Bismarck was a Junker, a Prussian rustic, monarchist, particularist, agrarian and militarist. Each of his qualities is an attribute of a mentality of caste, a very curious one, not lacking in grandeur, but very narrow and not always adequate to the conduct of affairs.
Monarchist means anti-Parliamentarian. The fine scorn of rhetoric and even of public discussion, a conviction that democracy will not lead to anything beyond a display of mediocrity, that is one of the salient features of his mind. Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by the word faithful, (féal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary because it is without meaning in our present moral state.
The Junker is particularist, at least he was. The political and administrative centralization which the Jacobins achieved in France inspires him with horror. For him it is disorder. He sees in it nothing but a dust heap of individuals crushed beneath a formula. Even today, when the German accuses France of anarchy, that is what he means. He figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune. Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the professors which at heart he despises.
He is agrarian and militarist, that is to say, conservative and enamored of force. In 1830 four-fifths of the population lived by agriculture and the landlord governed his peasants patriarchally. He kept the conservatist spirit of a rustic, a very lively sense of authority and the military instinct. He had scant liking for distant enterprises or adventures. He was at once religious, warlike, and realist, knowing how to nurse his ambitions and to confine his view to what was within reach.
Bismarck for a long time was the decided opponent of naval armaments and colonial policy, in short, of imperialism. Even his projects for social reform—insurance against sickness, against old age—which have been accepted as concessions to modern ideas, were due entirely to his monarchical and patriarchal conception of the State. He copied the ancient decrees of Colbert as to naval personnel. He would have gone as far as assurance against non-employment. In the dominion of the King, he said, no one should die of hunger.
The Junker made a force of Prussia; he made Prussia itself. It was due to him that she passed after 1815 from the form of a Polizeistaat to the form of Kulturstaat, the latter only an expansion of the former. In place of a watchful, regulating, and vexatious State she became an organized State, the instructor of youth, the protector of religion, the source of inspiration for agricultural reforms, and all great commercial and industrial enterprises. This State was not an emanation from the national will, but the creator of a nation, the living and moving self-incarnation of the Hegelian "idea," that is to say, the Divine thought.
Of all the German aristocracy the noble of Pomerania or Brandenburg, the Prussian Junker, represented this social type most definitely. In the south the liberal tendencies—to be exact, the memories of the French Revolution—persisted far into the nineteenth century. But it is well known that German unity was accomplished by military force and against liberalism.
After 1871, and even after Sadowa, the problem of interior policy which presented itself was that of the "Prussianization" of Germany. At one time it seemed that Bismarck was on the point of succeeding in it. What was that national liberal party upon which he depended for so long? It was the old liberal party, with advanced tendencies tainted with democratic liberalism and even with cosmopolitanism, keeping up its relations with the intellectuals, the university men, who made so much noise with pen and voice about 1848 and later. They dreamed of the unity of Germany in the democratic liberty and moral hegemony of their nation, having become in Europe the sobered heir of the French Revolution.
Under the influence of Bismarck they sacrificed to their dream of unity, to their national dream, their liberal dream, and they secured for the Chancellor the support of the upper bourgeoisie.
It was indeed the Prussianization of Germany, but in that spirit and in that system contemporary German militarism would never have fructified. It was contrary to the characteristic tendencies of a monarchical State supported by a conservative caste, which was also particularist, military, and agricultural. A State of this kind tends to become a closed State.