of a written constitution for Prussia, mentioned the fact of the people having roused themselves in 1813, in order to obtain the promised grant of a constitution; a fact which Bismarck's historical authorities had failed to emphasize. So he rose from his seat and said he objected to that interpretation; the ground of the uprising was the popular hatred of the French occupation of the country.

"You know little about the matter," cried an elder deputy. "You were not living then. The King published a proclamation promising a constitution if we would take up arms; it was posted up in Breslau and here in Berlin.” Bismarck was non plused. But he had always had a way of extracting himself from pitfalls, and knew how to perform it, moreover, in such manner as to damage bis adversary more by his liberation than he had suffered hurt by his tumble; and so now. Rising again calmly, he said in substance that "it was true he was not living at the time, and had often regretted it, for he should have liked to fight against Napoleon. He had taken it for granted that it was his despotic yoke which the country was resenting. He had to hear now it was a national one. was not grateful for the information, and no longer regretted not having lived then."

He

the

In Kniephof he had enjoyed ruffling the tempers of his fellow-squires by giving vent to the liberal opinions which he had heard advanced by "Jack" Motley and other chums of his university and Rhineland days, and which, for that matter, were being preached pretty generally by Germans, too, in as far as they belonged to the political parties which were demanding parliamentary government and the unification of German States. But when matters became serious, as they did in this year (1847) and the next, blood of nature proved stronger than the water of adoption." He realized that he was "the King's man, from the crown of his head to the calves of his legs," and felt moved to his uttermost depths to work in behalf of the throne. The family were willing to make things easy for him, in the hope of his really doing something at last towards starting into a diplomatic career, which their mother had always said was the one he was most suited for; so he set out for Berlin, from whence he traveled up and down the country, forming tory unions and establishing a tory press. His first journalistic writing was done for such a paper of his own founding, the "New

Prussian Gazette," which still survives and is known widely under its popular sub-title " Die Kreuz-Zeitung," a remarkable newspaper, which is as feudalistic in tone to-day as it was fifty years ago, as much an organ of Prussian squiredom, and the credo of monarchical orthodoxy; for which reasons it turned on its founder in the sixties and combated him in the eighties (during the Kultur Kampf), and outlived his disgrace and fail, in the beginning of the nineties. But at this period, in the fifties, Bismarck in his speeches outdoes the "Kreuz-Zeitung" in ultra-monarchicalism, advocating resistance to the popular cry for a Constitution, and objecting to all reforms. When the Constitution was ratified finally in 1850, after the Revolution had been crushed by the steel arm of the military, he expresses himself as being "grateful only for the clause in it which makes the ministers responsible to the crown and not to parlia ment." He detests parliaments, and a republican reader can hardly read his perorations against popular government without mixed amusement and resentment. But they were

reported in Pomerania in those days, as they would be still, by the local Sir Roger de Coverleys with untinctured approbation, and the general gratification of the Pomeranian country-side society was witnessed with rapture by the girl who had pledged her troth to the speaker while he was without credit and unknown. Bismarck certainly reached the zenith of his emotional life, attained the high niveau of his intellectual circumspection, and enjoyed the best health he ever had, in "the Frankfort period." It includes the seven years after his marriage with Johanna in 1849, from 1852-59. The beginning is marked in the letters by the confessions to Johanna and longings for moonshine and sonatas from Beethoven; the end, by the Little Book, as it is usually entitled-or a recapitulation of the political relation between Austria and Prussia. The marvelous fullness of the latter is as much the harvest of jealous patriotism as of professional experi

having lodged me in his hill castle, to which the vesper bells of Pesth are sending up their sounds. The view is charming. The burg lies high, the Danube flowing below, crossed by its iron bridge; beyond it, Pesth, and, in the distance, the endless steppe with its horizon melting into the purple of the evening mist. The journey here would have delighted you, at least the portion between Gran and Pesth. The dark side of the trip was the sun; it burnt, namely, as hot as if Tokay grapes were to be ripened on deck; and the multitude of passengers was great; strange to say, not an Englishman in it; they can't have discovered Hungary yet." The next evening he writes: "Again the lights of Pesth are shining down below. All day I have been in uniform; had an audience with the young sovereign, in which I presented my credentials [Bismarck was on a special mission to Emperor Francis Joseph], and received agreeable impressions. After dinner the whole court made an excursion into the mountains to the beautiful shepherdess,' who, however, has been dead a long timeKing Matthew Corvin loved her several hundred years ago. A local festival had brought thousands to the spot, who crowded around the Emperor when he appeared among them with deafening elgen [huzzahs], danced Csardas, waltzed, sang, played wild airs, climbed in'o the wood trees, and pressed round the ladies and gentlemen of the court."

A couple of days later he goes to Szolnok, where he deposits his money with Prince W—, and after eating a breakfast under a Schoenhausen-like lime, gets into "a very low hay-cart, with bags stuffed with straw for cushions, and drawn by three Hungarian horses. The Uhlans loaded their pieces [the Prince had insisted on his taking an escort], mounted, and off we set in a furious gallop. Hildebrand and my extra Hungarian valet sat in front on a straw bolster with the drivera dark, brown peasant with a mustache, broad-brimmed hat, long black hair made glistening with grease, a shirt that reached only to his stomach, where a band of hairy, naked skin was visible, and a pair of trousers, each leg of which was ample enough for a woman's skirt, and extended only as far down as to the knees, where the leather spurredheeled boots began. Fancy a firm, elastic soil under you, level as the top of a table, on which nothing is visible for miles round to the distant horizon, except tall well-poles marking the watering-places for cattle; droves

of thousands of white and brown-flecked oxen, with horns as long as your arms, shy as wild animals, and watched over by halfnaked men, provided with long sticks and mounted on shaggy, poor horses; immense herds of swine, accompanied invariably by a swineherd with an ass to carry his sheepskin greatcoat, and occasionally himself; and great flocks of wild fowl." The party halted for the night at the garrison station Ketskemet, then proceeded southward, as Bismarck "hoped to see something of the robbers, in their heavy fur coats, guns in hand and pistols in belt, and the captains, some of whom are said to belong to the native gentry, in black masks. A few days ago several gens d'armes were killed in a fight with them, while two men of the band were seized and shot by court martial in Ketskemet. But no robbers showed themselves. The lieutenant in my escort said they knew before daylight probably that I was traveling under protection; some of them possibly were the peasants who greeted us at the post-stations with the dignified, earnest manner of their caste, uttering their istem adiamek, Praise be unto God!'"

6

Five years later, after having visited most of the other countries of Europe, Bismarck went to Denmark to pass a few weeks of his summer vacation, and the same animal spiri's which had impelled him in Hungary to seek adventures on the steppes led him here into a par.y of courtly sportsmen, bound for “a wilderness four hundred miles square. The very land of my dreams!" he writes; "sixty miles distant from the last post-station, and a hundred to the next, at this wild spot where I should like to build a cottage; the country between is sprinkled with swamps, and has forests of birch, cedar, pine, ash, and oak, sometimes too thick, almost, to penetrate, sometimes very thin with only scattered trees, but the whole everywhere close covered with stones of all sizes, from that of your hand to rocks as big as houses."

A day later he is laid up with a sprained leg, his foot having turned on one of these loose stones; and the accident, with its subsequent spell of invalidism, proves to be the beginning of notices of bad health, which recur from this time on, both in the private letters and the accounts of public reports and speeches. He became liable to fits of suffering from swollen veins in the once sprained leg; and to this evil a facial neuralgia associated itself, which he attributes sometimes to the cold

seasons he spent in St. Petersburg, sometimes to the wearing worries and vexations of office, and sometimes to the exhaustion attendant in the wake of social attendance at court festivities.

There are up-flickerings of the old humor and zest in life throughout the rest of the letters, it is true, but the large, major note of sustained propulsiveness is no longer in them to the same exuberant extent as before; so, if a stranger must make a choice, let him leave the rest, and grasp instead the one volume descriptive of the Frankfort days. This volume contains more of the man Bismarck than all of the later volumes put together, and the essence of the patriot, the diplomatist, and the statesman besides.

In Frankfort his political views clarified and systematized themselves. "Nobody, not even the most malicious skeptic of a democrat, would believe that charlatanism and pretension compose the substance of the diplomacy carried on here," he writes to his wife at the commencement; and, behold, the keynote of the whole historic period that follows is struck for once and all! Bismarck masters the charlatanism and practices the pretentiousness. His watchword becomes, Nur dreist und consequent-Be persistent in audaciousness and all will be well; and this does not change again. There had still been enough of the raw young country squire in him when he came down to the Diet at first to incline him loyally towards the Emperor Franz and Austria, they being the liege lords of the King and Prussia. A perception, however, of the fact that such fealty is one-sided, that Austria regards Prussia as a young vassal to be used without compensation, and restricted, by means fair or foul, in her lusty young instinct of aggrandizement, suffices to transform him at once and fundamentally. A resolve ripens in him promptly to defy Austria; and thenceforward diplomatic opposition is what he practices at the Diet, and political opposition what he advises at Berlin, where spirits are divided, Roon and the war party, the members of which are likewise ambitious, taking sides against the traditional head of German affairs, while the pious and timid preach the feudal gospel of traditional allegiance. The King wavers, and this situation continues till the end of the story, it being the same at bottom whether the monarch occupying the throne goes by the name of Frederick William IV., William I., or Frederick III.; and whether the oppos

ing parties at his right hand and left be Bismarck and Roon against Gerlach and Queen Elizabeth, or Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon against Prince Frederick William, Empress Augusta, and the Crown Princess. When the situation did change, and the occupant of the throne stepped from the golden middle ground of moderation, when, in other words, to Frederick III. succeeded William II., Bismarck's occupation was gone.

66

In order to influence the King in favor of alliances with western powers against the one which is blocking Prussia's way to greater might, he goes so far as to write apologies for revolution and republicanism; he goes further, and favors national parliaments; and still further, and lends an ear to the popular demand for the union of German States. "The demand offers a means for winning popular allegiance to whatever State will take it up," he reasons with Manteuffel. Later (in the final volumes) he is reported as having assured a deputation that he bad worked and lived in order to give his faithful German countrymen unification and so fulfill their patriotic dream." The true dash of spirit, the bold maneuvers, the restless, resistless forces of will and mind, are in the early volumes, I repeat. In these there lies more between the lines than the later interpretations afford in all their thousand pages. One is meat and core; the other palaver and shell. He lived for power, not ideas, and for power only. If that had incurred to Prussia from disunion, disunion is what he would have wrought for. Little cared he for dreams. He was an incarnation of the pioneer soul of his northern Fatherland, and stretched out for room and empire, as the great Elector had done before him, and Frederick called the Great. If he turned out to be an agent of the national life, it is one example more in history of how much greater is life than the disposition of the mightiest of men.

At the Diet, meanwhile, the intuition of his secret enmity to Austria growing into certainty, his colleagues urged his being recalled, and the King, yielding, thought of making him Prime Minister, but, wavering as usual, sent him first to St. Petersburg for a couple of years, and then to Paris as his Ambassador. Then, however, mustering up all his courage, he took the decided step of calling Bismarck to Berlin. The year was 1862. And, sure enough, the expected took place, for in little less than ten years Bismarck had let the Prussian army loose with its "mailed

fist" against the cuirasses of Denmark, Austria, and France, and knocked them hollowperhaps, indeed, they found them so. Bismarck asserts that they were; that corruption prevailed in all States but Prussia, and in all the army administrations save that of Germany.

One bit of romance is opened in the account which Bismarck gives of his impatience over the delay of the King in signing the declaration of war with Austria in 1866. He represents himself as "walking up and down the garden of the Ministerium at night too agitated over the uncertainty he is kept in to go to sleep," and takes a respite under hand by dispatching Herr von Gablentz to Vienna to propose to Emperor Franz their turning their swords on France and taking Alsace mutually, "since their swords are unsheathed "—a nocturnal picture which has its pendant in the figure of King William, who, at the same time, is pacing his chamber, drawn one way by the representations in his thoughts of Bismarck and Roon, and another by the pleadings of his Queen and the sacred Past: the tension of both men being suddenly put an end to by a bul.et which is fired at the Minister one day by a fanatic enemy. The shot misses, but it brings the old King to his knees and a decision; God's having spared the Premier being interpreted by his pious heart as a hint that He means Bismarck to live and have his way. And forthwith, in the pages, the silent pacing in the garden is replaced by the sound of thundering cannon rolling into Bohemia and the tramp of shouting troops.

As for realistic bits, here is Bismarck's account of the morning of the 2d of September, 1870, at Doncherry:

"Yesterday evening, after coming here at your Majesty's royal command, in order to take part in the negotiations concerning the capitulation, the same were interrupted towards one o'clock after midnight by a grant of time for reflection, besought for by General Wimpffen, after General von Moltke had declared decisively that no other condition would be given save that of their laying down their arms, and if this were not fulfilled in the meanwhile, the bombardment would begin again at nine o'clock in the morning. wards six General Reille was announced, who told me that the Emperor wished to see me and was already upon the way from Sedan. The General then returned immediately in order to inform his Majesty that I was following, and a short time afterwards I found myself face to face with the Emperor at a

To

spot in the neighborhood of Frenois, about midway between Sedan and here. His Majesty was sitting in a carriage with three officers of high rank, and an equal number of others were on horseback. I recognized the generals Castelnau, Reille, and Moskwawho seemed to be wounded in the foot-and Vaubert. Arriving at the carriage, I dismounted, strode to the side where the Emperor sat, and asked what were his commands. The Emperor expressed the wish to see your Majesty, apparently thinking that your Majesty was in Doncherry. After I had informed him that your Majesty's headquarters were twelve miles distant at the moment, in Vendresse, the Emperor asked if your Majesty had fixed upon a place for him to resort to, and what I thought about the matter. I said I had come to the place where we happened to be, in the dark, and did not know anything, therefore, about the vicinity, and offered to place the house which I was occupying in Doncherry at his disposal, saying I would vacate it at once. The Emperor accepted the proposition, and drove slowly towards Doncherry; stopped, however, several hundred paces before the Maas bridge, in front of a lonely cottage and inquired if he could not alight there.

"I had the house examined by Count Bismarck-Bohlen, Secretary of Legation, who had followed and come up with me, and, upon his announcing that the rooms were small and poor, but free from wounded men, the Emperor got down and invited me to accompany him inside. Here, in a small chamber containing a table and two chairs, I had an interview that lasted nearly an hour."

In a letter to Johanna he says the Emperor alighted before the village because "he shrank from the gaze of people;" but to his royal master he is strictly objective and makes no comment. Yet comment is one of his strong points, and he indulges in it occasionally, even in communications to the King, as instance the celebrated letter of complaint against Count Arnim. Every volume of his writings will be found sprinkled thickly with comment, and while those on things may "go," the reader is apt to be more amused over what he says of persons than credulous. A good deal, in fact; the trouble being that Bismarck's estimates of men are all so similar. Nature surely shows up more varieties of human creatures than Poschinger's and Rohl's "editions," which seem to know of only two-fools and base knaves.