The Life of Prince Bismarck. By William Jacks. (J. Maclehose
and Sons, Glasgow. 10s. 6d.)—No one can see more clearly than Mr. Jacks that the time for a definite judgment on Prince Bismarck's character and policy has not yet come. In one sense such a time will never come. Opinions will always be divided about him, as they will be, we can hardly doubt, about Julius Caesar. But this is no reason why such a book as Mr. Jacks has given us here should not be useful and even necessary. It supplies a clear, consistent, easily understood conception of the great German's career and policy. Possibly the lines and wrinkles are, as in a fashionable photograph, too much smoothed out. The story of the Suitur-Kampf, for instance, as it is told here, has something of the style of the official narrative about it, The relations between Bismarck and the old Emperor, especially in the matter of the Imperial Crown, are not adequately set out. A noteworthy saying of the Prince has somehow found its way into one of the Wagner volumes recently published by Mr. Grant Richards. It is to this effect,—that people had a good idea of what he had done to familiarise the German people generally with the Imperial idea, but that no one realised the trouble which he had to take in getting the idea into the heads of elevated personages whom he describes as the Pickelhaube. In view of the hostility which Bis- marck sometimes showed to this country, it is interesting to read the following. He was arguing against the principles of consti- tutional Monarchy which the Reform party of 1848-49 held up for German imitation. " The appealing to England is our misfortune. Give us everything English that we do not have. Give us English fear of God, and English respect for the laws ; the whole English constitution, but also the whole circumstances of English proprietorship, English wealth, English public spirit, especially an English House of Commons." This was said early in his career, but he never ceased to admire us, though he would have crushed us without a moment's remorse to advance any German interest. Mr. Jacks's English has sometimes a curiously Germanic character, and once at least the ultra-Tweed use of "will" occurs. "As soon as these breaches have been filled, I will have no more zealous endeavours than to find peace with the Centrum."
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