Then there are other European events which are wont to take place at even intervals, the Polish uprisings, for instance. Formerly we had to expect one every eighteen or twenty years. Possibly this is one reason why Russia wishes to be so strong in Poland that she may prevent them. Then there are the changes of government in France which also used to happen every eighteen or twenty years; and no one can deny that a change of government in France may bring about such a crisis that every interested nation may wish to be able to intervene with her full might—I mean only diplomatically, but with a diplomacy which is backed by an efficient army close at hand.
I assume on the strength of my purely technical-diplomatic judgment, which is based on my experience, that these are the intentions of Russia and that she has no wish to comply with the somewhat uncouth threats and boastings of the newspapers. And, if this is so, then there is surely no reason why we should look more gloomily into the future now than we have done at any time during the past forty years. The Oriental crisis is undoubtedly the most likely to occur, and in this our interests are only secondary. When it happens, we are in a position to watch whether the powers, who are primarily interested in the Mediterranean and the Levante, will make their decisions and come to terms, if they choose, or go to war with Russia about them. We are not immediately called upon to do either. Every great power which is trying to influence or to restrain the policies of other countries in matters which are beyond the sphere of its interests is playing politics beyond the bounds which God has assigned to it. Its policy is one of force and not of vital interests. It is working for prestige. We shall not do this. If Oriental crises happen, we shall wait before taking our position until the powers who have greater interests at stake than we have declared themselves. There is, therefore, no reason, gentlemen, why you should look upon our present situation with unusual gravity, assuming this to be the cause of our asking for the mighty increase of our armaments which the military bill contemplates. I should like to separate the question of reëstablishing the Landwehr of the second grade, in short the big military bill and the financial bill, from the question of our present situation. It has to do, not with a temporary and transient arrangement, but with the permanent invigoration of the German empire.
That no temporary arrangement is contemplated will be perfectly clear, I believe, when I ask you to survey with me the dangers of war which we have met in the past forty years without having become nervously excited at any one time.
In the year 1848, when many dikes and flood gates were broken, which until then had directed the peaceful flow of countless waters, we had to dispose of two questions freighted with the danger of war. They concerned Poland and Schleswig-Holstein. The first shouts after the Martial days were: war with Russia for the rehabilitation of Poland! Soon thereafter the danger was perilously near of being involved in a great European war on account of Schleswig-Holstein. I need not emphasize how the agreement of Olmütz, in 1850, prevented a great conflagration—a war on a gigantic scale. Then there followed two years of greater quiet out of general ill feeling, at the time when I first was ambassador in Frankfort. In 1853 the earliest symptoms of the Crimean War made themselves felt. This war lasted from 1853 to 1856, and during this whole time we were near the edge of the cliff, I will not say the abyss, whence it was intended to draw us into the war. I remember that I was obliged at that time, from 1853 to 1855 to alternate like a pendulum, so to speak, between Frankfort and Berlin because the late king, thanks to the confidence he had in me, used me as the real advocate of his independent policy whenever the insistence of the western powers that we too should declare war on Russia grew too strong, and the opposition of his cabinet too flabby for his liking. Then the play was staged—I do not know how often—when I was called back here and ordered to write for His Majesty a more pro-Russian dispatch, and Mr. von Manteuffel resigned, and I requested to be instructed by His Majesty to follow Mr. von Manteuffel, after the dispatch was gone, into the country or anywhere else, and to induce him to resume his office. Yet each time Prussia, as it was then constituted, was hovering on the brink of a great war. It was exposed to the hostility of the whole of Europe, except Russia, if it refused to join in the policies of the west European powers, and, if it did, it was forced to break with Russia, possibly for a very long while, because the defection of Prussia would probably have been felt very painfully in Russia.
During the Crimean War, therefore, we were in constant danger of war. The war lasted till 1856, when it was at last concluded by the treaty of Paris, and we found, in the Congress of Paris a sort of Canossa prepared for us, for which I should not have assumed the responsibility, and against which I vainly counseled at the time. We were not at all obliged to play the part of a greater power than we were, and to sign the treaties made there. But we were dancing attendance with the view of being permitted to sign the treaty. This will not again happen to us.
That was in 1856, and as early as in 1857 the problem of Neuchâtel was again threatening us with war. This did not become generally known. In the spring of that year I was sent to Paris by the late king to negotiate with Emperor Napoleon concerning the passage of Prussian troops in an attack upon Switzerland. Everyone who hears this from me will know what this would have meant in case of an understanding, and that it could have become a far-reaching danger of war, and might have involved us with France as well as with other powers. Emperor Napoleon was not unwilling to agree. My negotiations in Paris, however, were terminated because his majesty the king in the meanwhile had come to an amicable understanding in the matter with Austria and Switzerland. But the danger of war, we must agree, was present also during that year.
While I was on this mission in Paris, the Italian War hung in the air. It broke out a little more than a year later and came very near drawing us into a big general war of Europe. We went so far as to mobilize, and we should undoubtedly have taken the field, if the peace of Villafranca had not been concluded, somewhat prematurely for Austria, but just in time for ourselves, for we should have been obliged to wage this war under unfavorable circumstances. We should have turned this war, which was an Italian affair, into a Franco-Prussian war, and its cessation, outcome, and treaty of peace would no longer have depended on us, but on the friends and enemies who stood behind us.
Thus we came into the sixties without the clouds of war having cleared from the horizon for even one single year.
Already in 1863 another war threatened hardly less ominously, of which the people at large knew little, and which will only be appreciated when the secret archives of the cabinets will be made public. You may remember the Polish uprising of 1863, and I shall never forget the morning calls which I used to receive at that time from Sir Andrew Buchanan, the English ambassador, and Talleyrand, the French representative, who tried to frighten me out of my wits by attacking the Prussian policy for its inexcusable adherence to Russia, and who used rather a threatening language with me. At noon of the same days I then used to have the pleasure of listening in the Prussian diet to somewhat the same arguments and attacks which the foreign ambassadors had made upon me in the morning. I suffered it quietly, but Emperor Alexander lost his patience, and wished to draw his sword against the plotting of the western powers. You will remember that the French forces were then engaged with American projects and in Mexico, which prevented France from taking a vigorous stand. The Emperor of Russia was no longer willing to stand the Polish intrigues of the other powers, and was ready to face events in our company and to go to war. You will remember that Prussia was struggling at that time with difficult interior problems, and that in Germany the leaven had begun to work in the minds of the people, and the council of the princes in Frankfort was under contemplation. It may be readily granted, therefore, that the temptation for my gracious master was very strong to cut, and thus to heal, his difficult position at home by agreeing to a military undertaking on a colossal scale.
At that time war of Prussia and Russia together against those who were protecting the Polish insurrection against us would undoubtedly have taken place if his majesty had not recoiled from the thought of solving home difficulties, Prussian as well as German, with foreign help. We declined in silence, and without revealing to the other German powers who had hostile projects against us the reasons which had determined our course. The subsequent death of the King of Denmark changed the trend of thought of everybody interested. But all that was needed to bring about the great coalition war in 1863 was a "Yes" instead of a "No" from His Majesty the King in Gastein. Anybody but a German minister would perhaps have counseled affirmatively, from reasons of utility and opportunism in order to solve thereby our home difficulties. You see neither our own people nor foreigners really have a proper appreciation of the amount of national loyalty and high principles which guides both the sovereign and his ministers in the government of German states.