¶ Unquestionably there was, incidentally, a large element of injustice in his plans and purposes, but what of it? Is there not such in your own life, and do you know any man whose career is not based on injustice either in some coarse, obvious or in some subtle way?
The world belongs only to those who do battle, and there is absolutely no chance for the man who will not fight!
All government is based on some form of injustice, all land tenure is stained with the sword, all “putting up” of one family, or individual, is based on “taking” something from some other family or individual.
Nor am I excepting the conquests of love itself, from time immemorial presented as a token of man’s romantic, softer side. For, if the hero does not “save” the heroine from the villain, to take her for himself, then for whom does he save her?
¶ The Bismarck struggle and the Bismarck triumph are as old as history—and as new as the career of the man of today who has achieved his heart’s desire.
The empire-maker Bismarck had his way because he was strong enough to have his way, and while cruelties in various forms, for the ends of statecraft, coexisted in him with many fine qualities, after all that simply means that he was a human being with impulses of various kinds—good and less good—in one heart. It is also an undeniable fact that as late as 1862 Bismarck was by the common crowd in Prussia hated and feared, regarded as Germany’s ogre of disaster.
¶ Here then is the whole thing in a nutshell: His strong conservative, not to say reactionary, sentiments did not blind him to the fact that he could do nothing without the “people,” whom politically he ignored in so far as their fitness for constructive government was concerned; but it was the “people,” and the “people” only, who could bring United Germany.
He realized the present impracticability of such a Union as he had in mind for his master, the King of Prussia; that to urge it too soon would simply bring a new revolution, and God knows there had been enough blood-letting for the sake of power in and around Prussia for lo! these one hundred years gone by.