A BALL AT BISMARCK’S.
TO A PRUSSIAN DIPLOMATIST.
Petersburg, 1st July, 1859.
I thank you for your letter, and hope you will not allow the first to be the last. Among the matters which interest me, the Frankfurt negotiations, next to immediate necessities, occupy the first place with me, and I am very much obliged for any news from thence. I regard our policy, up till now, as correct; but I look mournfully into the future. We have armed ourselves too soon and too strongly, and the heavy load which we have assumed is dragging us down an inclined plane. There will be intervention in order to occupy the Landwehr, as people do not like simply to send them back home. We then shall not even be Austria’s reserve, but shall sacrifice ourselves directly for Austria, and relieve her of the stress of war. The first shot on the Rhine brings with it a German war as the chief circumstance, from its threatening Paris. Austria will get breathing time; and will she make use of her freedom to aid us in playing a brilliant part? Will her efforts not rather be directed so to shape the measure and form of our success as it may serve specific Austrian interests? If we are worsted, the Federal States will all desert us, like faded plums in the wind; and each State, the capital of which receives a French garrison, will save itself in a patriotic way on the raft of a new Rhenish Confederation. Perhaps it will be possible to attain a combination of measures on the part of the three great neutral Powers. We are too expensively armed to be able to wait the result as patiently as England and Russia, and our intervention will scarcely bring to light that quadrature of the circle—a peace basis agreeable to France and Austria. The public voice in Vienna is said to be very bitter against their own Government, and is stated to have reached the pitch of hissing their national hymn. Our enthusiasm for war seems also to be only of a moderate character, and it will be difficult to convince the nation that war and its evils are an unavoidable necessity. The proof of this is too artificial for the comprehension of a Landwehr man.
In a business point of view, my position here is very pleasant; but there is a great deal to do to manage forty thousand Prussians, for whom one has to be police, advocate, judge, assistant, and councillor—every day there are twenty to fifty signatures, without passports. I am still, as it were, in camp, with a few beds, towels, and caps, bought in a hurry; without cook and kitchen, as all utensils are wanting—and, in all this heat, without summer clothing! My house is large enough, and handsomely situated on the Newa; three great saloons, two of them larger than those at Seufferheld’s; I have had the Chancery placed in one, with a good flooring, looking-glass doors, and silver chandeliers. All that I have as yet received from Frankfurt are my weapons, unfortunately packed under some crown chandeliers in such a way that three guns were quite broken to pieces, and the barrels ruined. I wonder what wiseacre packed them! If the rest of the things have been packed so, I may perhaps congratulate myself if they have been lost. The insurance is small, if the plate is with it; the premium high, because the fool has insured against “war risk!”
Hohendorf, 3d February, 1860.
I still hear with pleasure, and with a sort of longing for home, all intelligence concerning the state of things and persons at Frankfurt; and when I read the papers, I often feel a desire to hurry into the midst of battles at the sessions. The campaign over the war constitution was capital. Let them proceed openly and daringly to urge our demands; they are too just not finally to be, although slowly, recognized. The Sovereign States, by grace of the Rhenish Confederation and the Diet, can not rely upon their particularity for any duration against the stream of events. As in my recovery, there may occur a time of standing-still and relapse occasionally; but it still will go forward, when we courageously dare and are not ashamed of our daring any more, but openly proclaim in the Diet, in the press, and, above all, in our Chambers, that which we desire to represent in Germany, and what the Federation has hitherto been for Prussia—an Alp and a noose about our necks, with the end of it in the hands of the enemy, that only waits the proper moment to run it tight. But enough of politics.