Blood and Iron Part 15

-- Bismarck voted against every new privilege. His speeches read like reports of personal rows! He was frank, fearless and frenzied, and in turn his volleys excited groans and hisses.

-- Was ever mortal so utterly out of touch with the prevailing French conception of liberty, equality and fraternity? Here is the way he summed up political equality:

-- "The goosequill arguments of newspaper writers!" "Relics of pot-houses!" "The emanc.i.p.ation of the people does not mean progress!"

"A royal word is more than volumes of law!" "The Prussian sovereigns are in possession of a crown by G.o.d's grace!" "The king has said he did not wish to be coerced or driven!" "Let there be a period of four years, at least, before another such stupid meeting as this is held."

-- It was a curious situation. Bismarck was both rude and crude!

His style of delivery was lame, his voice improperly placed, his mannerisms grotesque. Despite his hobbling oratory, however, Bismarck was soon a marked man; he held his audience by his sensational ideas and his dogged courage!

-- Why did Bismarck vote against every new privilege? This may not be decently answered in a word; you must read on in detail; there was a great principle behind Bismarck's political att.i.tude. True, it was crudely conceived and expressed, at this period; but he will improve with time.

-- Bismarck well remembered the excesses of German Jacobins, in the southwest, during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. Alsace and Lorraine had welcomed ma.s.sacres as signs of political equality; mob leaders destroyed castles and monasteries; Jew-baiters went mad; Schneider, the tyrant of Stra.s.sburg, took charge of the guillotine, but not making enough blood flow, was soon aided by professional executioners, straight from Paris.

-- There was also the lunatic "Feast of Reason." Stark-mad Germans paraded with Marat's statue, attacked churches, wrecked altars, heaped up images of saints, crosses, pews, pulpits, and priests' garments, touched the match, and danced around the fire;--while Schneider harangued the mob on the joys of reason, as against revealed religion; solemnly a.s.suring his thousands of listeners that Christianity was now a thing of the past.

-- Thus the mad war of liberty burst forth, accompanied by many extraordinary episodes. Nor were the followers confined exclusively to the rabble; we find many noted teachers, scholars and politicians endorsing the French guillotine as a remedy for all political ills--men like Blau, Wedekind, Hoffmann, Foster, Stamm, Dorsch, not overlooking the spectacular John Mueller, who in the cause of the people committed unheard-of follies with his pen, as a necessary support for the sword.

-- There was also a stark-mad leader named Cloots, who usually signed his bulletins "Cloots, Personal Enemy of Jesus of Nazareth." His object was the union of all mankind, literally speaking; no halfway measures for him, no long delays; he wanted his political salvation here and now.

-- So inflamed were the people that the discharge of a tailor's apprentice, in Breslau, precipitated a riot and the artillery was brought into play.

-- In Saxony, 18,000 peasants demanded a democratic const.i.tution; but the authorities replied by sending the messenger to a mad-house.

-- Thus, in various directions, the crack-brained revolutionists played their parts; nor should history overlook the contribution of the learned Dr. Faust, of Buckelburg, whose profound treatise, "Origin of Trousers," was read in Paris as a sort of historical endors.e.m.e.nt of the great democratic party that gloried in the equality, not to say liberty, exhibited by casting trousers aside.

-- Now what do you think? This King's Man, sprung up of a sudden, coming from his fox-hunting and his cow-sheds, hits right and left at the Jews! Yes, as against his "beloved Christians." Here is a new note indeed--old yet new.

We had not supposed Jew-baiting a thing of the past; but in these tempestuous times it did seem that race-prejudice had no place in a plain attempt to keep a king's crown.

-- "I will pa.s.s," Bismarck thundered, "to the question itself. I am no enemy of Jews, and if they are enemies to me, I will forgive them.

Under certain circ.u.mstances, I even love them. I would grant them every right--save that of holding superior office posts in a Christian country.

-- "I admit I am full of prejudices, sucked in with my mother's milk.

If I think of a Jew, face to face with me as a representative of the king's sacred majesty, and have to obey him, I must confess that I should feel myself deeply broken and depressed. The sincere self-respect with which I now attempt to fulfil my duties toward the state would leave me! I share these feelings with the ma.s.s of large strata of people, and I am not ashamed of their society."

-- Thus, now at this supreme moment, when with voice of bra.s.s our Bismarck is making his entry into the world of affairs with his sharp words on Christians and Jews, and more especially with his uncompromising conception that kings are indeed the personal representatives of G.o.d on this earth, we do see that Bismarck stems from a fighting race. All his years, this Bismarck was a frightful hater.

-- With the sorry figure of the world-oppressed Jew in our eyes and the malignancy of this new Jew-baiter, it is well that at the very outset this be made clear: That whatever Bismarck was or was not, at least he was no hypocrite. His words always fall like the wrath of G.o.d.

It is a solemn fact that he changed his point of view many, many times--even as you and I--but there is always the ring of sincerity about it that even the acid test of long time is unable to dissolve.

-- It was this tremendous earnestness--this sincerity--that made Bismarck feared, hated and despised.

Against your will, you are forced to believe what this giant says, no matter how mocking, how insolent, how absurd his charges!

Some tell us that Bismarck's ancestry stems from Bohemia, others trace the Bismarcks to Russia, still others a.s.sert Jewish origin.

This much is a fact: from a geographical point, the family name comes from the little river Biese, near Stendal.

-- Bismarck's pa.s.sion and prejudice against Jews was proverbial. It did indeed often turn him, for the time being, into a mad dog!

Near the close of life, in retirement at Friedrichsruh, some candid friend desecrated the great man's retirement by sending him a copy of a book by an anonymous writer, "Bismarck, the Jew."

Ordinarily, Bismarck paid no attention to social lampoons, but on this day as he read the book aloud to guests, his anger became black and terrifying!

-- "I am determined to have the law on the audacious writer!"

Bismarck's guests saw the old man in one of his moods of frightful rage.

But next day something intervened--and Bismarck never brought suit for damages.

-- Here is one thing that you must never forget in studying great men: That it is possible, nay inevitable, for a man to be at once very great and very small.

At the very beginning of his career, we find Bismarck ringing the solemn changes on "Christian," and we behold him in a characteristically unamiable mood over "Jews." Yet all the time he was endeavoring to lay down the dogma that the proper aim of the state is the realization of the Christian ideal!

-- If now you can understand this mental contradiction, you are in a position to grasp one of the strange paradoxes with which Bismarck's life is literally filled.

You see here, at once, why he has been so often accused of double-dealing, of stacking the cards, of changing his mind, of going ahead by going backwards, winning ultimately by fair means or by foul.

-- And now for the sequel. Many years later, Bismarck was exceedingly glad to be guided by the advice of Jews, more especially the Jewish banker Bleichroder.

On one side of the table sits Bismarck, the Pomeranian Junker, and on the other side the sallow-faced, undersized Jew, Bleichroder.

Great friends they are today, to be sure; and between them is a mound of treasury reports, telling in minute detail the financial resources of Louis the Little, now a helpless prisoner of war. France is at the Prussian's mercy, and a Jew is called in--a despised Jew!

Bleichroder and Bismarck coolly examined the balance sheets of France, the present state of her debts.

The money cost turns out to be the stupendous sum of five thousand millions of francs.

-- Literary and journalistic France, in book, editorial and oration made a great outcry at the moment, declaring dramatically that Prussian barbarians had decided "to bleed France white"--attributing to Bismarck a figure of speech borrowed from the butcher's block! Well and good, but France paid the indemnity in surprisingly short time; and had many millions left to go on her way rejoicing, had it not been for the miserable obsession, "Ravanche!" that kept her in hot water for years.

-- Bismarck was correctly quoted in this respect: That gold is as necessary in war as gunpowder; and the best way to keep a quarrelsome would-be Napoleon out of war is to empty his pockets.