Action speaks for itself. “When I hear of ministers in parliamentary countries making long speeches to defend their policy, it always strikes me that there has been very little policy; and I am reminded of those big dishes of stew which our frugal German housewives serve up on Mondays with the remnants of Sunday's dinner—lots of cabbage and carrots, making a great show, with small scraps of meat.”
Action fascinates the masses as much as speech,[32] for it demands courage, which is of all virtues the rarest.[33] Pastor Stocker, of anti-Semitic renown, relates that Bismarck once asked him whether there were any text in the Bible saying, “All men are cowards?” “No, you are thinking of the text: 'The Cretans are all liars,'” said Stocker. “Liars—cowards, it comes to much the same thing,” answered Bismarck; “but it's not true only of the Cretans;” and he then asked Stocker whether the latter had met many thoroughly brave men. The Court pastor replied that there might be several definitions of courage; but Bismarck interrupted him with a boisterous laugh: “Oh, yes, the moral courage of letting one's face be smacked rather than fight a duel; I have met plenty of men who had that.”
Bismarck's own courage is that of a mastiff, and in early life it often got him into scrapes. We have remarked how some of these might have been detrimental to his whole career. Whilst he was doing his One Year Voluntariate in the Prussian Light Infantry, he paid a visit to Schleswig, which was then under Danish rule. One day, wearing his uniform, he was seated in a Brauerei when he overheard two gentlemen holding a political conversation and expressing extreme Liberal sentiments. With amazing impudence he walked up to their table and requested that: “If they must talk nonsense, they would use an undertone.” The two Schleswigers told the Junker to mind his own business, whereupon Bismarck caught up a beer-jug and dashed its contents in their faces. This affair caused very serious trouble. Bismarck was taken into custody and ordered out of the country. On joining his regiment he was placed under arrest again, and there was an interchange of diplomatic notes about him. He only escaped severe punishment through powerful intercession being employed at Court on his behalf.
Some years later when Bismarck had been appointed to the Legation at Frankfort (a post which he owed to the delight with which Frederick William IV. had read his bluff speeches in the Prussian Lower House), he was present at a public ball, where a member of the French Corps Législatif, M. Jouvois de Clancy, was pointed out to him as a noted fire-eater. This gentleman had been a Republican, but had turned his coat after the coup d'état. He was a big man with dandified airs, but evidently not much accustomed to society, for he had brought his hat—not a compressible one—into the ball-room; and in waltzing he held it in his left hand. The sight of the big Frenchman careering round the room with his hat extended at arm's length was too much for Bismarck's sense of fun; so, as M. Jouvois revolved past him, he dropped a copper coin into the hat. One may imagine the scene. The Frenchman, turning purple, stopped short in his dancing, led back his partner to her place, and then came with flashing eyes to demand satisfaction. There would have been assault and battery on the spot if friends had not interposed; but on the following day the Frenchman and the Prussian met with pistols and the former was wounded. Unfortunately for Bismarck, M. Jouvois knew Louis Schneider, the ex-comedian, who had become Court Councillor to Frederick William IV., and was that eccentric monarch's favorite companion. Schneider had but a moderate fondness for Bismarck, and he represented his act of gaminerie in so unfavorable a light to the King that his Majesty instructed the Foreign Office to read the newly appointed diplomatist a severe lecture.
Bismarck has never liked Frenchmen. His feelings towards them savor of contempt in their expression, but there is more of hatred than of genuine disdain in them, and much of this hatred has its source in religious fervor. Bismarck is a believer. The sceptical levity of most Frenchmen, the profanity and licentiousness of their literature, their want of reverence for all things, whether of Divine or of human ordinance—all this shocks the statesman, who still reads his Bible with a simple faith, and who has attentively noted the doom which is threatened to nations who are disobedient, During the Franco-German War, Countess Bismarck, hearing that her husband had lost the travelling-bag in which he carried his Bible, sent him another with this naïve letter: “As I am afraid you may not be able to buy a Bible in France, I send you two copies of the Scriptures, and have marked the passages in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel which relate to France—also the verse in the Psalms which says that 'The unbeliever shall be rooted out.'”
Carlyle saw affinities between the character of Cromwell and that of Bismarck, but the only resemblance between the two men is physical. One may question how far Cromwell was a believer: he certainly had as little respect for sacred words as he had for cathedrals and kings, and he juggled with texts of Scripture as it suited his purpose. Bismarck has never canted. His acknowledgments of Divine mercies have only been expressed where national triumphs were concerned—never where his own personal enterprises had to be lauded. On the other hand, he has evinced strong religious scruples under circumstances when few men would have credited him with such. He has spent more sleepless hours from thinking over the deposition of George V. of Hanover than Cromwell did from fretting over Charles I.'s execution. He reconciled that deposition with the dictates of his reason, but not with those of his faith in the inviolability of kings. When it had been decided to annex Hanover, the Crown lawyers were instructed to draw up a report of legal justifications for this measure; but when Bismarck had read half through this document, he threw it aside with irritation: “Better nothing than that—it reminds me of Teste's Memorandum on the confiscation of the estates of the Orleans family.”[34]
Again Bismarck, while making it the chief occupation of his life to study how the Plebs might be managed, has never stooped to such immoral means for this purpose as the French officials of the Second Empire employed. He was deeply interested in Napoleon III.'s experiments with universal suffrage. The whole system of plébiscites, official candidatures, prefectoral newspapers, and electoral districts, so arranged that peasant votes should neutralise those of Radical working-men, seemed to him “very pretty,” as he once told a disgusted Republican refugee. But the encouragement given by De Morny, De Persigny, and others to every kind of immorality that could amuse the people—frivolous newspapers, improper novels and plays, gambling clubs, and outrageous fashions in dress—this was a very different affair. De Morny was fond of quoting the anecdote about Alcibiades having cut off the tail of his dog to give the Athenians something to talk about, and during Bismarck's short stay in Paris as Ambassador in 1862, he and the Prussian statesman had more than one conversation about the art of ruling. Bismarck had the frankness to say that he looked upon the comedies of Dumas the younger, and indeed on most French plays of the lighter sort, as grossly corrupting to the public morals. “Panem et circenses,” smiled De Morny. “Panem et saturnalia,” muttered Bismarck.
Another point upon which De Morny and Bismarck could not agree, was about the qualities that are requisite in a public servant. De Morny cared nothing for character. The men whom he recommended for prefectships or posts in the diplomatic service were, for the most part, adventurers—brilliant, witty, diseurs de rien and cajolers of the other sex. “A French Ambassador,” he maintained, “should always consider himself accredited auprès des reines.” Bismarck loathes ladies' men: and he had the poorest opinion of Napoleon III.'s diplomatists. His own ideal of a State functionary is the blameless man without debts or entanglements—laborious, but not pushing, well-educated but not abounding in ideas, a man in all things obedient. His sneering judgment on plenipotentiaries like M. Benedetti and the Duc de Gramont is well known. He called them “dancing dogs without collars.” They never seemed to have a master, he complained, “but stood up on their hind legs and performed their antics without authority from man alive. If they barked, you were sure to hear a voice from Paris crying to them to be quiet. If they fawned you might expect to see them receive some sly kick, warning them that they ought to be up and biting.” Bismarck conceived some liking and respect for Napoleon III., whom he saw to be better than his entourage. Had the Emperor's health remained good, the war of 1870 would doubtless never have taken place; but so early as 1862 Bismarck perceived that Napoleon III.'s bodily ailments were causing an indolence of mind that left the Emperor at the mercy of intriguing counsellors; and what he observed in his subsequent visits to Paris in 1867 and to Plombières in 1868, confirmed these impressions. His ceaseless study of France as the great enemy that would have to be coped with soon, moreover added to his deep and moody detestation of that country. When the formal declaration of war by France reached Berlin in July 1870, Count Bismarck was staying for a few days at Varzin. The news was communicated to him by a telegram which was put into his hands just as he was returning from a drive. He at once sprang into his carriage, to go to the railway station, and on his way through the village of Wussow, he saw the parish minister standing at the door of his manse. “I said nothing to him,” ejaculated Bismarck, in relating the story long afterwards to some friends, “but I just made a sign as of two sabre-cuts crosswise, and he quite understood.”
The pastor of Wussow understood the sign of the cross in sword-cuts to mean crusade, and as such the war against France was viewed by all good Prussians. Bismarck and the village clergyman were at one in regarding the French people as the Beast of the Apocalypse, and Paris as Babylon. Such sentiments are not incompatible with Christian piety, for there must be militants in the Church. But where Bismarck ceases to be a Christian in the common acceptance of that term, is in his exaggerated contempt for almost all men as individuals.[35]
His want of charity—we do not of course mean in almsgiving, for in this respect he is as generous as the Princess, his wife, allows him to be—is the most unamiable and disconcerting trait in his nature. Disconcerting because misanthrophy is an evidence of moral short-sightedness, begetting timidity and rendering a man incapable of forming disciples to carry on his work. Without trustfulness, a statesman can make no real friends. It may be said that uncharitableness like Bismarck's must be the result of many disenchantments; but a man who only keeps rooks and ravens must not complain that all birds are black. The men who were at different times Bismarck's most zealous helpmates—Count Harry Arnim, Herr Delbrück, Count Stolberg and Count Eulenborg—were all discarded as soon as they gave the smallest sign, not of mutiny, but of independence. Bismarck would not accept advice or remonstrance from them; he required on all occasions that blind obedience which is not loyal service, but servility. For the same cause he would never employ Herr Edward Lasker, whose great talents as a financier and parliamentary debater would have been of immense value to the monarchy. He has rejected the advances of Herr Bennigsen, the Hanoverian founder of the Nationalverein, who is now leader of the National Liberals; and those of Dr. Rudolph Gneist, who is one of the ablest politicians in Germany, but who had the misfortune to take the wrong side during the Conflikt-Zeit. Opposition, as Bismarck has often taken care to impress upon his hearers, shall never be regierungsfähig so long as he holds office. He abominates the Parliamentary system which brings to power men who have begun life as demagogues agitating for the abolition of this and that, and who, afterwards, are obliged to make shameless recantations, or to quibble away their words. The contrary system of selecting for his assistants only men who have never sown political wild oats is, however, compelling Bismarck to rely now on such henchmen as Herr Von Puttkamer and Herr Hofmann. The former is the Chancellor's brother-in-law, an excellent subordinate, supple as a glove, but with no originality of mind or firmness that could enable him to remain Home Minister if he were not propped up in this post. Herr Hofmann is also a mere painstaking bureaucrat, who, if he did not hear the voice of command, would be quite inapt to think for himself. Of late Prince Bismarck is said to have been training his son, Count Herbert to act as his Secretary and to take his place by-and-by. Count Herbert is a clever man, but dynasties of maires du palais have never succeeded in any country, and it is strange Bismarck should have forgotten that the Hohenzollern dynasty has owed its rapid rise to a respect for that principle which he is now ignoring, namely the selection of the best men without favoritism. If independence of mind and character have been eyed with suspicion by the Prussian kings, as they now are by the Chancellor, Germany would have had no Bismarck.