of land lying on the Danish boundary, and Germans all together on this side, I should hold it for a false policy not to end the matter at one stroke, and restore the purely Danish district to Denmark. I should then hold the restoration as a simple demand of the same national policy which we are carrying out in Germany, and which we are prevented from following in relation to Poland by the historical development which we after the last hundred years are no longer able to alter." The other speech to which we have alluded is by far the ablest and most exhaustive statement of the anti-Polish view which we have ever read. It is in answer to the arguments of the Polish members against the absorption of Posen in United Germany. After complaints of the influence which the Polish clergy had brought to bear on the elections, and a slight sketch of the conquest of Posen and the struggle of the Germans and the Poles there, he gives the following reasons for believing the aim of the present Polish movements to be both undesirable and hopeless of attainment:— "One needs only to think out the idea of the restoration of the Republic of Poland, in the boundaries of 1792, to be convinced of its impracticability. It is impossible simply because there are not Poles enough; there are far fewer Poles in the world than people generally believe. People talk of sixteen millions of Poles. The provinces of the former Republic of Poland, of 1772-not counting Liefland, which was first conquered from and then recovered by Sweden by the peace of 1660, or the provinces on the other side of the Dnieper which were given up to Russia at the peace of Andrassow, with the town of Kiew (not including the district that now bears that name), the remaining district is inhabited by about twenty-four millions of men. Among these, there are seven and a half millions of Poles-more than these there are not in the world-and of them a million and a half are scattered over wider districts which form the western governments of the Russian Empire, among populations which not only are not Polish, but do not wish to be-who would not for the world come back under Polish rule. Only see, in Galicia, the enmity of the Ruthenians against the Poles, to whom they were formerly subject, as the West-Prussians were,-I give this example because it is well known to all,—and you will then have the measure of the feelings of the more than ten millions of non-Poles, who, with twelve hundred thousand Poles, inhabit the west of the Russian Empire. In the West-Russian provinces, to balance the ten per cent. of Poles who live scattered about there as former masters, those who have come in by conquest and gained land, or as renegades to their people have adopted Polish manners and speech, there are ninety per cent. of other peoples, the greatest part of whom are of Russian origin, Ruthenians and White Russians; and these speak Russian, weep in Russian, though under Polish rule, are Russian, and wish to remain Russian, and stand by the Russian Government in their fights against the Polish nobility. The rest are Lithuanians, Littians, Germans, and a very considerable number of Jews. This accounts for twelve millions out of twenty-four millions, where it would be the greatest injustice to give ten per cent. of them a rule over the other ninety per cent., which the latter would dread and hate." Then after further estimates of the same kind, he wound up the calculations with these words: “If you reckon all together (those who live compactly enough together to form a community, and who at home are at least in a majority), then you find, if I do not mistake, six and a half millions of Poles; and in the name of these six and a half millions you demand back the government of the twenty-four millions with a tone of pathos, as if it were the most unworthy slavery and degradation not to allow you to retain under your rule those whom, alas! you enslaved for centuries-yes, even for five hundred years." Such then, as we gather both from these speeches and from letters published in his "Life," have been the fundamental political ideas of Count Bismarck. To some this statement may seem to suggest a more idealistic tendency than would accord with the popular conception of his policy. Well, for our own part, we have never heard, nor can we conceive of a statesman who accomplished a great political work without some flavour of idealism in him. But the vulgar idea that idealism is inconsistent with the power of adapting means to ends, with the foresight that sees what can be done now as well as what should be done eventually, is nearly as remarkably refuted by the life and work of Bismarck, as by that of any other great political actor. Indeed, it is not too much to say that just where his faith in the possibility of perfection has failed, there the results of his work have been smaller and weaker. That there have been those elements of weakness in his work we should be the last to deny the struggles with the Abgeordnetes Haus on the question of the right of control over the military service show often the vulgarly practical side of Count Bismarck's nature. The insolent sneers at theorists who live in their own cliques, and know nothing of the people they represent; the bold threat that they would not be in a position to refuse him the means for war if they should be really needed; above all, the arrest of Herr Twesten, and his insulting defence of that arrest, distinctly weakened his power, and the effect of these acts, revived and strengthened by his sanction to the arrest of Professor Jacoby and the other Socialists,* has been seen even this year in the address of the central committee of the Fortschritt-Partei. But there is one quality for which Count Bismarck deserves, as we think, far more credit than he has ever received; which deserves the respect of "practical" men as tending to the overthrow of red-tape; of idealists as pointing to a higher and healthier standard than the ordinary one in the intercourse between different nations. We mean his intense and thorough-going straightforwardness. Some, no doubt, will be inclined to apply to him Cornwall's description of Kent: "This is some fellow Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb * A curious instance of the ignorance of our popular newspaper writers of German politics, is given by a remark of Punch, that though the arrest of Jacoby was a blunder, the arrest of the Socialist-Democrats was quite defensible. Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he! An honest mind and plain-he must speak truth: An they will take it, so; if not, he's plain. These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness Harbour more craft, and more corrupter ends, Than twenty silly ducking observants That stretch their duties nicely." But we believe this description, though at first sight plausible, will be found, on closer study of his career, to be most unjust. To begin with that part of his work which has perhaps attracted the greatest amount of obloquy. We mean the Schleswig-Holstein war of 1864. Now we think that any one who reads the speeches of the Prussian Abgeordnetes Haus delivered at this time, and remembers besides that the sympathy of the Germans for their fellow-countrymen in Schleswig-Holstein was as strong and clearly expressed in 1813 and 1848 as in 1864, will hardly seriously attribute to Count Bismarck any special guilt (if guilt there was) in his first agitation of this question. The notion that it was a trick to silence internal quarrels by foreign complications is refuted both by the fact that one of the first motions on the subject was made by the distinguished Liberal leader, Herr Twesten, who, though he opposed the war, did so simply on the ground of the small chance of success, and showed as great a sense of indignation at the breach of his agreement by the King of Denmark, and as great a desire to come to the rescue of his fellow-Germans, as Bismarck. The conduct of the Prussian ministry to the Prince of Augustenburg in first making use of his name for their purpose, and then thrusting him aside by legal quibbles, was no doubt eminently unscrupulous, but it was not unscrupulousness of the underhand kind, at least so far as Bismarck was concerned. He did not treat that prince as Cavour treated Garibaldi, first letting him do the work alone and then snatching the prize from his grasp; the meaning of the Prussian intervention in the matter was tolerably clear from the first, and the folly of the Prince of Augustenburg in refusing to come to terms with them after their conquest must have seemed to Bismarck an amply sufficient ground for setting him aside. Again, we say, the proceeding was undoubtedly immoral, but it was the immorality of an overbearing soldier, not of a tricky diplomatist. The case of Cavour to which we have alluded is no doubt an argument for the supreme success of cunning, but at the same time we maintain that had Count Bismarck acted with thorough uprightness, had he appealed to the popular feeling in Schleswig-Holstein, instead of setting up a man of straw like the Prince of Augustenburg, Schleswig-Holstein would have gravitated towards Prussia in a way of which no Liberal in Europe could have disapproved. With regard to the greater struggle of 1866, and its immediate antecedents, few, we think, who know anything of the times, can doubt that honesty and straightforwardness were in the main on the side of Count Bismarck's policy. The treaty of Gastein and the squabble about the division of Schleswig-Holstein have made many Englishmen forget that the petty intrigues of Austria in the German States were as disgraceful as in the Italian ones. We must consider, too, the threat to reduce Prussia to the Electorate of Brandenburg; the attempt to expel her from the Bund at Frankfort; and, what is after all still more important, the appeal which had been made by the German people in 1848 to the then King of Prussia to do completely what his successor did partially in 1866. In all the diplomatic struggles of the time Bismarck was most open; the warning to the Austrians "to remove their centre of gravity to Pesth or Buda," the threat of "blood and iron," was certainly a wonderful contrast to the ordinary wiles of diplomacy. Nor can the encouragement to Kossuth and Klapka be looked upon as dishonest in intention, for there can be little doubt that it is not Count Bismarck's fault that Vienna is not now a city of United Germany. But though, with a curious. perversity, we in England have insisted on believing that an "unconstitutional" statesman must be a rogue, there cannot be a doubt that this candour has had its effect in Germany. Even the small princes of Germany, so lately the satellites of Austria, have begun to draw closer to Prussia, as the renovator of German life and policy; and Bismarck has shown that he can well appreciate and reciprocate such confidence by the gentleness and consideration with which he has handled the other members of the Bund. For the explanation, indeed, of this latter phenomenon, we must undoubtedly look behind Count Bismarck, at the figure of the kind-hearted old gentleman who is exercising an influence on German politics, such as a far abler man than he might have failed to produce. We said that Count Bismarck was specially fitted for the work which he has accomplished. Not less fitted is King William I. to be the king of Count Bismarck, or of the gradually uniting Germany. Pure in his domestic life (a matter which seems to tell so much more strongly in Prussia and England than elsewhere), with a tender sympathy for his people and their aspirations, and yet a good-natured feeling for his brother kings and princes (strengthened, of course, by theories of "divine rights”), knowing when to give way to his able minister, and when to stand firm, he supplies at once the best foil and the most useful watchword to a rough and ready politician like Bismarck. No one could live in Prussia during the war without becoming conscious that, for the present at any rate, the country was intensely monarchical. The exaggerated feeling about the king, indeed, reminded one of the stories of the enthusiasm in England, during Napoleon's wars, for a king, not unlike King William in character, though driven by his madness into an obstinacy from which, happily for Prussia, King William is to a great extent free. The battle of Gravelotte was especially delighted in as "the King's battle." Not only in newspapers, but in private talk, I heard allusions to the "Helden-König;" and a strong Liberal, certainly not given to sentimentalism in politics, in summing up the causes of the Prussian success, mentioned to me as almost the chief of these causes, that they had a king who was "Königlich gesinnt." Whether or not Count Bismarck fully shares this popular enthusiasm, there is no doubt that he is fully conscious of the strength which it gives to his policy. This "An English ministry," he cries on one occasion, “whatever it may call itself, is a ministry of the Parliament. We are the Ministers of his Majesty the King." "The Prussian people are monarchical in feeling," he tells the House on another occasion; and again he exclaims, "In a few words, gentlemen, if we are to gain your confidence, we must give way to you in a manner which is impossible for the Ministers of the King of Prussia. We should then be not Ministers of the King, but of Parliament; we should be your Ministers, and to that I hope to God we shall never come." last utterance brings us to a point which is perhaps the most important of all in the consideration of the life of a prominent statesman of to-day. What effect will the unity of Germany, and the European leadership which it has gained in this war, have on the progress of European freedom? It is often assumed, indeed, by Englishmen that Germany is merely a despotically-governed country, and Bismarck the embodiment of the principles of military despotism. We believe that the first of these views is intensely superficial, and if taken by itself, utterly false; while the second one will be greatly modified by a study of these speeches. It is, of course, true that the power of the Abgeordnetes Haus in Prussia, and of the German Reichstag, is nothing like that of an English House of Commons; true, that neither Prussia nor the Bund has a "responsible ministry," that arrests are far more arbitrary, newspapers more easily suppressed, and public meetings dissolved with less excuse; but yet we have seen that the spirit of freedom is in the Germans as strongly as it is in us. There is a life in German towns which is essentially independent, which was not wound out of red tape, and cannot be choked by winding red tape round it. Herr Menzel, one of the writers on the Elsass and Lothringen question,* distinctly appeals to this peculiarity in those provinces as a proof of the strength of the German element there. Nor is it only in this form of municipal freedom that the * Elsass und Lothringen sind und bleiben unser. |