¶ After all is said, history is not the record of some far-off manifest destiny, but instead is merely the sordid story of human nature in action, reciting at best the littleness that appertains to men’s ways, with now and then the unrealized expression of some fleeting larger hope.
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His Versailles masterpiece reduced to its final analysis, in terms of human nature; wherein it is made clear that Bismarck knew his German peasant as well as his Prussian King.
¶ The core of human interest around which Bismarck shaped his stupendous politico-military drama, in order that, in the end, William might become German Emperor, was neither an appeal to parliaments nor to armies, but a reply to a peculiar psychological something in the Teuton character that makes respect for the strong hand.
It is only in the largest way that this fact may be made clear. It escapes categorical statement;—and can best be glimpsed behind the history of events, from the psychological rather than the physical side.
¶ Bismarck manipulated an invisible but very real human force, made it the breath of life for his plans!
¶ That he warped on the Nineteenth Century the old Holy Roman Empire conception of Divine-right is an amazing politico-military fact.
It was only after many brilliant achievements that, at the height of his power, Cæsar linked himself with the gods. Cæsar’s earlier life knew no such pretensions, but as he climbed the dizzy heights of fame, at last the day came when his kinship with the immortal gods themselves alone satisfied his inordinate ambitions; and from that time forth Divine-right became an established fact in the theological-political code of kings; and thus on, down through the Middle Ages, until the French Revolution destroyed confidence in the old-line absolute monarch, as vicegerent of Christ on this earth.
¶ However, that Otto von Bismarck, the blond Pomeranian giant, warped on the Nineteenth Century the Imperial Cæsarian idea of the Divine-right of kings is not the final fact of his work. The inner fact is that he urged the King’s authority as a foil against the mob-idea of the French Revolution. The liberty-crazed masses needed a strong hand at this time.