TOPICS OF THE DAY.
PRINCE BISMARCK AS DEBATER.
IF the sole object of political oratory were to produce
immediate effect, Prince Bismarck might be pronounced the most successful orator alive. From the day when, in his famous " blood-and-iron " speech, he stood revealed to Europe as a new force with which nations had to reckon, he cannot be said to have made a speech which, for the object he had in view—that object not being always to convince his audience in the Chamber—has been entirely unsuccessful, and he has repeatedly earned a triumph of the most exciting sort. He is, in fact, by far the most effective speaker in the German Parliament, can crush an adversary with a sentence, or with a peroration can bring a majority to its 'feet foaming with applause. Clear and vehement in utterance, with one high oratorical faculty—that of condensing a policy into a thunder- ing epigram translatable into all languages—he shares with the younger Pitt the power of weighting his speeches with facts known only to himself, and letting out secrets where needful which tell like shells as they drop into an advancing column. His utter plainness, his vehement courage—so opposed to the reticence of most official speakers—his terrible frankness, whether real or assumed, and the exceptional posi- tion which makes of his words acts, all combine to give him an ascendancy which sometimes, as on 4th December, seems to carry the majority out of itself, till they are ready, like some horde after a victory, to raise him on their shields and pronounce him a King of Men. But then is that immediate success the true object of a statesman who has not only to debate, but to govern, not only to crush hostile regiments, but to organise armies of friends and enemies alike ? Even to us, who admire many of the Prince's Parliamentary qualities, and deprecate the exaggerated reticence and caution of our own debaters when touching on serious affairs, it seems that prosperity, battle, and perhaps the irrita- tion of a contest with an intangible power with which, because it is intangible, the Prince is ill fitted to cope, have exagger- ated those qualities in the German Chancellor until they have become dangers to himself and to the great party whom he leads. Twice within three days has Prince Bismarck intervened in debate with a result utterly crushing to his immediate opponents, but sure to intensify in the long-run all the political difficulties he tries by his fury to remove. The speech on Foreign Affairs on the 4th inst. was more than daring, it was rash to the extreme of indiscretion. A Foreign Minister of Germany might, if his evidence were clear, fitly express any amount of indignation at the murder of Captain Schmidt by the Carlists, but what could be the use of threatening every disturbed Power by alluding to an impulse to land troops in Spain, seize the first Carlist officer obtainable, and hang him up as adequate reprisals ? No doubt the Chancellor, in the German report of his speech, condemns that impulse as "bar- barous," but why allude to so impossible a policy at all ? It is natural that the Prince should be enraged by a crime like that of Kullmann, which threatened not only his life, but his policy, and might have been the signal for a dozen attempts upon his person ; but what must be the result of accusing the Centre Party—that is, all Ultra- montanes in Germany—of complicity even in thought in such a crime, except to make twelve millions of Catholic Germans be- lieve that between them and the Chancellor there can be no peace or compromise, that he believes them all alike hostile enough to desire or tolerate his assassination ? If it were true, it would be a most imprudent thing to say ; but the Prince knows the world well enough to know that it is not, that men rarely commit personal crimes for their Church, that a man like Monsignor de Merode, a fanatic who would lead any rebellion for his faith, would still be bound by the morality and the honour of his day. The very anxiety of the Catholics to make out Kullmann mad, an anxiety which enrages Prince Bismarck, is proof of their desire to deny that assassination is a crime which Catholics could tolerate. An army does not justify its forlorn hope by proclaiming its insanity. Prince Bismarck desires to beat down, rather than convince his op- ponents; but language of that kind beats down no one, does but make the huge mass of men who are both Catholics and quiescent subjects feel as if they were personally attacked. It is an.indictment against a people which the Chan- cellor brings, not an argument against a party. Grant every- thing which he may by possibility have believed,—that all Ultramontanes are anti-Germans, which cannot be the case ;
that Bavarian regiments would revolt in the next war, which, unless the Wittelsbachs revolt first, seems to us absurd ; that he himself was the object of a sanguinary hatred, and still tlae part of a statesman would be action, not speech, the serene ex- ternal tranquillity which of all devices best guards the lives of Kings, and not an outburst which proclaims to would-be rebels, or traitors, or assassins how numerous they are. Imagine Crom- well, even when his iron nerves acknowledged the influence of incessant threats, denouncing all Royalists or Fifth-monarchy men as accomplices in heart of those who frequently attacked his life. The Royal etiquette which pronounces villains of the kind misguided, fanatical, or mad but isolated persons, has surely its root in the first maxims of a statescraft which Prince Bismarck has not hitherto despised.
Again, in the second debate on the motion for withdrawing an embassy to the Pope, the language employed by the Chancellor seems to us to show that the battle into which he has plunged with the Catholic chiefs has shaken that central equanimity which, whatever their outside appearance, is always the strength of statesmen of the rank to which the world, whether hostile or friendly, has unanimously raised the man who has made Germany. The withdrawal of an embassy from the Vatican may in itself be a wise step or a foolish one, we do not presume to judge. We cannot see our- selves the wisdom of knowing a little less about the proceedings of any living power, but still the Empress of India keeps no Envoy in Mecca, Prince Bismarck may think the embassy dis- liked in Italy, or the German representative may be so treated. by the Curia as to render his position in the Vatican in- tolerable to a Power so great. Grant any excuse, any secret the public does not know, any depth of irreconcilability in Rome, and still what can be the wisdom of stating officially from the tribune, in that voice which reaches the whole world, Protestant or Catholic, that the Pope hates Germany until. terms between Catholicism and Berlin are impossible, and the Papacy is a friend to every German Revolutionist Imagine what Prince Bismarck himself would say if Mr. Disraeli were incautious enough, during a severe, though tacit struggle with. the Particularists of Ireland, to tell the Irish that. Would he ever again believe in Mr. Disraeli's capacity to govern even the Isle of Man ? Yet his own position, by his own descrip- tion of it, is far more critical than Mr. Disraeli's could by possibility be. He says Monseigneur Meglia, Nuncio in Bavaria in 1869, said at Munich to the Wurtemberg Envoy that the Catholic Church was free only in America, England, and Bel- gium, and in other countries had only to look to revolution to secure her rightful position. The words are confirmed by the statesman who was Premier of Wurtemberg in 1869, and were therefore reported to Stuttgardt ; and granting them literally true, to what do they amount ? That an Italian ecclesi- astic, favoured by Rome before the Falck laws had been con- ceived or the Temporal Power had ended, had given utterance to an opinion repeatedly expressed in France by sceptics, in Italy by enemies of the Papacy, in England by the bitterest Protestants, that the chance of the Catholic Church hence- forward was to rely on the extreme democracy. We, who cer- tainly are no friends of the Papacy, though we think it wiser to understand it than to fling abuse into the air, have said the same thing a hundred times. What else is the argument on which Louis Blanc rejects the female suffrage, which on his theory is logical, or by which extreme Radicals in Italy defend a suffrage so limited as to be scarcely moral, or Irish Orangemen protest against lowering the county suffrage in Ulster? What is there in a Nuncio to Munich, that a man like Prince Bismarck should quote his private talk; or in Windhorst, that he should fight him as if he were at the head of pirate legions; or in the Centre Party itself, overwhelmed as it is in Parliament, Press, and Empire, that he should reveal secrets like his view of the probable action of Rome, had.Napoleon won the day? His statement—ridiculously misreported by the telegraph, which makes him say that the Council which adjourned before Speicheren was influenced by German victories—was in the textual report perfectly intelligible, namely, that had Napoleon won, the Council would have reassembled and interpreted the dogma in a very different sense, possibly, it may be presumed, in the sense of proclaim- ing the temporal power divine. That is couteivable, to Pro- testants at all events ; but what is the use of an assertion which is at best a conditioned prophecy, which the Prince can no more prove than Mr. Disraeli can prove that Parliament next Session will vote a Tenure Bill? Or granting the Papacy an armed foe of Germany, what is the effect of declaring that it used Napoleon as a tool, except to show that Prince Bismarck,
in expediting war with France, in sanctioning the Hohen- zollern candidature in Spain—a terrific blow at once to French arrogance and to the personal amour-propre of the Spanish Empress of the French—in circulating the story of the insult which nobody gave or received at Ems, was running even a more frightful risk than the world knew, was declaring war on Rome as well as France ? He carried his point, no doubt, in debate, but at precisely the cost which Queen Victoria would incur if she declared, in a speech from the Throne that every Mussul- man was at heart a traitor, that the Mutiny had been arranged at Mecca, and that the only policy to be pursued with Islam was battle with Mecca to the death. Such utterances would not be wise if they were applicable to a mere faction, to a party as feeble as the Partionlarists or the Poles ; but applied as they are to a creed, a creed with 12,000,000 German followers, a creed whose professors believe themselves depositaries of the only truth, they can be accepted only as indications that the haughty statesman at the head of Germany has lost in debate the full self-control, the power of letting out passion as one lets a river through a lock, or a sea through a dyke, which once gave him such irresistible strength. He obtained, no doubt, all the applause he desired, a passionate outbreak of support from the majority, but only that buyer is successful who fulfils his desire at the price he can afford. In the attitude of every great ruler, be he Minister like Chatham, or soldier like Marlborough, or even demagogue like O'Connell, there must be something of the King,—something of one so elevated above the mass that he can care for all, and can descend to individual conflict with none ; and it is this element of grandeur, a necessary element, as we believe, which seems tons to be fading out of a character which has accomplished so much for Germany. If Prince Bismarck were Pope, he would excommunicate Lord Acton for his letters, and the pen his fingers held, and every Bridgnorth citizen who had ever voted for his squire.
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