For Bismarck’s dismissal there were various causes: differences in domestic policy and in foreign, and an absolute impasse on the question whether Bismarck’s fellow-Ministers were to be treated as colleagues or subordinates. “Bismarck,” said Caprivi afterwards, “had made a treaty with Russia by which we guaranteed her a free hand in Bulgaria and Constantinople, and Russia bound herself to remain neutral in a war with France. That would have meant the shattering of the Triple Alliance.” Moreover, the relations of Emperor and Chancellor were, at the last, disfigured by violent scenes, during which the Kaiser, according to the testimony of every one, showed the most astonishing dignity and restraint. But it may all be summed up in the words of the Grand Duke of Baden, reechoed by the Emperor to Hohenlohe, it had to be a choice between the dynasties of Hohenzollern and Bismarck. The end came to such a period of fear, agony, irony, despair, recrimination, and catastrophic laughter as only the pen of a Tacitus could adequately describe. Bismarck’s last years, both of power and retirement, were those of a lost soul. Having tried to intrigue with foreign Ambassadors against his Sovereign before his retirement, he tried to mobilize the Press against him after he had retired, and even stooped to join hands with his old rival, Waldersee, for the overthrow of his successor, Caprivi, being quite indifferent, complained the Kaiser bitterly, to what might happen afterwards. “It is sad to think,” said the Emperor of Austria to Hohenlohe, “that such a man can sink so low.”
When Bismarck was dismissed every one raised his head. It seemed to Hohenlohe to be at last a case of the beatitude: “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Holstein, the Under-Secretary, who, to the disgust of Bismarck, refused to follow his chief and who now quietly made himself the residuary legatee of the whole political inheritance of the Foreign Office, intended by Bismarck for his son, freely criticized his ex-chief’s policy in a conversation with Hohenlohe:
“He adduced as errors of Bismarck’s policy: The Berlin Congress, the mediation in China in favor of France, the prevention of the conflict between England and Russia in Afghanistan, and the whole of his tracasseries with Russia. As to his recent plan of leaving Austria in the lurch, he says we should then have made ourselves so contemptible that we should have become isolated and dependent on Russia.”
Bismarck, whom Hohenlohe visited in his retirement, with a strange want of patriotism and of perspicuity, pursued “his favorite theme” and inveighed against the envy (der Neid) of the German people and their incurable particularism. He never divined how much his jealous autocracy had fostered these tendencies. One may hazard the opinion that the Germans are no more wanting in public spirit and political capacity than any other nation; but if they are deprived of the rights of private judgment and the exercise of political ability, they are no more likely to be immune from the corresponding disabilities. Certainly, in no country where public men are accustomed to the exercise of mutual tolerance and loyal cooperation by the practise of Cabinet government, and where public opinion has healthy play, would such an exhibition of disloyalty and slander as is here exhibited be tolerated, or even possible. When in 1895 Caprivi succumbed to the intrigues of the military caste and the Agrarian Party, Hohenlohe, now in his seventy-sixth year, was entreated to come to the rescue, his accession being regarded as the only security for German unity. To his eternal credit, Hohenlohe accepted; but, if we may read between the lines of the scanty extracts here vouchsafed from the record of a Ministerial activity of six years, we may conjecture that it was mostly labor and sorrow. He was opposed to agrarianism and repressive measures, and anxious “to get on with the Reichstag,” seeing in the forms of public discussion the only security for the public peace. But “the Prussian Junkers could not tolerate South German Liberalism,” and the most powerful political caste in the world, with the Army and the King on their side, appear to have been too much for him. His retirement in 1900 marks the end of a fugitive attempt at something like a liberal policy in Germany, and during the fourteen years which have elapsed since that event autocracy has held undisputed sway in Germany. The history of these latter years is fresh in the minds of most students of public affairs, and we will not attempt to pursue it here.
CHAPTER III
GERMAN CULTURE
THE ACADEMIC GARRISON
Nothing is so characteristic of the German nation as its astonishing single-mindedness—using that term in a mental and not a moral sense. Since Prussia established her ascendency the nation has developed an immense concentration of purpose. If the military men are not more belligerent than the diplomatists, the diplomatists are not more belligerent than the professors. A single purpose seems to animate them: it is to proclaim the spiritual efficacy, and the eternal necessity, of War.
Already there are signs that the German professors are taking the field. Their mobilization is apparently not yet complete, but we may expect before long to see their whole force, from the oldest Professor Emeritus down to the youngest Privat-dozent, sharpening their pens against us. Professors Harnack, Haeckel, and Eucken have already made a reconnaissance in force, and in language which might have come straight from the armory of Treitschke have denounced the mingled cupidity and hypocrisy with which we, so they say, have joined forces with Muscovite “barbarism” against Teutonic culture. This, we may feel sure, is only the beginning.
German professors have a way of making history as well as writing it, and the Prussian Government has always attached the greatest importance to taking away its enemy’s character before it despoils him of his goods. Long before the wars of 1866 and 1870 the seminars of the Prussian universities were as busy forging title-deeds to the smaller German states and to Alsace-Lorraine as any medieval scriptorium, and not less ingenious. In the Franco-Prussian War the professors—Treitschke, Mommsen, Sybel—were the first to take the field and the last to quit it. Theirs it was to exploit the secular hatreds of the past. Even Ranke, the nearest approach to “a good European” of which German schools of history could boast, was implacable. When asked by Thiers on whom, the Third Empire having fallen, the Germans were continuing to make war, he replied, “On Louis XIV.”