Blood and Iron Part 16

-- The Jewish feature, however, shows Bismarck, through and through; and we could not present him without this surprising scene. Make the most of it.

-- "I do not much like the piety that proclaims itself," said Louis XIII. A similar remark may be made concerning Bismarck's life-long belief that the Lord was on Bismarck's side--Jew-baiter and all.

-- "The longer I work in politics," he once remarked, summing up his many political difficulties, "the smaller my belief in human calculation. I look at the affair according to my human understanding, but grat.i.tude for G.o.d's a.s.sistance so far raises in me the confidence that the Lord is able to turn our errors to our own good; that I experience daily, to my wholesale humiliation."

CHAPTER VIII

Bismarck Suffers a Great Shock

27

Wherein it is shown that Bismarck's protest against disrespect for const.i.tuted authority was based on certain tragic historical instances he would not repeat.

-- It is freely granted that ideas of "Liberty!" that many German patriots desired to see come to pa.s.s, in 1848, were not those of 1789; but elements of lawlessness, of mob-rule, of marchings to "Ca Ira!" of absurd glorification of the common man, and of snarlings at kings as kings, were largely in the spirit laid down by Robespierre, Danton, Marat and that crew, with their chosen gangsters of the guillotine.

Bismarck would have none of it!

True, many of the old-line excesses were no longer used for political purposes, but Bismarck was too well-balanced, had too much common sense, in short was too strongly aligned with landed interests to endorse "popular" government on the old type from over the Vosges. His protests were all in support of authority, discipline, duty, devotion to a deliberately chosen monarch, who ruled by the will of G.o.d.

-- In '48 the talk of the "Rights of Man" really meant the rights of individual men--the tailor, the barber, the shoemaker--each of whom felt that the time had now come to overturn the political system of kings and to bring on the rule of the common people.

Old-line hatred of Napoleon had pa.s.sed away. The French military despot of the early part of the century was now figured as a "great democrat," whose wars had "all" been in the interest of the people.

Could anything have been more absurd? The literary speculations of Rousseau, as to the status of a new society (such, for example, as running naked in the grove and rolling on the gra.s.s) were now replaced by loud discussions not on the Rights of Man, as a form of idealism, but the rights of all manner of men, each of whom felt that, under the new dispensation, hastened if necessary by bomb, dagger and poison-cup, the human race was to rise to n.o.bler political ideals. It is not difficult to see that political theories of this sort have been indulged, in one way or other, by every generation in revolt against the settled ways of the fathers.

-- Let us, therefore, go back to original sources and see for ourselves just what account the common people had given of themselves, in a political way, in France at the time of her so-called political millennium. We shall then be able to grasp Bismarck's position clearly and be able at least to understand, if we do not support, his att.i.tude of uncompromising severity toward popular rule, as understood at this moment in the political evolution of Germany.

-- If it be a mark of progress to call G.o.d a superst.i.tious idol and to endeavor by the guillotine to enforce political rights, then the precious French key to the Door of Destiny for this human race should be duplicated and placed in the possession of nations, far and wide, as the final expression of man's best idea of himself, his wife, his child and his country.

This 1789-93 return to National paganism, both political and social, is the mockery that Bismarck decided with all his almighty strength, nay his supreme rage, to set aside; and for him Prussian Militarism, which he so jealously set his heart on, against the rising tides of French const.i.tutionalism, otherwise mob-rule, was at once to prove the sharp cure and the dreadful counter-blow.

-- It was only after St. Helena that the Napoleonic legend, presenting Napoleon as the great democrat, was brought forward, to wit, that the Emperor's many brutal campaigns were in the interest of the "common people" instead of gratification of his obsession for wars.

The transition came about in a simple way. The Emperor was dead and gone; his fate on a distant black rock added romantic interest to his lost cause; and the return of the old-line French kings after Waterloo, under the bayonets of Britain and the Allies, had proved a keen disappointment, politically, to France. It is conceded that Napoleon had promised and in many cases had applied liberal principles in his conquered domains; but now that the man was dead, agitators of many lands, including the 39 distracted German states, began to take literally what the Emperor had said in a sort of huge politico-military satire, to wit, that his blood-letting was truly in the interest of the ma.s.ses.

-- Hence, between 1815 and 1848, agitators of Germany began ringing the changes on the glories of the French Revolution. True, the Emperor had been dead some 20-odd years; a new generation found surprising merits in his military plans, forgetful of the lure of loot that had been the foundation of it all; yes, for one thing the hungry desire of the landless for the lands of the Catholic church.

-- The exaggerated fact has been falsely set forth again and again that the French peasant of 1789 was down in the very mire of political despond, without a sou to his name; the c.o.c.k called him to work at dawn, and all for the good of the aristocrats; he was penniless, he was an absurd figure, he was not a man but a beast;--hence his righteous revolt in the sacred name of Liberty.

-- The fact is that at this time the French peasant was in no worse condition than the working cla.s.ses of other lands, including Britain, Italy and Germany. That the Revolution first broke out in France and not in the other countries named is to be traced to journalistic and oratorical agitators of the ward-politician type.

-- The special taxes of which the peasantry complained did not exceed two per cent of the products of the soil; and it is also a fact that France had a large and profitable foreign trade; but French political and journalistic agitators were afield, and the plain truth is that the landless desired to confiscate, and did confiscate, the t.i.tles of those in possession.

No sooner was the gigantic confiscation of Catholic church lands, amounting to about one-third of the soil of France, or two billion five hundred million of francs in nominal value, ordered by Mirabeau, backed up by the Revolutionary tribunals, than the supposedly impecunious French peasants came forward and purchased to the extent of millions of francs; and it is a fact today (1915) that one of the secret dreads of the French peasantry is that some sensational political change may come in the stability of the French Government, a change that will forfeit these old land t.i.tles, based on confiscation in Revolutionary days.

-- The French peasantry wants no great National military hero to emerge from the war of 1915; and it is not unthinkable that should a very strong French general suddenly come forward, he would be removed by a.s.sa.s.sination; a thing that has happened at least once before, in latter-day French politics.

This confession of politico-social fears on the part of the French peasantry explains why in France, take them as a group, the candidates invested with the honors of the Presidency are timid men, without ambitious political bias, and why, on the whole, the modern French National instinct lives in dread of a military hero, who with a turn of his wrist might on the vote of his soldiers declare himself, let us say, Emperor.

-- Loaded down with debts incurred for various reasons, the French of 1789 were on the verge of National bankruptcy.

This condition has usually been charged up against the excesses of the French kings, such, for example, as expending some 200,000,000 francs for pleasure-palaces, for the pretty women around Louis XIV; but this charge will not bear the light of modern research.

It is also a fact, on the practical side, that the much-boasted support given to America by the French in America's Revolutionary War, in a degree helped to bankrupt the French government; but Americans have forgotten or wink at this plain financial obligation.

-- Also, the French Revolution had promised in its every utterance the dawn of the political millennium, whereas instead it brought an era of blood, idol-worship and free-love. We are not discussing here those poetical French surveys of the Rights of Man. Every ward-politician in Paris had the list at his tongue's end. There was some truth, much truth, in many of these expressions, no doubt, as mere expressions of humane sentiments. That, however, is another story.

-- One has but to read the Memoirs of President Bailly of the Revolutionary a.s.sembly to find that mob-rule predominated from the first day of the supposed "Dawn of the political Millennium." The mob in the gallery hissed or applauded each speech, and deputies were intimidated.

-- Bismarck in his united Germany wanted no Jacobin Clubs, largely composed of ward-politicians, and Bismarck wanted no Marat with his vile newspaper, "Friend of the People," setting cla.s.s against cla.s.s.

-- He wanted no guillotine as the German symbol of political liberty.

This political method of the guillotine was at best only a cowardly form of a.s.sa.s.sination, ineffectual, barbarous. First one side used it, then the other; then still another group; each set of French political a.s.sa.s.sins prating of Liberty had recourse to the guillotine to be well rid of rivals much as in Caesar's time the women of Caesar's family, that their own might be exalted, in turn proceeded to poison prospective collateral heirs to the Imperial throne.

-- Bismarck knew all about this dirty French mess, parading itself as the "voice of the people." He was a strong man himself and he was guilty of gross ambitions in his rise to power, but on the whole Bismarck stood for self-possession and for manly audacity, certainly not the French Revolution type of audacity. It is a fact that Bismarck, as a human being, was a vast egotist, and had his own, ofttimes unscrupulous, way of gaining his ends, but his conception of Militarism, the force he did eventually use, was at bottom a virtuous effort to support, liberate and unify the Fatherland, not drag it into the mire of idolatry and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity.

-- We shall frequently say harsh things about Bismarck, in this book; we do not wish to follow French methods and endeavor to make an impossible hero of a man of clay. Bismarck, as a man and in the methods of his rise to great glory, had his gross faults, and we fearlessly point them out.

-- But here are some of the facts that Bismarck can never stand accused of, in the light of this much-boasted French political "Millennium" of 1789-93, and here, likewise we find the real reasons why he did struggle with all his might against a reluctant people to enforce Militarism throughout the jealous clashing 39 German states; and if Bismarck's exercise of the strong hand, in the bosom of the German family was a fault, then at least it did not include these French conditions, set up to cause the world to gasp in admiration.

-- The bull-necked Danton, the Parisian ward-heeler, in control of public opinion, came on with his guillotine; and closed the city's gates against any man that had a dollar to pay his debts or buy a dinner.

-- The so-called "will of the people" was in short a spurious affair, unnaturally created by a political morphine that gave glorious dreams; and this wretched drug was supplied by the mob-leaders.

All the blood-letting was represented as a harmless affair, tending toward liberty and equality; all the confiscations of church-lands and redistribution among the peasants was declared a "great" political triumph.

Throughout even the loneliest country districts the word was pa.s.sed that the political millennium was about to break.

-- The King was represented as a "monster fattening on crime." His wife was called an Austrian "panthress," and vile pamphlets were secretly pa.s.sed around reflecting on her character. G.o.d was represented as judging the King, and the guillotine was awaiting Louis, by Heaven's decree.

-- The 26,000 priests who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the monstrous political farce were visited with all manner of persecutions; one section of Revolutionary opinion decreed that death was the just due of all offending pastors.