III.
Prince Bismarck considers himself to be the successor of Stein, to whom he has caused a statue to be erected, and whose great policy he claims that he is continuing. In this respect, he is profoundly mistaken; and, very far from following that policy, he abandons and betrays it.
Stein and all his school have, like Burke and Pitt, combated the principles of the French Revolution. French ideas had, at the close of the last century, invaded Germany, and the armies of the first Republic had no difficulty in conquering by their arms a country which they had before overrun with their ideas.
Baron von Stein, that restorer of the German Vaterland and liberty, was a mortal foe of the French Revolution. His mission and his work were to withdraw Germany from the fatal path into which, following France, she had strayed, and to bring her back into the path laid out for her by her history.
He could not save Prussia from the defeat at Jena, but he trained her, by his thorough and excellent reforms, for revenge at Waterloo and Sedan. He it was who formed Scharnhorst, the organizer of military Prussia, and whose system Count von Moltke perfected; he, probably, who became the soul of the patriotic movement in 1813; he it was who, together with Scharnhorst, Stadion, and Gagern, gave to Germany that powerful impulse out of which came the great present situation; he it was who stood the distinguished protector of the German historical school, that real antithesis of the French revolutionary school, which former had as its influential organs Niebuhr, Eichhorn, Schlegel, Görres, the two Grimms, de Savigny, etc., and which M. de Sybel represents still in our day.
Stein was a conservative, a patriot, and a Christian. What he fought against in the French Revolution was [pg 489] that philosophic and abstract method that France had adopted, destructive of all national tradition; that spirit of exclusive and narrow equality which influenced her course, and in the pursuit of which, according to M. de Tocqueville, she has lost liberty; that absolutism, whether in democracy or in Cæsarism, that obliteration of the individual, that indifference to rights, that worship of brute force, that extinguishment of all local, provincial, and autonomous life, that exaggerated idea of the state, that oppression of religious liberty, of Christian teaching, and of the Catholic Church, all of which characterized the French Revolution.
Stein wanted a Germany united, but federal, Christian, liberal, traditional, and historical; he wanted her, as Burke did England, to be the reverse of revolutionary France.
Now, is it not Stein's work, that Germany born of his reforming genius, that M. von Bismarck is destroying? The liberal national party, on which he leans, is merely a doctrinaire French party, anti-historic, ideological, and anti-religious, the harbinger of levelling and radical democracy; a party which inclines to absolutism and Cæsarism, adores centralization, unconditional unification, and the omnipotence of the state, and which is the adversary of all proud and free consciences, and of any independent church. It is not the Protestant idea, but the Masonic and Hegelian one which this party represents.
Stein was a Christian, a conservative, and a German; the Prince von Bismarck is sceptical, revolutionary, and belongs to the French school. Stein sought to found German unity on federal liberties, in the alliance of the church with the school, and on peace between religious denominations; M. von Bismarck overturns that basis, substitutes in its place absolutist and Prussian unification, secularized teaching, and religious discord.
It is surprising that, when in France the ideas which inspired the French Revolution have been abandoned even by the most intelligent part of the school of liberalism; by such men as Tocqueville, Thierry, and Guizot, who are discouraged, and talk more openly of their disappointments than of their hopes; when M. Renan asserts that the French Revolution “is an experimental failure”; when the Revue des Deux Mondes, through the pen of M. Montégut, proclaims “that the Revolution is politically bankrupt”; on the very morrow of the final miscarriage of that Revolution under its two forms of government, the Empire fallen at Sedan, and the social Republic fallen under the ruins of the Paris Commune—it is at that very time that Prince von Bismarck thinks it skilful and profound to import that French revolutionary system into Germany! M. Renan has cause for rejoicing; he has given utterance to a wish which M. von Bismarck has set about to fulfil. “France,” he said, “need not be considered lost if we can believe that Germany will be in her turn drawn into that witches' dance in which all our virtue has been lost.”