I have sought in this letter to set forth the character and import of the meeting at Berlin, and to show the policy which Prince von Bismarck has endeavored to inaugurate there. I have not been eaves-dropping at the doors of the chambers in which the three emperors and their chancellors held their deliberations; but there is no difficulty in conjecturing what was talked about, and, I may add, what was thought therein.
We must not overestimate the importance of these conversations; the meeting at Berlin will no more bring about positive results for the solution of pending questions in Europe than did the numerous interviews which Napoleon III. had with the Emperor of Austria, the ministers of Great Britain, and the czar. As we have stated before, it is not a congress; it forms no alliances, and no treaty determining the new European equilibrium will come out of it. What M. von Bismarck wished particularly to bring about was the presence of the two emperors with their counsellors in the capital of the new empire. Their mere presence signified, in the eyes of the prince chancellor:
The recognition of the German Empire; the sanction of the treaties of Prague and Frankfort, which were to form the basis of the new equilibrium of Europe.
The impossibility for France to find a powerful ally that would enable her to attempt a war of retaliation.
On the part of Austria, the abandonment of all idea of returning to her old German policy, and the repudiation of all connivance with the particularistic resistance of the lesser states of Germany.
I will presently examine whether [pg 481] the presence at Berlin of the head of the dynasty of Hapsburg signifies also the repudiation of the Catholic movement which the persecutions directed against the church have stirred up throughout entire Germany.
Assuredly this policy of M. von Bismarck shows, I will not say grandeur, but skill and audacity; and it has been crowned by wonderful success. When I saw Prince von Bismarck raise Prussia, that a few years ago could hardly rank among the great powers, to the height of the Empire of Germany through the victories of 1866 and 1871—when I contemplated these astounding results, I was for a moment tempted to consider him as a great minister, as one of the rare successors of Richelieu or of Stein.
I was the more inclined to this judgment because, as a Belgian, I was grateful for the honest and upright policy which he had followed as regards Napoleon III. before the last war. There is no longer any room for doubt, now that the diplomatic documents are known, that Napoleon III., in order to redeem the unpardonable blunder which he had committed by favoring the war of 1861 between Prussia and Austria, endeavored to obtain in Luxemburg and in Belgium the compensations which he considered needful for him in view of the aggrandizement of Prussia. We know about the rough draft of the Benedetti treaty, which no amount of equivocation and timid denial can do away with.
I had, in my work published in 1865, clearly denounced the plot; and from the Belgian tribune, because I had pointed out these perils to its government, I have been called a political visionary and almost a traitor to my country. Subsequent events have justified my allegations, and now every one knows that the dangers which we ran for a time were more real, nearer at hand, and greater than even I imagined them to be.
The war of 1870 was the consequence of the refusal of the government of Berlin to yield to the guilty covetousness of Napoleon III. I ascribe the honor of the former to M. von Bismarck and to the integrity of William IV. I had proclaimed the existence of two eminent perils: a diplomatic peril, viz., an alliance of France with Prussia, of which Belgium would have been the stakes and the victim; the chance of a war between those two nations, in which France might have been victorious. We have, almost by a miracle, escaped those two perils; through the war of 1870, Belgium has been preserved from diplomatic conspiracies, and as a Belgian I can never forget it.[192]