To make assurance doubly sure, Bismarck leaving the journalist, did a little detective work. In the garden, from a secret place, he could see the French minister’s house. In half an hour, he spied the journalist ringing the French minister’s doorbell.
“Ah, ha!” was Bismarck’s comment.
¶ What did this giant not do to help his beloved Prussia, and to humiliate his detested Austria?
One day, he found a fiery anti-Prussian review in an Austrian member’s desk. He thought nothing of ransacking a desk. Richelieu had a system of espionage unrivaled in history. Bismarck in this respect is the Cardinal’s close second. Each man regarded himself as a patriot. Bismarck was obstinately loyal to Prussia. Her aggrandizement became henceforth his life’s passion. Nay, Bismarck did not ask that the member be dismissed! That would be punishment too coarse. Instead, Bismarck decided that the best revenge would be to print the address piecemeal and thus keep the member in suspense;—something like twisting the cords a little each day till the victim meets strangulation in frightful form.
¶ During the eight years that Bismarck was a member of the freakish Frankfort Diet set up by Austria to “rule” the quarreling thirty-nine German states, Bismarck, the Prussian giant, came to see the necessity of controlling the press.
¶ Frankfort stupidities decided Bismarck to appeal directly to the common people (whom also he politically despised!) and hence we find that he now meets Austria’s hired journalists by urging the utmost press-freedom. “In this,” says Lowe, “Bismarck was an opportunist,” as he often was. “I learned something,” he used to say when his enemies accused him of shifting ground.
¶ Bismarck now demanded “open discussion” of German policies; saw that hired press agents vigorously set forth the Prussian side. In this connection it is interesting to draw a parallel between Bismarck’s ideas of journalism, in 1852, and the American conception (1915).
¶ “In the press, truth will not come to light through the mists conjured into life by the mendacity of subsidized newspapers, until the material wherewith to oppose all the mysteries of the Bund (Frankfort) shall be supplied to the Prussian press, with unrestricted liberty to use it.”
¶ This idea is precisely what extremists like Roosevelt set up (1915), battling against “trusts,” endeavoring to make them audit their books on the curbstone! So, what is new under the sun?