The money cost turns out to be the stupendous sum of five thousand millions of francs.
¶ Literary and journalistic France, in book, editorial and oration made a great outcry at the moment, declaring dramatically that Prussian barbarians had decided “to bleed France white”—attributing to Bismarck a figure of speech borrowed from the butcher’s block! Well and good, but France paid the indemnity in surprisingly short time; and had many millions left to go on her way rejoicing, had it not been for the miserable obsession, “Ravanche!” that kept her in hot water for years.
¶ Bismarck was correctly quoted in this respect: That gold is as necessary in war as gunpowder; and the best way to keep a quarrelsome would-be Napoleon out of war is to empty his pockets.
¶ The Jewish feature, however, shows Bismarck, through and through; and we could not present him without this surprising scene. Make the most of it.
¶ “I do not much like the piety that proclaims itself,” said Louis XIII. A similar remark may be made concerning Bismarck’s life-long belief that the Lord was on Bismarck’s side—Jew-baiter and all.
¶ “The longer I work in politics,” he once remarked, summing up his many political difficulties, “the smaller my belief in human calculation. I look at the affair according to my human understanding, but gratitude for God’s assistance so far raises in me the confidence that the Lord is able to turn our errors to our own good; that I experience daily, to my wholesale humiliation.”