The voice in the Wilderness proclaims the God-given glory of Kings, vicegerents of Christ on this earth.
¶ The French Revolution brought to Paris adventurers and patriots from every part of Europe. Among these was a young Corsican who, with his mother and sisters, had been driven out of his native island. This man, Napoleon Bonaparte, was in the course of a few years to become Emperor of France and Master of Europe.
¶ There is a classical picture of young Napoleon, at the time of the early riots in Paris.
Standing on a curbstone, to one side, he watches the passing of liberty-crazed mobs, armed with pikes—the self-same common people on whose shoulders Napoleon himself was later to ride into amazing power.
¶ Thus, likewise, in another time of political crisis, (1847-48) men were flocking to Berlin to debate anew the well-worn theme, “The Rights of Man.”
Quietly looking on was another man of destiny, Otto von Bismarck, burly dyke-captain of the Elbe, up to that time a farmer on his ancestral estates in Pomerania. What this young blond giant saw before him was somewhat of this extraordinary order:
¶ The universal theme was once more “Liberty,” and the din not only in Berlin but throughout German states, was ear-splitting. Of course, there were patriots who stood on broad National grounds, but the purely personal point of view was still very much in evidence.
Every man had his say, often accompanied by brandishing of fists or the laying on of canes; all dignified by the name “patriotism,” but in truth it exhibited the old struggle of human nature for supremacy.
The masses were fighting to unseat kings, whose dogma of “Divine-right” had by the French Revolution been shown to be only insidious political quackery, in the past sustained largely by the sword. The common people were wrestling to grasp this monarchic sword away, and here and there had already seized the hilt or the blade—it mattered not which!—and the dynasties of Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Wittelsbach, and all the lesser swarm, were suddenly put on the defensive. Hotly pursued sovereigns kept their heads only by some concession to popular fury; again, by flight. The people were intoxicated with the wine of their newly found power!
¶ And what would they do with their new bauble, liberty, fraternity and equality? The centre of the stage was occupied by a struggling mass of kings, fighting not only for their crowns but for the very clothes on their backs! There were poets in fine frenzy declaiming; grenadiers firing muzzle-loaders; priests invoking the wrath of God; kings shouting out that they were the only accredited earthly representatives of Heaven; historians hotly insisting that all were in error, and that the scroll showed this or that; law-givers pleading for the old forms; lunatics laughing in demoniacal glee; peasants armed with pitchforks jabbing right and left; demagogues calling on Heaven to witness their lofty and disinterested leadership; while around the edges of the scene mountebanks, camp-followers, renegades, whores and political blacklegs, were waiting for their share of the plunder, let victory fall where it may.