Throne-Makers

Bismarck

One by one the nations of the world come to their own, have free play for their faculties, express themselves, and eventually pass onward into silence. Our age has beheld the elevation of Prussia. Well may we ask, “What has been her message? What the path by which she climbed into preëminence?” That she would reach the summit, the work of Frederick the Great in the last century, and of Stein at the beginning of this, portended. It has been Bismarck’s mission to amplify and complete their task. Through him Prussia has come to her own. What, then, does she express?

The Prussians have excelled even the Romans in the art of turning men into machines. Set a Yankee down before a heap of coal and another of iron, and he will not rest until he has changed them into an implement to save the labor of many hands; the Prussian takes flesh and blood, and the will-power latent therein, and converts them into a machine. Such soldiers, such government clerks, such administrators, have never been manufactured elsewhere. Methodical, punctilious, thorough, are those officers and officials. The government which makes them relies not on sudden spurts, but on the cumulative force of habit. It substitutes rule for whim; it suppresses individual spontaneity, unless this can be transformed into energy for the great machine to use. That Prussian system takes a turnip-fed peasant, and in a few months makes of him a military weapon, the length of whose stride is prescribed in centimetres--a machine which presents arms to a passing lieutenant with as much gravity and precision as if the fate of Prussia hinged on that special act. It takes the average tradesman’s son, puts him into the educational mill, and brings him out a professor,--equipped even to the spectacles,--a nonpareil of knowledge, who fastens on some subject, great or small, timely or remote, with the dispassionate persistence of a leech; and who, after many years, revolutionizes our theory of Greek roots, or of microbes, or of religion. Patient and noiseless as the earthworm, this scholar accomplishes a similarly incalculable work.

A spirit of obedience, which on its upper side passes into deference not always distinguishable from servility, and on its lower side is not always free from arrogance, lies at the bottom of the Prussian nature. Except in India, caste has nowhere had more power. The Prussian does not chafe at social inequality, but he cannot endure social uncertainty; he must know where he stands, if it be only on the bootblack’s level. The satisfaction he gets from requiring from those below him every scrape and nod of deference proper to his position more than compensates him for the deference he must pay to those above him. Classification is carried to the fraction of an inch. Everybody, be he privy councilor or chimney-sweep, is known by his office. On a hotel register you will see such entries as “Frau X, widow of a school-inspector,” or “Fräulein Y, niece of an apothecary.”

This excessive particularization, which amuses foreigners, enables the Prussian to lift his hat at the height appropriate to the position occupied by each person whom he salutes. It naturally develops acuteness in detecting social grades, and a solicitude to show the proper degree of respect to superiors and to expect as much from inferiors,--a solicitude which a stranger might mistake for servility or arrogance, according as he looked up or down. Yet, amid a punctilio so stringent, fine-breeding--the true politeness which we associate with the word “gentleman”--rarely exists; for a gentleman cannot be made by the rank he holds, which is external, but only by qualities within himself.

Nevertheless, these Prussians--so unsympathetic and rude compared with their kinsmen in the south and along the Rhine, not to speak of races more amiable still--kept down to our own time a strength and tenacity of character that intercourse with Western Europeans scarcely affected. Frederick the Great tried to graft on them the polished arts and the grace of the French: he might as well have decorated the granite faces of his fortresses with dainty Parisian wall-paper. But when he touched the dominant chord of his race,--its aptitude for system,--he had a large response. The genuine Prussian nature embodied itself in the army, in the bureaucracy, in state education, through all of which its astonishing talent for rules found congenial exercise. One dissipation, indeed, the Prussians allowed themselves, earlier in this century,--they reveled in Hegelianism. But even here they were true to their instinct; for the philosophy of Hegel commended itself to them because it assumed to reduce the universe to a system, and to pigeon-hole God himself.

We see, then, the elements out of which Prussia grew to be a strong state, not yet large in population, but compact and carefully organized. Let us look now at Germany, of which she formed a part.

We are struck at once by the fact that until 1871 Germany had no political unity. During the centuries when France, England, and Spain were being welded into political units by their respective dynasties, the great Teutonic race in Central Europe escaped the unifying process. The Holy Roman Empire--at best a reminiscence--was too weak to prevent the rise of many petty princedoms and duchies and of a few large states, whose rulers were hereditary, whereas the emperor was elective. Thus particularism--what we might call states’ rights--flourished, to the detriment of national union. At the end of the last century, Germany had four hundred independent sovereigns: the most powerful being the King of Prussia; the weakest, some knight whose realm embraced but a few hundred acres, or some free city whose jurisdiction was bounded by its walls. When Napoleon, the great simplifier, reduced the number of little German states, he had no idea of encouraging the formation of a strong, coherent German Empire. To guard against this, which might menace the supremacy of France, he created the kingdoms of Bavaria and Westphalia, and set up the Confederation of the Rhine. After his downfall the German Confederation was organized,--a weak institution, consisting of thirty-nine members, whose common affairs were regulated by a Diet which sat at Frankfort. Representation in this Diet was so unequal that Austria and Prussia, with forty-two million inhabitants, had only one eighth of the votes, while the small states, with but twelve million inhabitants, had seven eighths. Four tiny principalities, with two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants each, could exactly offset Prussia with eight millions. By a similar anomaly, Nevada and New York have an equal representation in the United States Senate.

From 1816 to 1848 Austria ruled the Diet. Yet Austria was herself an interloper in any combination of German states, for her German subjects, through whom she gained admission to the Diet, numbered only four millions; but her prestige was augmented by the backing of her thirty million non-German subjects besides. Prussia fretted at this Austrian supremacy, fretted, and could not counteract it. Beside the Confederation, which so loosely bound the German particularists together, there was a Customs Union, which, though simply commercial, fostered among the Germans the idea of common interests. The spirit of nationality, potent everywhere, awakened also in the Germans a vision of political unity, but for the most part those who beheld the vision were unpractical; the men of action, the rulers, opposed a scheme which enfolded among its possibilities the curtailing of their autocracy through the adoption of constitutional government. No state held more rigidly than Prussia the tenets of absolutism.

Great, therefore, was the general surprise, and among Liberals the joy, at the announcement, in February, 1847, that the King of Prussia had consented to the creation of a Prussian Parliament. He granted to it hardly more power than would suffice for it to assemble and adjourn; but even this, to the Liberals thirsty for a constitution, was as the first premonitory raindrops after a long drought. Among the members of this Parliament, or Diet, was a tall, slim, blond-bearded, massive-headed Brandenburger, thirty-two years old, who sat as proxy for a country gentleman. A few of his colleagues recognized him as Otto von Bismarck; the majority had never heard of him.

Bismarck was born at Schönhausen, Prussia, April 1, 1815. His paternal ancestors had been soldiers back to the time when they helped to defend the Brandenburg March against the inroads of Slav barbarians. His mother was the daughter of an employee in Frederick the Great’s War Office. Thus, on both sides his roots were struck in true Prussian soil. At the age of six he was placed in a Berlin boarding-school, of which he afterward ridiculed the “spurious Spartanism;” at twelve he entered a gymnasium, where for five years he pursued the usual course of studies,--an average scholar, but already noteworthy for his fine physique; at seventeen he went up to the University at Göttingen. In the life of a Prussian, there is but one period between the cradle and the grave during which he escapes the restraints of iron-grooved routine: that period comprises the years he spends at the university. There a strange license is accorded him. By day he swaggers through the streets, leering at the women and affronting the men; by night he carouses. And from time to time he varies the monotony of drinking-bouts by a duel. Such, at least, was the life of the university student in Bismarck’s time. At Göttingen, and subsequently at Berlin, he had the reputation of being the greatest beer-drinker and the fiercest fighter; yet he must also have studied somewhat, for in due time he received his degree in law, and became official reporter in one of the Berlin courts. Then he served as referendary at Aix-la-Chapelle, and passed a year in military service.