¶ And Bismarck was intensely human!
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The elements of his greatness number three—Here read two, but the third and greatest is yet to come.
¶ Now you ought to begin to understand the man in his naked reality; his elements of greatness compounded with crying frailties—but his very faults endear him to us the more, because they show him brother to the weak.
¶ Threefold a great man, great in ambition and courage; greater in compelling victory through years of patient and moody planning; but greatest of all in his downfall, when turning his back upon the blaze of glory, he retires to the country to view the mighty forests, and to take long walks with his dogs over the fields, communing with himself, the winds of heaven, and the immortal stars.
¶ His time is now very short; the sands have all but run out of the glass. For the first time in many, many years, he now belongs to himself once more—on the very edge of the tomb—before the sun is to go out forever—and the long night settles down.
¶ Does he still believe in his old ikon? In the secret chamber of his heart does he still believe that God was behind it all, on the side of the needle-guns of Sadowa?
¶ The justifications of earth ofttimes betray themselves in strange superstitions, and there always was a large strain of superstition compounded in the great mind of this great man; not unlike the superstitions of a brother conqueror, Julius Cæsar, who was wont to crawl on his belly to the Temple, there to return thanks to the immortal gods for success in battle.
¶ To his dying day, Otto von Bismarck held fast that he was the instrument of God, and that God did it all, through him. Flesh and blood needs some explanation for its ways—and it may be that one interpretation is on the whole as good as another. With Bismarck the ikon was God.