Prussian military aristocracy wanted no “democratic gold, from the gutter, melted down with their old aristocratic gold of Frederick the Great”—and as a matter of fact, could you blame them? Were you there, at the time, and of the land-holding privileged class, you too would have been up in arms.
¶ Get this straight: William’s idea of “United Germany” simply meant that there should be a United Germany compounded of the thirty-nine clashing states, provided William’s beloved Prussia and not the detested Austria could front the movement.
¶ Despite all the noble souls who write poetry on brotherhood (and Germany has her patriots, God knows!), the irony of fate is such that all human alignments of a political nature must at some stage be spattered with mud.
¶ You see, henceforth for a quarter of a century, the realization of this much-prized but elusive and seemingly impossible Unity was to become more and more a game of politics in which the stakes were kingdoms, principalities, riches and honors unnumbered. In all card-games the result is not known till the last card is played; and in the present case the game was to be protracted twenty-four years. Chips were flung about in huge stacks, now piled on the Austrian side, now on the Prussian; and finally, it was to break up in a fight, in which Prussia had to tip over the table, violently seize the spoils, batter heads right and left, and beat off rival players with needle-guns.
¶ Come, come, there is no need of claiming too much for human nature. The grand prize was to be gained, ultimately, by seizure! Even the sober, common-sense William I, to whom it finally fell to be crowned German Emperor, saw the true situation early, after the church-building William IV had been gathered to his fathers. You will hear more of that as we go along.
When all intriguing, all card-stacking, all smiling, all smooth speeches no longer serve to conceal the real end of this amazing game of international politics, as between Prussia and Austria, then the thing to do is to bring on “blood and iron.” The very human end that Bismarck always had in mind was German liberation and Unity, by driving the Nation’s enemies beyond the borders.
¶ The best title to lands, the surest, the most incontrovertible—let purists and pietists rage as they may—is the sharp edge of the sword.
We shall see all that more clearly as the bloody years go by.
¶ In the critical year ’48, democratic mobs chased that old aristocrat and king-maker Metternich out of Vienna. Hungary, Bohemia and other intervening principalities went mad with excitement about “Liberty!” South Germany was in a turmoil.
William IV had again practically promised a Constitution, and had ordered the troops from Berlin; he placed a sign on his castle “National Property.” At this time the king let slip these fateful words, “Prussia is to be dissolved in Germany!” Bismarck, pained beyond expression, sent a letter to the King, full of expressions of loyalty. The King kept the letter on his desk all summer.
¶ The giant continued to protest. He now first used a subsidized press, called well-known men to write for the “North Prussian Gazette.”
For all this, he was dubbed “Junker,” “Hot Head,” “Reactionary,” but he thundered away like a battleship in action.
¶ The King was in the hands of the Liberals. Bismarck regarded this as a frightful situation. Bismarck, of the Old Regime, stood by the landlords and the titled folk. He had prodigious pride of station, hated to see the King make a fool of himself about paper Constitutions.
¶ In Berlin, along in March, there were amazing scenes. The democrats were crazy for blood; William shrank with horror against fighting his beloved Berliners. But this son, the future William I, who twenty-four years later was to gain the imperial German crown, was not so squeamish. The young prince gained the popular title “Cartridge-box prince,” equivalent to saying that he was willing to blaze away at “beloved Berliners,” or at any other citizens insane with political excitements hazardous to “Divine-right.”
¶ It is true that on March 18th this romantic William IV did indeed enter into negotiations with the insurgents; and—think of the mortification to one of Bismarck’s upper-class leanings!—did indeed do no less than wrap the German tricolor around his body and heading a democratic procession march around the streets, even going so far as to make a foolish speech in which he extolled the glories of the German democratic revolution.
¶ Here we might as well close the book, were it not for Bismarck. The surly dog of a king’s man flatly refused to vote “Aye!” in the Diet, where the hot-heads were intent on passing resolutions “commending the King for his loyalty to democratic principles,” in marching ’round town with the mob. Bismarck for the time being stood like a great mastiff at bay before wolves.
His terrific speech upholding royal prerogative made his early and sudden fame.
¶ It is a fact that with all their political ambitions, and their solemn belief that Germany’s political future was an open book, the Radicals in Prussia never guessed the way events were to turn out; nor for that matter the Radicals never desired the conquest of Germany by Prussia; therefore the subsequent astonishing rise of German Imperialism through Prussian domination, would have proved a most surprising revelation had the patriots of 1806 to 1848 returned from the other world, say in 1870, to view Prussia’s rise to glory.
¶ The political uprisings of 1848 had parallels in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany; and the excesses cleared the way for wiser action, in years to come.
¶ “The frenzy was a sort of tottering bridge between the French 1789-93 idea of democracy (that has to do with bloodshed and violence) and the purified conception expressed in modern constitutional democracy.”
¶ The German democratic uprisings of 1820, ’30 and ’48 were planned to win a certain type of civil liberty. They failed. The question was “equality,” as well as popular “machinery” of representation. How was it to be brought about? Modern “parliamentarism” had not as yet been involved.
¶ The patriots of ’48 had their Jacobin clubs in mild imitation of the French Revolution. Baden alone had 400, with a membership of 20,000. “Every tavern and brewery, (Dahlinger, German Revolution of ’49, p. 33), became a seat of democratic propaganda.”
See, there stands the mighty Hecker,
A feather in his hat,
There stands the friend of the people,
Yearning for the tyrants’ blood;
Big boots with thick soles,
Sword and pistol by his side.
¶ Copied from French models was the word “Citizen.” We hear of Citizen Brentano, Citizen Franz Sigel, Citizen Ostenhaus, Citizen Schimmelpfennig; some of these leaders were extremely radical; but Brentano endeavored to keep the Revolution from becoming a record of lawlessness after the French Revolution type. (Dahlinger, p. 100).
We cannot go into the various battles fought and lost. Many of the leaders were exiled, others shot. The patriots were as a rule young collegians, ambitious to rise in life, but sincerely holding to modified conceptions of French Constitutionalism. There were a large number of journalists in the thick of the struggle, also professors in high schools. These chosen leaders, by various oratorical tricks, drew political and social malcontents from every walk of life.
¶ In the end, Prussian troops put down the patriots.
¶ In ’48, all kings were under suspicion; it made no difference whether the king was a good king or a bad king; a king was a king, and all kings were bad.
The younger generation, especially became morbid over the word “Liberty!” What it really meant, in ’48, was that human nature should restrain itself, in order that all men might, immediately, enter into so-called God-given political rights.
The situation was somewhat analogous to that created after the Civil War, in the United States. Certain political fanatics, weeping over the Negroes, now demanded universal suffrage, literally, for the slaves, and in secret saw that by controlling the South, a “Black Republic” might be set up, side by side with our “White Republic.”
¶ Fraternity and equality—that was the cry in ’48—glossed over by politico-religious glamour, expressed in the idea that men “ought” do thus and so, and therefore “a people’s king” was in order. The people were to crown themselves.
For a thousand years the accepted political doctrine had been that kings held office by Divine-right, but now orators of the day harangued mobs proclaiming the literal belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
While, thus, the new apostles ridiculed the old idea of Divine-right, as attached to the acts of monarch, leaders of the people saw no inconsistency in asserting attributes of political divinity in the doings of the common people. Thus, a species of nebulous politico-religious humanism was pictured as the highest expression of political philosophy.
The individual wished to come into his own and the quicker the better. Reformers shocked landed proprietors, titled folk and office-holders under kings, by demanding unconditional surrender of the machinery of government; zealots urged revolts against all manner of constituted authority. The point was to gain for the barber, the tailor, the shoemaker and the blacksmith more life, more political experience, more freedom of choice—and right on the next tick of the clock!
¶ There is this about it: that the Frankfort Convention offered to William IV the “People’s Crown” as a direct symbol of belief in political idealism, not necessarily, however, the political idealism that tolerates a king but instead uses him as a popular signboard.
The Convention held that German unity “ought by right” to be established; therefore “once the grand Idea was set afloat” the cause “must by moral right come to pass.”
¶ Probably never before in the world was there formulated an outright, widespread expression of greater political idealism by men who called themselves patriots. There is a noble side to the sentiment, heightened the more as we realize the inevitable delusion of it all, translated into terms of human selfishness.
Germany, so the zealots proclaimed, should by blood and language be united; and in this respect orators of the hour were correct.
Germany had a manifest destiny, the speakers continued, but in this respect they were guided by faith rather than by experience. At least, the momentary end of “manifest destiny” was clearly the political function; to be one and united.
¶ So far good.
¶ Then why “should not” this noble German Idea be “accepted”? The word Idea was usually presented with a capital letter, in form of personification, so real had the thing become to German political orators.
Certainly every German was ready to testify that National Unity had been the one political dream of generations past and gone.
Had not the old wandering minstrels sung of the Fatherland, alas, too long delayed by miserable human selfishness! German bull-headedness insisted on insularity, on individualism, on particularism, on standing each petty monarch in his corner, with farce-comedy courtiers bowing and scraping while the rights of the peasant were forgotten. Assuredly, the day had come for this folly to cease. Then in Heaven’s name, why not a United Germany—here and now?
¶ The petty passions of rival princes acted as a bar to the acceptance of the glorious National Idea, spelled with the big “I.”
Intense particularisms preferred loyalty to local princes, fashions, customs, dialects rather than to lose the old ways in the larger life of the German Nation.
¶ But Bismarck did not lose heart.