None but the incorrigibly childish can be inclined to ascribe to good luck a prosperous career extending over near twenty-three years, spent under the fiercest glare of the world's sunshine. No minister of any age was more bitterly assailed or opposed, even at the court of which he is now the acknowledged major domus in the manner of the Pepins and other Thum-Meiers of the Frankish monarchy. The king's brother, Prince Charles, detested the innovator whose opinions on the necessity of Austria being removed from membership in a remodelled German confederation, had for years leaked out from the despatch-boxes of the Foreign Office. Even the Junkers, whose dauntless leader he had been before and after the revolutionary events of 1848, shrank instinctively from a man who could not be credited with veneration for the Holy Alliance. It is remembered in Berlin that, on the nomination of one of them, well at court, a diplomatist of some standing, to the post of under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, the new member of the government confessed to his friends that he accepted the post in spite of Bismarck's "foreign" policy, and only in consideration of his contempt for parliamentarism. The queen, on the other hand, brought up in principles of constitutional government, and strongly attached to the English alliance, viewed with horror the bold pugilist who was daily assailing, not the persons only of the people's representatives, but some of the very foundations of every parliamentary edifice. Yet fiercer was the animosity shown him on every occasion by the Princess Royal of England, whose father had early taught her that a throne, to be safe, requires absolute solidity of institutions and agreement with the people, and who seriously trembled for the preservation of her children's future. Her husband expressed himself forcibly on a public occasion against some reactionary measures of the government. As the court, so were the liberal parties, so the people in general. When a fanatic, of the name of Kohn, attempted Bismarck's life in May, 1866, there were few persons who did not regret his failure. It may be said with truth that, for years, two men only understood a portion at least of his political views, and shared them. One was King William. Isolated as Herr von Bismarck was, he learned to rely implicitly on his sovereign's faithfulness, and has had no reason to regret his trust; for the king, though greatly his inferior in intellect, and far from unblest with legitimist predilections, was as firmly convinced as his minister that the confederation of German states, and Prussia herself, might be swept away unless placed upon a new footing, in one of those tornadoes which used periodically to blow across the continent of Europe. Thus, the new departure was as much his own programme as Bismarck's, and although he started (in 1861) with a hankering after "moral" rather than material conquests, he gradually understood the necessity for war, and has of a certainty "taken kindly," as the saying is, to material conquests of no inconsiderable magnitude.
None, even among Bismarck's modern sycophants, would pretend that their hero was the inventor of German unity. Passionately, though not over-wisely, had that ideal been striven after and suffered for by the best patriots in various parts of Fatherland, their vision becoming hazy just as often as they attempted to combine two opposite claims, that of a national texture, and that of a headship of Austria, which is non-German in a majority of its subjects, and alien in nearly all its interests. The Frankfort Parliament of 1848 marks the transition to a clear insight, inasmuch as its final performance, the constitution of 1849, placed the new crown on the King of Prussia's head. When offered, it was haughtily declined under the applause of Bismarck and his friends. The king refused because its origin lay in a popular assembly; in Bismarck's eyes its chief defect was that Prussia would be dictated to by the minor states. It was not until later, in 1851, when appointed Prussian ambassador to the Germanic Diet, chiefly because of his defence of the Treaty of Olmütz, which placed Prussia at the mercy of Austria, that he recognized the central point to be the necessity of thrusting Austria out of the confederation. It is proved now that he was sagacious enough also to perceive that such a wrench would not lead to a permanent estrangement, but that Austria, removed once and for all from her incubus-like and dog-in-the-manger position within the federate body, would become, in her own interest and that of European peace, New Germany's permanent ally.
These, then, became the two purposes of his active life ever since the day when, at the age of thirty-six, he obtained a share of the responsibility in the management of affairs as ambassador in Frankfort; first, to transfer Austria to a position in the East, and then to bestow upon the Fatherland political unity under Prussia, the royal prerogative in the latter remaining uncurtailed, so far as circumstances would allow. Thirty-four years have now elapsed. His opponents, in his own country or out of it, are at liberty to reiterate that he was born under a lucky star; that he merely took up the thread of German unification where the Frankfort Parliament of 1849 had let it drop; that anybody could have utilized such mighty armaments as those of Prussia with the same effect; that, given total disregard of principle or moral obligations, the result, in the hands of any political gamester, must have been what it was. There is something to be set against each of these assertions. For it was not the goddess of Fortune which pursued Bismarck in the ungainly shape of his former friend, that spiteful Prince Gortschakoff. The Frankfort assembly had left the Austrian riddle unsolved, and apparently insoluble. There was no hand in the country firm or skilful enough, no brain sufficiently hard or enlightened as to the needs of the day—not the king's, not Count Arnim's, nor certainly that of any other known to his contemporaries. And finally, when a public man so deftly gauges the mental capacities or extent of power of his antagonists—such as Count Beust, or Napoleon, or Earl Russell—that he knows exactly how far he can step with safety; then such a "gamester," however terrible the risks to which he may have exposed his country, is a great man. Complete unity of aims throughout, power given to carry them out, a wonderful absence of very serious mistakes, and finally a life sufficiently prolonged to admit of retrospection; in each of these respects the career of Bismarck resembles that of Mr. Disraeli.
The oft-told story of his diplomatic adventures at Frankfort, at Vienna, at Petersburg, and at Paris, and still more of his rulership in Prussia since 1862, and in Germany since 1866, has been uniform under two aspects. First, as already mentioned, in the stern continuity of his purposes. And secondly, in the mistaken view entertained regarding him at each successive period of his public life. Passing under review the whole career of this political phenomenon, you naturally pause before its strangest and its most humorous feature, viz., that, although living under the closest inspection, he was misunderstood year after year. Who would, consequently, deny the possibility at least, of Bismarck's being so misunderstood, by friend and foe, at this present moment?
While those despatches were written by him from Frankfort which Poschinger's researches have now exhumed, their writer was thought, by his partisans just as much as by his enemies, to be occupied solely with strengthening the "solidarity of conservative interests" and the supremacy of Austria, or with spinning the rope of steel which was to strangle all parliaments in Germany. And yet we know positively at present that, with increasing vigor day by day, did he warn his government against the scarcely concealed intention of Austria to "avilir la Prusse d'abord et puis l'anéantir" (Prince Schwartzenberg's famous saying in 1851); we observe with surprise how quickly legitimist leanings disappear behind his own country's interests; we stand aghast at the iron sway obtained by so young a man over the self-conceit of a vacillating, yet dogmatic and wilful, king (Frederick William IV.). It was he whose advice, given in direct opposition to Bunsen's, led to the refusal by Prussia of the Western alliance during the Crimean war. But he did not give this advice, as German liberals then believed, out of subservience to the autocrat of the North, whose assistance his party humbly solicited in order to exterminate liberalism. He persistently gave it to thwart Austria and to preserve Prussia (then in no brilliant military condition) from having to bear the brunt of Muscovite wrath, which he cunningly judged to be of more lasting importance in the coming struggles than the friendship of Western Europe. At a time when European politicians considered that he was the mouthpiece of schemers for a Russo-French alliance in his repeated and successful endeavors to gain Napoleon's good-will, he was adroitly sounding the French emperor's mind and character. He soon convinced himself that it was shallow and fantastic, and he built upon this conviction one of the most hazardous designs which ever originated in a brain observant of realities—that identical design which eventually led Prussia, some years later, first to Schleswig and then to Sadowa, with the "arbiter of Europe," as Napoleon was then called, stolidly looking on! And what is one to say of the four years of parliamentary conflicts (1862 to 1866), during which no one doubted but that his object in life and his raison d'être consisted in a reinstatement of the Prussian king on the absolute throne of his ancestors—a reaction from all that was progressive to the grossest abuses of despotism? All this time he was fighting a desperate battle against backstairs influences, which with true instinct were deprecating and counteracting his schemes of aggrandizement and national reorganization. It is clear, on looking back to that period which has left such indelible marks on the judgment of many well-meaning liberals, that his exaggerated tone of aggressive defence in the Prussian Landtag, the furious onslaught of his harangues, were intended to silence the tongues at court which denounced him as a demagogue and a radical. Paradoxical as it may sound, one may safely assert that nothing more effectually helped King William in his later foreign policy, than the opinion pervading all Europe in 1864 and 1866, that, having lost all hold upon the minds of his people, weakened and crippled in every sense of the word by Bismarckian folly, his Majesty could never strike a blow.
There was peace and concord in Germany between 1866 and 1877. Without becoming a liberal, and while opposing every attempt to outstep certain limits, Bismarck created and rather enjoyed an alliance with the majority formed in his favor by the national liberals and a moderate section of the conservatives. The German Empire, proclaimed by the German sovereigns at Versailles in January, 1871, was of his creation; and while established upon somewhat novel principles of federation by a parliamentary statute, it looked to outsiders like a home for progress and liberty. There were dangers lurking, it is true, beneath many a provision of the new constitution, such as the absence of an upper house, and the substitution in its stead of delegates from the separate governments, acting in each case according to instructions received, authorized to speak whenever they chose before the Reichstag, but deliberating separately and secretly both upon bills to propose, and upon replies to give to resolutions of the Reichstag. In fact, this Bundesrath, or federal council, represents the governing element under the emperor, with functions both administrative and legislative. By an artificial method of counting, Prussia, although she would command three-fifths of all the voters by virtue of her population, has less than one-third. Thus the possibility of an imbroglio between the governments is ever present, as well as that of a hasty vote in the popular assembly.
Bismarck before Paris.
It will never, probably, be quite understood why Prince Bismarck broke loose from a political alliance which, it would seem, had given no trouble whatever. In foreign affairs the house, in its immense majority, abstained from even the faintest attempt at interference. As for patronage, it has been said that no appointment was ever solicited for anyone by a member of the liberal party. From ministerial down to menial posts no claim was raised, no request preferred. If the section of moderate conservatives above mentioned has furnished a few ambassadors like Prince Hohenlohe, Count Münster, Baron Keudell, and Count Stolberg, that was by the chief's free will. Why, then, it has been asked, a change so absolute as the one the world has witnessed, from the saying of the chancellor in 1877, that his ideal was to have high financial duties on half a dozen objects and free trade on all others, to one of the most comprehensive tariffs in the world two years later? His own and his friends' explanations are lamentably deficient—"growing anæmia and impoverishment of the country," "drowning of native industry by foreign manufacturers," "corn imported cheaper than produced," and what not. The present writer, looking from afar, has always thought two motives to have been paramount in the chancellor's mind when he separated from the liberals and became, not a convinced, but a thorough-going protectionist. It is not said that these were his only motives. Chess-players know that each important move affects not only the figures primarily attacked, but changes the whole texture of the play.