Blood and Iron Part 24

Bismarck suspected that it came straight from Prussia's hated rival.

Seeking out the proprietor of the newspaper Bismarck congratulated him "on close relations with Napoleon." The owner, taken off his guard, replied: "You are wrong; it came from Vienna!" This was exactly what Bismarck wished to ascertain, and his suspicions were verified.

To make a.s.surance doubly sure, Bismarck leaving the journalist, did a little detective work. In the garden, from a secret place, he could see the French minister's house. In half an hour, he spied the journalist ringing the French minister's doorbell.

"Ah, ha!" was Bismarck's comment.

-- What did this giant not do to help his beloved Prussia, and to humiliate his detested Austria?

One day, he found a fiery anti-Prussian review in an Austrian member's desk. He thought nothing of ransacking a desk. Richelieu had a system of espionage unrivaled in history. Bismarck in this respect is the Cardinal's close second. Each man regarded himself as a patriot.

Bismarck was obstinately loyal to Prussia. Her aggrandizement became henceforth his life's pa.s.sion. Nay, Bismarck did not ask that the member be dismissed! That would be punishment too coa.r.s.e. Instead, Bismarck decided that the best revenge would be to print the address piecemeal and thus keep the member in suspense;--something like twisting the cords a little each day till the victim meets strangulation in frightful form.

-- During the eight years that Bismarck was a member of the freakish Frankfort Diet set up by Austria to "rule" the quarreling thirty-nine German states, Bismarck, the Prussian giant, came to see the necessity of controlling the press.

-- Frankfort stupidities decided Bismarck to appeal directly to the common people (whom also he politically despised!) and hence we find that he now meets Austria's hired journalists by urging the utmost press-freedom. "In this," says Lowe, "Bismarck was an opportunist," as he often was. "I learned something," he used to say when his enemies accused him of shifting ground.

-- Bismarck now demanded "open discussion" of German policies; saw that hired press agents vigorously set forth the Prussian side. In this connection it is interesting to draw a parallel between Bismarck's ideas of journalism, in 1852, and the American conception (1915).

-- "In the press, truth will not come to light through the mists conjured into life by the mendacity of subsidized newspapers, until the material wherewith to oppose all the mysteries of the Bund (Frankfort) shall be supplied to the Prussian press, with unrestricted liberty to use it."

-- This idea is precisely what extremists like Roosevelt set up (1915), battling against "trusts," endeavoring to make them audit their books on the curbstone! So, what is new under the sun?

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Ox-like patience of Prussian peasantry sorely tried--The incessant call for the strong man to end political miseries.

-- As the result of all this deep study, Bismarck came to the conclusion that Prussia in the great moral idea of a United Germany could win, only by fighting Austria. We might as well get at the core of this thing, in short order. The complications are amazing; but the more we probe into Bismarck's gigantic problem, the larger grows the stature of our modern German giant.

-- From this time till the hour of his death, many years later, Bismarck remains the one great central will power of Germany, the source of political legitimacy, dealing out with his brawny hands favors where they would do the most good, setting men up or casting them down; and in the end, through a series of profound political combinations the inner currents of which to this hour no human being has been able to chart and cla.s.sify, our strong man at last is to set up his United Germany, placing the imperial crown on William's head in the palace of the French kings, at Versailles.

-- Oh, how unforgivable all this is to the French. Not only that defeat should come in '70, but that the palace of the Bourbons, costing some $200,000,000, should be used in solemn mockery by the super-man Bismarck, as the stage-setting whereby to complete the imperial German holiday! Centuries must pa.s.s before this, the profound mortification to French feelings, is forgotten. That is to say, the worst thing you can do to a man is to hurt his pride. Had the German Empire come to pa.s.s without wounding French pride (not to add the French pocketbook) the French would long since have gone on their way in peace, rejoicing in German prosperity. Why not? The French are Christians, not the slightest doubt of that; and as Christians do not envy the German ox, a.s.s or maid-servant. Indeed, that is as it should be in a Christian world.

-- At home, up in Prussia, Bismarck's sullen glances surveyed Europe afar, and in the '50's, of which we are writing, this is his problem:

He sees Germany still a mere crazy-quilt of clashing states. There are warring ecclesiastical barons, free cities, petty princelings; Catholic Bavaria against Protestant Prussia; n.o.bles against the people; the people against themselves, divided by G.o.d knows what controversies, sane or insane; poets writing their hymns of liberty then dying unheroically by a brickbat flung wildly in some street brawl; jurists trying to hammer together some const.i.tution that will not be blown to pieces by the first explosion of gunpowder;--and all failing! With pugnacious Prussia on the North, with rapacious Austria on the South, with insolent Bavaria hanging off on the Southwest, and the others fighting tooth and nail for the land, that will eventually fall to the strongest--the German problem became an exhibition over many years of the n.o.blest, likewise of the darkest, pa.s.sions of the human breast.

Three dreadful wars were to be fought, 80,000 lives were to be sacrificed, during twenty years of turbulence; and in the blood-drenched interim various monarchs are to make a plaything of the thirty-nine disunited German states.

-- But the thing had to be gone through with. The historical evolution could not be hastened, although it was often set back. Sick Germany had many a hideous nightmare before the fever pa.s.sed.

Convention after convention, diet after diet, contending monarchs using any plea that will give the upper hand to Prussia or to Austria, or over princes and whimsical knights, from the one who holds his sovereignty because his ancestor had been a king's barber, to another who in a lucky moment had found the queen's lace handkerchief, and after that lived like a parasite on the land;--all these high contracting parties must be sent to the dump heap and the soil sprinkled with precious German brothers' blood, mingling freely with vile blood, before the new political crop can grow.

-- Between 1750 and 1870 the German problem had been settled over and over again, but was not finally settled till by Bismarck's blood and iron. This means in Frederick the Great's own obstinate way!

-- We have heard from political fanatics, poets, lawyers, kings, thieves, church-people; all manner of men and not a few women have babbled and cackled; and there has been blood-letting, generation after generation, all up and down the Rhine, the Main, the Spree and the Elbe; then there would follow a lull brought about by some great Charter of Liberty framed by the Liberals, at their latest conference; and when it all went up in smoke, we would hear again that the Prussian government had its own plan, which, quite naturally Austria would never consent to advance.

-- Indeed, the ox-like patience of the German people, with their great moral dream of "German National faith," was strongly tried.

-- It remained for the obstinate spirit of Frederick, through Bismarck, to find the only way, by blood and iron. Sentimentalists should not shed tears. It is no less an authority than Marshal Davout, the great French soldier who had for his watchword, "The world belongs to the obstinate."

Was not the Great Frederick, in his youth, an idealist, and did he not write a touching essay on the evils of absolutism? But he ended by embracing the tyranny of kings--even as you and I, if we have the power.

-- At the very outset, then, let it be made clear that it is short-sighted to call Bismarck Prussian tyrant. What would you, please? Cakes for the child, when the child cries? That has often been tried, and always in vain.

Next time, the child wants two cakes instead of one. It will not do.

Frederick was dubbed the "last of the tyrants." We are sorry if this were true.

Tyrants are exceedingly useful. Nay, we are glad to report that Frederick is not the last.

They still exist in every family, village, city, state, and nation.

For the most part, they exercise their tyranny in petty exactions, with no big plan such as distinguishes the dominating man from the little fellow with the mean temper and his childish ambition to rule, let us say, his dog or his wife.

-- There is something pathetic in the incessant call this earth has for a strong man. It was so in Germany, and Bismarck was that man.

Caesar was a.s.sa.s.sinated because he was said to be a tyrant, yet after his death for 400 years Rome sought in vain for a man strong enough to hold the Empire from going to pieces.

-- Is there not something puzzling in the devotion of a people to their amiable oppressor? They may rebel against absolutism, as Bavarian hates Prussian, but if the political despot is strong enough to win against foreign foes, as Bismarck did at Koeniggraetz, Sedan and Gravelotte, the people kiss the hand that smites. What greater tests of loyalty do you ask of human nature?

-- Before 1866, he was without doubt the "best-hated" man in Europe, lampooned, ridiculed, even the victim of attempted a.s.sa.s.sinations.

At Frankfort mothers sang their children to sleep by the following ditty:

Sleep, darling, sleep, Be always gentle and good, Or Vogel von Falkenstein will come And carry you away in a sack; Bismarck too will come after him, And he eats up little children.

-- Yet within a few years, in his character as Prussian Prime Minister, who against the will of the people achieved the greatness of Prussia, and thereby made possible United Germany, no adulation was too great for our self-same Bismarck, formerly sneered at, despised, vilified, and stoned.

So much for the value of public opinion. What then does it all mean?

Bismarck made his 30-years' battle against the people and won; and the people, strange to say, turned a mental somersault and now saw no inconsistency in cheering Bismarck, as liberator.

-- How strange this sounds!

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Here is the Man of the Hour, depicted in all his naked realism.

-- This amazing German problem called for a wise despot, to confront and overawe weak men, gathered in German parliaments in which there were worlds of cackling, but no wisdom.

The curse of Germany had been too much speechmaking, too much poetry, too much dreaming. The babble went on from 1815 to 1866, at least--fifty years!