Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire

by James Wycliffe Headlam

THE NEW EMPIRE.

1871-1878.

WITH the peace of Frankfort, Bismarck's work was completed. Not nine years had passed since he had become Minister; in that short time he completed the work which so many statesmen before him had in vain attempted. Nine years ago he had found the King ready to retire from the throne; now he had made him the most powerful ruler in Europe. Prussia, which then had been divided in itself and without influence in the councils of Europe, was the undisputed leader in a United Germany.

Fate, which always was so kind to Bismarck, was not to snatch him away, as it did Cavour, in the hour of his triumph; twenty years longer he was to preside over the State which he had created and to guide the course of the ship which he had built. A weaker or more timid man would quickly have retired from public life; he would have considered that nothing that he could do could add to his fame, and that he was always risking the loss of some of the reputation he had attained. Bismarck was not influenced by such motives. The exercise of power had become to him a pleasure; he was prepared if his King required it to continue in office to the end of his days, and he never feared to hazard fame and popularity if he could thereby add to the prosperity of the State.

These latter years of Bismarck's life we cannot narrate in detail; space alone would forbid it. It would be to write the history of the German Empire, and though events are not so dramatic they are no less numerous than in the earlier period. Moreover, we have not the material for a complete biographical narrative; there is indeed a great abundance of public records; but as to the secret reasons of State by which in the last resource the policy of the Government was determined, we have little knowledge. From time to time indeed some illicit disclosure, the publication of some confidential document, throws an unexpected light on a situation which is obscure; but these disclosures, so hazardous to the good repute of the men who are responsible and the country in which they are possible, must be treated with great reserve. Prompted by motives of private revenge or public ambition, they disclose only half the truth, and a portion of the truth is often more misleading than complete ignorance.

In foreign policy he was henceforward sole, undisputed master; in Parliament and in the Press scarcely a voice was raised to challenge his pre-eminence; he enjoyed the complete confidence of the allied sovereigns and the enthusiastic affection of the nation; even those parties which often opposed and criticised his internal policy supported him always on foreign affairs. Those only opposed him who were hostile to the Empire itself, those whose ideals or interests were injured by this great military monarchy—Poles and Ultramontanes, Guelphs and Socialists; in opposing Bismarck they seemed to be traitors to their country, and he and his supporters were not slow to divide the nation into the loyal and the Reichsfeindlich.

He deserved the confidence which was placed in him. He succeeded in preserving to the newly founded Empire all the prestige it had gained; he was enabled to soothe the jealousy of the neutral Powers. He did so by his policy of peace. Now he pursued peace with the same decision with which but two years before he had brought about a war. He was guided by the same motive; as war had then been for the benefit of Germany, so now was peace. He had never loved war for the sake of war; he was too good a diplomatist for this; war is the negation of diplomacy, and the statesman who has recourse to it must for the time give over the control to other hands. It is always a clumsy method. The love of war for the sake of war will be found more commonly among autocratic sovereigns who are their own generals than among skilled and practised ministers, and generally war is the last resource by which a weak diplomatist attempts to conceal his blunders and to regain what he has lost.

There had been much anxiety in Europe how the new Empire would deport itself; would it use this power which had been so irresistible for fresh conflicts? The excuse might easily have been found; Bismarck might have put on his banner, "The Union of All Germans in One State"; he might have recalled and reawakened the enthusiasm of fifty years ago; he might have reminded the people that there were still in Holland and in Switzerland, in Austria and in Russia, Germans who were separated from their country, and languishing under a foreign rule. Had he been an idealist he would have done so, and raised in Germany a cry like that of the Italian Irredentists. Or he might have claimed for his country its natural boundaries; after freeing the upper waters of the Rhine from foreign dominion he might have claimed that the great river should flow to the sea, German. This is what Frenchmen had done under similar circumstances, but he was not the man to repeat the crimes and blunders of Louis and Napoleon.

He knew that Germany desired peace; a new generation must grow up in the new order of things; the old wounds must be healed by time, the old divisions forgotten; long years of common work must cement the alliances that he had made, till the jealousy of the defeated was appeased and the new Empire had become as firm and indissoluble as any other State in Europe.

The chief danger came from France; in that unhappy country the cry for revenge seemed the only link with the pride which had been so rudely overthrown. The defeat and the disgrace could not be forgotten; the recovery of the lost provinces was the desire of the nation, and the programme of every party. As we have seen, the German statesmen had foreseen the danger and deliberately defied it. They cared not for the hostility of France, now that they need not fear her power. Oderint dum metuant. Against French demands for restitution they presented a firm and unchangeable negative; it was kinder so and juster, to allow no opening for hope, no loophole for negotiation, no intervention by other Powers. Alsace-Lorraine were German by the right of the hundred thousand German soldiers who had perished to conquer them. Any appearance of weakness would have led to hopes which could never be realised, discussions which could have had no result. The answer to all suggestions was to be found in the strength of Germany; the only diplomacy was to make the army so strong that no French statesman, not even the mob of Paris, could dream of undertaking single-handed a war of revenge.