Somewhat later the Minister of Marine, General von Caprivi, received a delicate intimation that the Kaiser thought a soldier was out of place in charge of the navy, and he also promptly but gracefully resigned, and accepted the command of an army corps instead with cheerful obedience. It is a great gift to know when and how to get out, and Caprivi did it so amiably and intelligently that the Kaiser made a mental note of him as a good man to rely upon when the time should come.
General Bronsart von Schellendorf similarly resigned the War Ministry. He was a descendant of one of the large colony of Huguenot families which took refuge in Berlin after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—and it was a strange freak of Fate’s irony which, in 1871, sent him as Colonel out from the German headquarters before Sedan to convey a demand for surrender to the French Emperor. Curiously enough he was succeeded now as Minister of War by another descendant of these exiled French Protestants, General von Verdy du Vernois, the ablest military writer of his generation, a notably clever organizer and a deservedly popular man.
Neither von Verdy nor Waldersee, who succeeded to Moltke’s proud position as Chief of the General Staff, remained long in their new posts. The world had nothing but vague surmises as to the causes of their retirement, and, noting that they still retain the friendly regard of their sovereign, did not dally long with these. Here again the contrast forces itself upon public attention, for these two good soldiers and able administrators neither sought interviews with travelling correspondents in which to vent their grievances, nor inspired spiteful attacks in provincial newspapers against their young chief. They went loyally out of office, as they had entered it, and kept their silence.
Thus throughout the public service, civil and military alike, these changes went forward—the greybeards who had helped to create the Empire on the field or in the council-room, one by one stepping down and out to make room for the new generation—but Bismarck, though becoming more and more isolated, clung resolutely to his place. It was no secret to him that the Kaiser’s principal advisers and friends were keen to throw him out of the Chancellorship; it must have long been apparent to him that the Kaiser was accustoming his mind to thoughts of a Berlin without Bismarck. But the Iron Chancellor had neither the simple dignity of Moltke nor the shrewd suavity of Caprivi. He would not leave until he had been violently thrust forth, and even then he would stand on the doorstep and shout.
The opponents of Bismarck had long been gathering their forces for a grand attack. Their difficulty had been the unwillingness of the Kaiser definitely to give his assent to the overthrow of the great man. Often, in moments of impatience at the autocratic airs assumed by Bismarck and his son, William had seemed on the point of turning down his thumb as a signal for slaughter. But there always would come a realization of how mighty a figure in German history Bismarck truly was—and perhaps, too, some modified reassertion of the tremendous personal influence with which for years the Chancellor had magnetized him. Almost to the end the young man had recurring spasms of subjection to this old ideal of his youth. Even while he was sporting his British ensign in Greek waters, and showing to the whole world how completely the breach between him and English royalty had been healed, he salved his conscience, as it were, by addressing enthusiastic and affectionate despatches to Bismarck from every new stopping-place on those classic shores.
But now, in January of 1890, the long-looked-for opportunity came. The natural term of the Reichstag elected in 1887—the last one chosen for only three years’ service—was on the point of expiration. The anti-Socialist penal laws would lapse in September of 1890 unless renewed either by this dying Reichstag or, without delay, by its successor. Prince Bismarck was, of course, committed to their prompt and emphatic renewal. His enemies—another term for William’s new friends—had secretly been preparing for the defeat of these laws in the Reichstag, and now, in the middle of the month, found that they had secured an absolute majority. They conveyed this fact to the Kaiser, with the obvious corollary that the time had arrived for him to take the popular lead in his Empire, and make an issue on this question with his Chancellor. William saw the point, and reluctantly took the decisive step.
Space permits only the most cursory glance at this parliamentary battlefield, whereon Bismarck had waged so many rough Berserker fights, and which now was to see his complete annihilation.
The Reichstag at Berlin is by no means powerful in the sense that Parliament is in London or Congress in Washington. It is a convention of spectacled professors, country nobles, and professional men desirous of advertisement or the pretence of employment, with a sprinkling of smart financiers and professional politicians who have personal ends to serve. They play at legislation—some seriously, others not—but as a rule what they do and say makes next to no difference whatever. They have not even the power of initiating legislation. That function belongs to the Bundes-rath or Federal Council, which means the Prussian Ministry, which in turn meant Bismarck. His historic conception of law-making was to combine by bribes and threats a sufficient number of the fragmentary parties to constitute a majority, and to use this to pass his measures as far as it would go. Then he would swing around, create a different majority out of other groups, and carry forward another line of legislation. In turn he had been at the head of every important political faction and the enemy of each, and if he was unable to get his way through one combination always managed sooner or later to obtain it by a new shaking-up of the dice.
Parliamentary institutions were not always at this low estate in Prussia. Three hundred years ago the Brandenburg Diet was a strong and influential body, which stoutly held the purse-strings and gave the law to sovereigns. The Hohenzollerns broke it down, first by establishing and fostering Stände, or small local diets, to dispute its power and jurisdiction, and then, in 1652, by the Great Elector boldly putting his mailed heel on it as a nuisance. It still lingered on in a formal, colourless, ineffective fashion until in the time of Frederic William I, when it was contemptuously kicked out of sight. That stalwart despot explained this parting kick by saying: “I am establishing the King’s sovereignty like a rock of bronze;” and, whatever its composition, there the rock stood indubitably in all men’s sight for much more than a century, with neither parliaments to shake its foundations nor powerful ministers to crumble away its sides.
Bismarck had made it a condition of his acceptance of office in 1862 that he would govern Prussia without a Parliament. When the fortune of war and the federation of the states enlarged the scope of his responsibilities to the limits of the new Empire, he proceeded upon the same autocratic lines. There was a greater necessity, it is true, of pretending to defer to the parliamentary idea, but he never dissembled his disgust at this necessity. He bullied the leaders of the opposition factions with such open coarseness, imputing evil and dishonest motives, introducing details of personal life which his spies had gathered, and using all the great powers at his command to insult and injure, that a large proportion of the educated and refined gentlemen of Germany, who should have been its natural political leaders, either declined to enter the Reichstag at all, or withdrew, disheartened and humiliated, after a brief term of service. All this reflected, and brought down in embodied form into our own times, the traditional attitude of the Hohenzollerns toward the poor thing called a Parliament.