¶ Thus, in various directions, the crack-brained revolutionists played their parts; nor should history overlook the contribution of the learned Dr. Faust, of Buckelburg, whose profound treatise, “Origin of Trousers,” was read in Paris as a sort of historical endorsement of the great democratic party that gloried in the equality, not to say liberty, exhibited by casting trousers aside.
¶ Now what do you think? This King’s Man, sprung up of a sudden, coming from his fox-hunting and his cow-sheds, hits right and left at the Jews! Yes, as against his “beloved Christians.” Here is a new note indeed—old yet new.
We had not supposed Jew-baiting a thing of the past; but in these tempestuous times it did seem that race-prejudice had no place in a plain attempt to keep a king’s crown.
¶ “I will pass,” Bismarck thundered, “to the question itself. I am no enemy of Jews, and if they are enemies to me, I will forgive them. Under certain circumstances, I even love them. I would grant them every right—save that of holding superior office posts in a Christian country.
¶ “I admit I am full of prejudices, sucked in with my mother’s milk. If I think of a Jew, face to face with me as a representative of the king’s sacred majesty, and have to obey him, I must confess that I should feel myself deeply broken and depressed. The sincere self-respect with which I now attempt to fulfil my duties toward the state would leave me! I share these feelings with the mass of large strata of people, and I am not ashamed of their society.”
¶ Thus, now at this supreme moment, when with voice of brass our Bismarck is making his entry into the world of affairs with his sharp words on Christians and Jews, and more especially with his uncompromising conception that kings are indeed the personal representatives of God on this earth, we do see that Bismarck stems from a fighting race. All his years, this Bismarck was a frightful hater.
¶ With the sorry figure of the world-oppressed Jew in our eyes and the malignancy of this new Jew-baiter, it is well that at the very outset this be made clear: That whatever Bismarck was or was not, at least he was no hypocrite. His words always fall like the wrath of God.
It is a solemn fact that he changed his point of view many, many times—even as you and I—but there is always the ring of sincerity about it that even the acid test of long time is unable to dissolve.