When, just at the beginning of the war, the French army made an attack on Saarbrücken, the reptile-press spread the report that they had reduced the city to ashes; and this infamous falsehood made a deep impression throughout Germany. A similar lie had been propagated at the commencement of the Austrian war. On the 27th of June, 1866, the Prussians were driven from Trautenau by General Gablenz, and forthwith the reptile-press raised the cry that the citizens of Trautenau had poured from their houses hot water and boiling oil on the retreating soldiers; and the government lent itself to the spreading of this detestable calumny by dragging off the mayor of Trautenau, Dr. Roth, to prison, where he was detained in close confinement nearly three months.[101]
There is no subject on which the organs of the “Press-Bureau” are more united or more eloquent than the necessity of keeping up the full
strength of the standing army; nay, they have gone so far as to demand that the Reichstag shall consent to take from the representatives of the people the right to legislate on military affairs during the next seven years. But before taking this step, hitherto unheard of in the history of constitutional government, it was necessary to manipulate public opinion, so that the members of parliament might seem to be compelled to this decision by the will of the people themselves. With this view packed meetings were gotten up in various parts of the empire which the telegraph lyingly announced to the world as very numerously attended and unanimous in demanding the seven-year enactment; but the popular gatherings which were held to protest against this violation of constitutional rights were passed over in dead silence, and their action, consequently, did not become known outside of their own immediate neighborhood. The reptile-press acted in full harmony with the “Telegraph-Bureau.” The Spener’sche Zeitung, in Berlin, went so far as to declare that no protests had been heard, whereupon the Provinzial-korrespondenz exclaimed that the movement, which had proceeded from the depths of the nation’s heart with unexpected power, should force the Reichstag to yield to the demand of the government.
As a part of the same programme, the “Press-Bureau” just a year ago raised the cry that France was buying horses, and that in less than three months she would declare war on Germany. On the same day and at the same hour this startling announcement was made in Frankfort, in Leipzig, in Stuttgart, and other cities. The following day hundreds of newspapers
throughout the fatherland took up the chorus and began to shout that the empire was threatened. Now, all the world knows that France at that time was as little thinking of making war on Germany as of tunnelling the Atlantic Ocean; but this piece of journalistic legerdemain roused the Teutonic mind to the necessity of strengthening the army and increasing the military resources of a country which was already a camp of soldiers.
No figure of rhetoric is more forcible than repetition, and we may calculate with mathematical precision just how many leading articles, all saying the same thing in fifty different localities, are required in order to fabricate a public opinion on a given subject.
Another trick of the reptile-press is employed to prevent the people from getting a knowledge of the speeches of the opposition in parliament. The arguments of these orators are either excluded from its columns or caricatured so as to appear childish or ridiculous. When, for instance, Sonnemann, the member for Frankfort, made an appeal in behalf of the Alsacians, who had themselves been reduced to dead silence, and showed from authentic documents the pitiable condition to which that province had been brought, the organs of the “Press-Bureau” declared that “to answer such utterances would be beneath the dignity of a chancellor of the empire; such want of political honor had no claim to pass as the honest views of an individual”; and when Mallinckrodt placed his hand on Lamarmora’s book to prove his charges against Bismarck, the Spener’sche Zeitung announced that “the national parties were filled with deepest disgust at the conduct of the Centrum’s faction,
and were not able to conceal their regret that Prince Bismarck should deign to answer these Ultramontane brawlers, since, by consenting to notice the tricks of Windthorst, Mallinckrodt, and Schorlemer, he was giving prominence to what ought to be completely ignored”; and then closed with the phrase of Frederick the Great, “Shall we play at fisticuffs with the rabble?” The Norddeutsche Allgemeine and National Zeitung indulged in similar strains, and these articles were then republished by nearly the entire German press. When an opponent is especially troublesome the press-reptiles raise the cry that he has been bought up by foreign gold; and in this they are probably sincere, since it must be difficult for them to understand how any man could refuse to sell himself for a proper consideration.
For five years now Bismarck’s venal press has poured the full tide of its wrath upon the bishops and priests of Germany. Here was a subject upon which the reptiles could distil their venom to their hearts’ content. What magnificent opportunities were here offered to the “mud-bathers” to hunt through the sewers of the centuries and to wallow in the mire of the ages; to revive Luther’s vocabulary and refurbish the rusty weapons that for hundreds of years had lain idle and hurtless! What an open field was here in which to ventilate historical calumnies, to produce startling effects by the dramatic grouping of striking figures; to bring out the light of the golden present by causing it to fall upon the dark and bloody background of the past! And what divine occasions for indignation, wrath, horror, word-painting to cause the hair to stand on end and the eyes to start! Here
was place for withering scorn, patriotic thunder, lurid lightning to sear the Jesuitic head bent upon the ruin of the new empire. And with what demoniac delight the hired crew ring the changes on each popular catch-word—progress, liberty, culture, free thought; and how they foam and rage when a bishop or a priest has the “boundless impudence” to speak in defence of the church! “It has come to this,” says the Dresdener Volksbote (April 17, 1873): “Minorities must keep silence.”