Blood and Iron Part 19

-- By 1848 there were Const.i.tutions in 23 of the states; many of these doc.u.ments illiberal to be sure; but nevertheless a step in representative government.

-- But the Germans are a peculiar people. They wish to refer everything to ultimate philosophical causes; hence the fruitless debates of the Frankfort Convention, in which all manner of prospective Const.i.tutions were tried by the formal rules of philosophy and ethics. Such questions as "What is a Federal state?" were angrily debated, and the changes rung on "federation of states."

-- After worlds of talking, unseen hands decided to offer to some powerful prince the German crown. How is that for democrats? William IV was the man selected.

-- Prodded by Bismarck, who was always explosive and satirical about democratic crowns, William s.p.u.n.kily refused to "pick a crown out of the gutter!" His dignity, as a Hohenzollern was offended; but Bismarck was playing for larger stakes. William now went about canva.s.sing the German princes for a crown; twenty-eight replied, one way or another; others, sticking to selfish interests, made no acknowledgment.

-- Now Bismarck, bellowing like a mastiff, set up the cry that if William accepted that democratic crown out of the Frankfort gutter, Prussia would become involved in civil war. And it was a fact! The old-line Prussian military aristocracy wanted no "democratic gold, from the gutter, melted down with their old aristocratic gold of Frederick the Great"--and as a matter of fact, could you blame them?

Were you there, at the time, and of the land-holding privileged cla.s.s, you too would have been up in arms.

-- Get this straight: William's idea of "United Germany" simply meant that there should be a United Germany compounded of the thirty-nine clashing states, provided William's beloved Prussia and not the detested Austria could front the movement.

-- Despite all the n.o.ble souls who write poetry on brotherhood (and Germany has her patriots, G.o.d knows!), the irony of fate is such that all human alignments of a political nature must at some stage be spattered with mud.

-- You see, henceforth for a quarter of a century, the realization of this much-prized but elusive and seemingly impossible Unity was to become more and more a game of politics in which the stakes were kingdoms, princ.i.p.alities, riches and honors unnumbered. In all card-games the result is not known till the last card is played; and in the present case the game was to be protracted twenty-four years.

Chips were flung about in huge stacks, now piled on the Austrian side, now on the Prussian; and finally, it was to break up in a fight, in which Prussia had to tip over the table, violently seize the spoils, batter heads right and left, and beat off rival players with needle-guns.

-- Come, come, there is no need of claiming too much for human nature.

The grand prize was to be gained, ultimately, by seizure! Even the sober, common-sense William I, to whom it finally fell to be crowned German Emperor, saw the true situation early, after the church-building William IV had been gathered to his fathers. You will hear more of that as we go along.

When all intriguing, all card-stacking, all smiling, all smooth speeches no longer serve to conceal the real end of this amazing game of international politics, as between Prussia and Austria, then the thing to do is to bring on "blood and iron." The very human end that Bismarck always had in mind was German liberation and Unity, by driving the Nation's enemies beyond the borders.

-- The best t.i.tle to lands, the surest, the most incontrovertible--let purists and pietists rage as they may--is the sharp edge of the sword.

We shall see all that more clearly as the b.l.o.o.d.y years go by.

-- In the critical year '48, democratic mobs chased that old aristocrat and king-maker Metternich out of Vienna. Hungary, Bohemia and other intervening princ.i.p.alities went mad with excitement about "Liberty!"

South Germany was in a turmoil.

William IV had again practically promised a Const.i.tution, and had ordered the troops from Berlin; he placed a sign on his castle "National Property." At this time the king let slip these fateful words, "Prussia is to be dissolved in Germany!" Bismarck, pained beyond expression, sent a letter to the King, full of expressions of loyalty. The King kept the letter on his desk all summer.

-- The giant continued to protest. He now first used a subsidized press, called well-known men to write for the "North Prussian Gazette."

For all this, he was dubbed "Junker," "Hot Head," "Reactionary," but he thundered away like a battleship in action.

-- The King was in the hands of the Liberals. Bismarck regarded this as a frightful situation. Bismarck, of the Old Regime, stood by the landlords and the t.i.tled folk. He had prodigious pride of station, hated to see the King make a fool of himself about paper Const.i.tutions.

-- In Berlin, along in March, there were amazing scenes. The democrats were crazy for blood; William shrank with horror against fighting his beloved Berliners. But this son, the future William I, who twenty-four years later was to gain the imperial German crown, was not so squeamish. The young prince gained the popular t.i.tle "Cartridge-box prince," equivalent to saying that he was willing to blaze away at "beloved Berliners," or at any other citizens insane with political excitements hazardous to "Divine-right."

-- It is true that on March 18th this romantic William IV did indeed enter into negotiations with the insurgents; and--think of the mortification to one of Bismarck's upper-cla.s.s leanings!--did indeed do no less than wrap the German tricolor around his body and heading a democratic procession march around the streets, even going so far as to make a foolish speech in which he extolled the glories of the German democratic revolution.

-- Here we might as well close the book, were it not for Bismarck. The surly dog of a king's man flatly refused to vote "Aye!" in the Diet, where the hot-heads were intent on pa.s.sing resolutions "commending the King for his loyalty to democratic principles," in marching 'round town with the mob. Bismarck for the time being stood like a great mastiff at bay before wolves.

His terrific speech upholding royal prerogative made his early and sudden fame.

-- It is a fact that with all their political ambitions, and their solemn belief that Germany's political future was an open book, the Radicals in Prussia never guessed the way events were to turn out; nor for that matter the Radicals never desired the conquest of Germany by Prussia; therefore the subsequent astonishing rise of German Imperialism through Prussian domination, would have proved a most surprising revelation had the patriots of 1806 to 1848 returned from the other world, say in 1870, to view Prussia's rise to glory.

-- The political uprisings of 1848 had parallels in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany; and the excesses cleared the way for wiser action, in years to come.

-- "The frenzy was a sort of tottering bridge between the French 1789-93 idea of democracy (that has to do with bloodshed and violence) and the purified conception expressed in modern const.i.tutional democracy."

-- The German democratic uprisings of 1820, '30 and '48 were planned to win a certain type of civil liberty. They failed. The question was "equality," as well as popular "machinery" of representation. How was it to be brought about? Modern "parliamentarism" had not as yet been involved.

-- The patriots of '48 had their Jacobin clubs in mild imitation of the French Revolution. Baden alone had 400, with a membership of 20,000.

"Every tavern and brewery, (Dahlinger, German Revolution of '49, p.

33), became a seat of democratic propaganda."

See, there stands the mighty Hecker, A feather in his hat, There stands the friend of the people, Yearning for the tyrants' blood; Big boots with thick soles, Sword and pistol by his side.

-- Copied from French models was the word "Citizen." We hear of Citizen Brentano, Citizen Franz Sigel, Citizen Ostenhaus, Citizen Schimmelpfennig; some of these leaders were extremely radical; but Brentano endeavored to keep the Revolution from becoming a record of lawlessness after the French Revolution type. (Dahlinger, p. 100).

We cannot go into the various battles fought and lost. Many of the leaders were exiled, others shot. The patriots were as a rule young collegians, ambitious to rise in life, but sincerely holding to modified conceptions of French Const.i.tutionalism. There were a large number of journalists in the thick of the struggle, also professors in high schools. These chosen leaders, by various oratorical tricks, drew political and social malcontents from every walk of life.

-- In the end, Prussian troops put down the patriots.

-- In '48, all kings were under suspicion; it made no difference whether the king was a good king or a bad king; a king was a king, and all kings were bad.

The younger generation, especially became morbid over the word "Liberty!" What it really meant, in '48, was that human nature should restrain itself, in order that all men might, immediately, enter into so-called G.o.d-given political rights.

The situation was somewhat a.n.a.logous to that created after the Civil War, in the United States. Certain political fanatics, weeping over the Negroes, now demanded universal suffrage, literally, for the slaves, and in secret saw that by controlling the South, a "Black Republic" might be set up, side by side with our "White Republic."

-- Fraternity and equality--that was the cry in '48--glossed over by politico-religious glamour, expressed in the idea that men "ought" do thus and so, and therefore "a people's king" was in order. The people were to crown themselves.

For a thousand years the accepted political doctrine had been that kings held office by Divine-right, but now orators of the day harangued mobs proclaiming the literal belief that the voice of the people is the voice of G.o.d.

While, thus, the new apostles ridiculed the old idea of Divine-right, as attached to the acts of monarch, leaders of the people saw no inconsistency in a.s.serting attributes of political divinity in the doings of the common people. Thus, a species of nebulous politico-religious humanism was pictured as the highest expression of political philosophy.

The individual wished to come into his own and the quicker the better.

Reformers shocked landed proprietors, t.i.tled folk and office-holders under kings, by demanding unconditional surrender of the machinery of government; zealots urged revolts against all manner of const.i.tuted authority. The point was to gain for the barber, the tailor, the shoemaker and the blacksmith more life, more political experience, more freedom of choice--and right on the next tick of the clock!

-- There is this about it: that the Frankfort Convention offered to William IV the "People's Crown" as a direct symbol of belief in political idealism, not necessarily, however, the political idealism that tolerates a king but instead uses him as a popular signboard.

The Convention held that German unity "ought by right" to be established; therefore "once the grand Idea was set afloat" the cause "must by moral right come to pa.s.s."

-- Probably never before in the world was there formulated an outright, widespread expression of greater political idealism by men who called themselves patriots. There is a n.o.ble side to the sentiment, heightened the more as we realize the inevitable delusion of it all, translated into terms of human selfishness.