oughbred article, be it man or beast. How ever, they were only a truly great nation while drinking was fashionable among them. Germany could have adopted for her own good many English ways-English fear of God and English respect for the law. The Kaiser has endeavored to introduce the English observance of Sunday among us, but a Sunday spent in England is one of my saddest recollections. Being young then and just arrived, I set about whistling, when a pious neighbor informed me it was not permitted a man to whistle in London on the Lord's day; and this so angered me that I left at once, for I did not enjoy having my liberty restrained. However, in Frankfort, when I was less particular than I am now, we always ate very plain food on Sundays, and I never used the carriage on that day on account of the servants I recall a funny experience with an English family when I was a youthful Jähriger. It happened one day that I was obliged to go, all dusty and dirty, straight from duty to the hotel where I took my meals. Chance placed me alongside people who had just arrived, and who, puzzled by my not immaculate appearance, began to discuss me. One of the ladies considered it impossible that I was an officer, and yet she said I had not the hands of a private. I listened in Although nearly four hours had elapsed since we first sat down at table, I have no recollection of the dishes served by the retinue of servants or the butler, a complacentlooking Teuton whose seventeen years of service gave him the privilege of wearing a blue serge sack-coat and a large gold chain over his ample breast. There was a momentary interruption as the coffee and liqueurs were placed on the board, cigars were handed to the gentlemen, the Countess lit a cigarette and the Prince, who had been drinking various wines, champagne, and beer, began on a fresh quart bottle of extra dry, while he puffed away at the first of three great porcelain pipes with enormous stems which stood erect in an umbrella-jar now placed beside his chair by the attentive butler. The visitor's book with pen and ink were put before me, while the Prince took up some photographs of himself, one with arms crossed over his breast exciting his displeasure. "Why was I photographed in such a position?" he exclaimed. "I never assume it; I am my arms are much too short to cross. not a poseur. No, you must not carry that thing off. You wish me to select for you the photograph I prefer? It is the one, I believe, in the soft slouch hat. [A reproduction of this photograph may be found in The Outlook for August 6.—THE EDITORS.] I like soft ha's and pliable cravats in my old age, and unstarched cuffs to my shirts. And now, dear child, this is the first time I have written my name this year [January 13]," he said, handing me the photograph, on which it had given him some trouble to inscribe the name and date. "I live here a hermit in my last days," Bismarck said presently; "it fatigues me to see people; but to-day has been a great happiness to me. I have liked several of your countrymen. There was Motley, and Bancroft. Bancroft always struck me as the ideal American Ambassador. His scholastic sedateness was all the more agreeable in contrast with the annoyance which the wife of one of his predecessors caused me. This lady considered herself specially privileged. At the receptions of the diplomatic corps she invariably stood in the open space through which their Majesties were to pass. Like a field-marshal in front of his armies, she stood before the diplomatic array; one after another the chamberlains attempted to remove her, but it took an army of them to get her back in line. I can comprehend all races and nations, even the Irish, who are an effeminate people with small brains and immense sentimentality, but I cannot overcome my aversion to the negroes; to me they appear like a caricature of the white man. Hence my great interest in the United States, where they enter with such momentum into the racial question. It does not astonish me that Social Democracy plays no important rôle in America, appearing only in the great centers, where it is readily suppressed, for the population is spread over such tremendous areas. This hot-house plant of our civilization only flourishes with you where the people are closely packed together. It appears to me that both England and America are displaying warlike tendencies; the Chino-Japanese conflict has ushered in this general desire to clash arms. I am astonished by the energy of the Japanese in contrast with the lethargy of the Chinese. "Some people see in the Chinese a menace to Europe; but the quiescent state of these people for centuries past shows this to be a groundless fear. It is far more probable that Japan must be considered in relation to the injury she will cause our mercantile relations than that China will ever enter the lists as a political power. How man and the hour change! Our century has accomplished much, but not everything; yet what tremendous progress I see in looking back over my life! The change in our ideas, in my own estimate of conditions, is marvelous. For instance, in my youth the Seven Years' War and the War of Freedom appeared very close together, and yet there was an interval of fifty-two years between them. "What a long time I have lived! I could have seen Napoleon I. Fortunately, fate permitted us to accomplish our work at different epochs. I had a sufficiency with old Nap the Third ! "I am not indifferent to what people will say of me when I am no more; ingratitude in high places has robbed my sun of all its brightness, embittered my latter years, and, like my friend in the Vatican, has made me a prisoner in my Sachsenwald. But I know how faithful was the service I rendered my King, and I declined their pension, for no one shall say that I ended my career by running after a reward like an industrious and conscientious postman on New Year's Day." Later we came together into the great drawing-room, cozy and old-fashioned, with sofas and arm-chairs dressed in chintz, the lamps burning brightly, and the samovar already steaming in preparation for the tea. 66 The sculptor, radiant, and seeing visions of a new statue beatified, said he had caught a softened look on the face of his Serene Highness unknown to the fraternity; and the Countess exclaimed in English as in perfect adoration she gazed at her father, “ I have never seen papa in a more amiable mood than he is today." Then the Great Dane woke from his sleep as we heard the whistle of the approaching train which was to carry me away, Prince Bismarck rose from his seat, and, followed by the dog, we linked hands like little children and in silence walked together to the door. N By the Countess von Krockow numerous French idioms and turns of expression. But in the speeches and letters there is plenty of abundant, pure, colloquial German, mingled here and there with primitive phrases analogous to Low-German forms of speech. He quoted from others, both verbally and in paraphrase. The incidents are too rare, however, for a man to think of him as a quotation-monger. ATIVE authors claim Bismarck not The diplomatic correspondence contains unfrequently for their own field. His writings have the prime merits of good compositions. They are well formed and well defined. They possess marrow, and have shape. Nor are they wanting in a certain kind of polish; such polish, namely, as that which results from hard utterance. He chose his sentences and weighed his words; for which reason many of his sayings are like coins, and bear not only the stamp of As to how the Prince came to Low German, nationality, but pass in the popular currency it may be accounted for, probably, by the of speech for proverbs and old saws. He associations of his early youth. His birthhad a way of putting things that is inimita- place, Schoenhausen, lies in the Saxon disble. As he often wrote, moreover, as he trict, it will be remembered, where Luther talked, his speeches read like his table-talk himself was born. His parents quitted it for when pronounced aloud. There is the same Pomerania, in 1816-the death of an old swing to both—the swing of deliberate prog. curmudgeon of a cousin having made Captain ress towards a point within clear view. von Bismarck the heir of three estates near The irregularity of passion plays no part in Naugard too full of woods and game to be any of his writings. Now and then there is withstood-but in doing so they left one an accent of good fellowship or of contem- dialect-speaking country for another still plation; but the great bulk of his observa- more rude. The first sounds, therefore, which tions are intellectual in origin, and win the the future Chancellor heard spoken, and tried mind of the reader without touching his heart. to imitate, thus came to be about the two most primitive ones of all of those which Germany affords in the way of speech. His nurses were stout, Platt-speaking peasant girls, and his train of attendant playfellows, in the home villages, Platt-speaking boys. In winter he was carried to Berlin with the family, to be sure, and in Berlin High German is spoken; but the trouble was, Otto still heard the familiar Platt even here. Indeed, he saw less of life in the city, on the whole, than in the country, his clever, handsome mother, as well as his handsome, simple-witted father, being used to devote the hours to society there which had fallen, in the solitude of Kniephof, to the nursery and park. His school years added English, French, and literary and juristic German to his first childish acquirements, without driving Platt out of his mind, however, for he came in contact with the peasantry on his vacations home. He retained a fondness for Low German always, and liked using it, on occasion, as a landlord to his menials. Of the two tongues, Platt-Deutsch or French, which took up best the essence of his genius there can hardly be a doubt; the query is He uses, in the main, two very different manners of expression. One of these is dignified and elegant; the other, homely and gruff. The first is likewise elaborate, while the second is concise. But they do not succeed each other after the fashion of periods. On the contrary, one intrudes pell-mell upon the other, the elusive blandness of the rhetoric of his official reports being broken in upon by outbursts of plain terms, while the directness of his familiar let'ers is interrupted in like wise by isolated companies of stilting paragraphs. He employs diplomatic and technical phrases without stint, but seems uneasy until an outright comment is got in somewhere or somehow. Whatever the manner may be, however, the meaning is always clear. Bismarck's pages are not among those in German literature which baffle foreign readers by the nebulous texture of their sentences. His sentences are long, for the most part, it is quite true. But they are distinct; the members that compose them are divided sharply, and the sequence of the words, like that of the thought, is logical and close. answered by the fact that no especial diplomatic remark of his ever came into vogue, although diplomacy occupied the best years of his life. If his felicitous condensations of thoughts into words be looked into, they are found to be homely references partaking of Platt ruggedness, and are like farm crowbars, that hoist wayside, common truths on end. The characteristic French axiom, on the contrary, is always a very superfine thing, and poniard-like in direction and aim. The Chancellor could get such off; he could split argumentative hairs, and spin, weave, and READY FOR A WALK From a photograph taken in 1894. brocade a political texture fit to beat the oldest hand at such work. His dispatches and circular notes are confounding as much because of the tight, neat, firm speciousness of their logic as for their audaciousness. But this refinement is the result of labor, not of inspiration. Bismarck's genius lay else where; and in consequence his happy hits lie elsewhere too. They have synthesis, not analysis, for their nature. For this reason he could sum up the case of Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg, in the one sententious phrase, "The same hands that rear chickens always know how to wring their necks" a wonderful multum in parvo in view of the fact that the Duke was, in truth, a pretender of Prussian incubation, and had his neck wrung, politically speaking, soon after by the Prussian Minister. Very apt condensation lies, too, in the assertion that he "gathered his views from the green land, not from the green table." Then consider the amusing slur cast at Great Britain: "And the hereditary parliamentary kings, who are wont to be led from out behind the coulisses where they are kept when a change of minis. try is demanded, in order to sign fresh appointments, and are then made to retire again after having supplied the opposition with a new fortress to storm and new men to point its arrows at." In this connection, furthermore, it becomes noticeable, I think, that the Chancellor's policy is not set forth, like most statesmen's, in selected terms, but gets summed up in single phrases which have himself for their author; "ferro et igni," "might goes before right." These verbal nutshells are characteristic, not merely of the spirit of his statecraft, but of his synthetically mental grasp, and natural style of expression. The fact is, Bismarck knew the secret of writing well and graphically. Whether he learned the art through precept or discovered it by himself does not appear; but only that he possessed it, and possessed it consciously. "After your departure," he writes to his sister, Malvina, in 1844, "I naturally found the house very lonely. I sat down by the hearth, smoked and philosophized on how unnatural and egotistic it is when girls who have brothers-and above all unmarried brothers-go and marry and carry on as if there was not ing in the world for them to do but follow their affections; a selfishness our sex, and I personally, know ourselves to be happily free from. On seeing how unfruitful these reflections were, I got up from the green leather chair, on which you used to whisper and exchange kisses with Miss and Oscar, and plunged into election affairs, from which I emerged with the conviction that five votes for certain and two uncertainly inclined towards my election, four for Krug's, sixteen to eighteen for Arnim's, and twelve to fifteen for Alvensleven's, so I chose to retire altogether. Now I live here with father, reading, smoking, and walking out, helping him eat lampreys and play at what he is pleased to call fox-hunting. We go out namely with Ihle, Bellin, and Carl in the rain, or with Réaumur pointing as at present to six degrees of cold, encircle, in the greatest silence and with every precaution against giving the wind, a pine knoll which we three are as good as certain contains not a living creature except a couple of old women perhaps, gleaning dry twigs, and Ihle, Carl, and two dogs enter it, giving vent to the most fearful and curious cries, particularly Ihle. Father stands motionless and attentive, with his rifle cocked, precisely as if he really expected game, until Ihle calls out close by: Ha la la he he at 'm he he,' in the strangest gutturals, when father asks me innocently if I haven't seen anything?' I answer, No! not the least thing!' in a tone of astonishment as natural as I can possibly make it. Thereupon we go to some other piece of wood whose certainty of game Ihle knows how to make believe he is sure of, grumble about the weather, and begin the same comedy over again. The thing is kept up three to four hours, without the zeal of father, Ihle, and Fingal cooling for one moment. "Besides these diversions, we amuse ourselves by looking at the orange-house twice a day, the sheepfold once, the thermometers hourly, and, since the weather has cleared up. have set the clocks striking after the sun in such harmony that only the library clock now gives one stroke after those of the other rooms have finished striking a tempo. Charles V. was a stupid fellow! You can easily see that I have no time left over on my hands, after such manifold occupations, to visit the curate; as he has no voice to give for the county council, I haven't been there once; it wasn't possible. The Elbe is full of ice; the wind is east by southeast; the new thermometer from Berlin stands at 8°; the barometer at 28.8. I tell you these things in order to set you an example how to write! Mention in your letters to father more of the small incidents of your life, and it will give him the most infinite pleasure; tell him who have visited you and Curt, whom you have called on, what you have to eat, how the horses are, how the servants behave, if the doors squeak, and whether the windows close tightly; in short, give facts, details." The library referred to here is shown nowadays, as it may be mentioned in passing, to public sightseers, as is the case, indeed, with pretty nearly the whole spacious house, with its numerous low rooms and chambersSchoenhausen having been turned into a museum of Bismarckian memorials. In 1844 PRINCESS BISMARCK From a photograph taken in 1888. always what a layman would call "a great reader." And in Pomerania, where he was managing Kniephof, at this date, his law studies and one year of military service not having led to anything, chiefly because both inclination and money were wanting-in Kniephof there were no books, or as good as none, which was one reason why he drank and caroused so there. Here, on the other hand, were nearly two hundred, and it would be hard for a man to find more knowledge in an equally small number of volumes. The fact that their number was limited had proved an advantage, rather than otherwise; for their turn to be read came round the oftener, and the contents were remembered the better because of the frequency of the reperusals. How much he had absorbed from the "Theatrum Europæum " he was surprised himself to see on entering into public life. His historical knowledge was not only much completer than most men's, it had a governmental coloring that showed differently from the school-room information of the run of politicians. fell into traps sometimes, to be sure, for this same reason. For example, he was sitting in the Assembly of the Three Estates, just about three years subsequent to this date, when a Liberal speaker, in arguing for the adoption He |