TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE OVATION TO PRINCE BISMARCK.
PERHAPS the most surprising incident in the series of incidents which have attended the resignation of Prince Bismarck, is the popular ovation given him on his departure. It had been fancied that Germany was cool, and Berlin even indifferent, and men talked of the ingrati- tude of nations, as if it had ever throughout history equalled the ingratitude of Princes ; but on the actual day of his departure the scene was wholly changed. The Berliners, who perhaps, with their wonted scepticism, doubted to the last whether the Emperor would let his great servant go, woke on that day to a perception that he was actually going, and poured out en masse to display their grief, and their conviction that a great and melan- choly event had occurred in the history of Prussia. The whole population was in the streets, the Prince's carriage could hardly move, the air shook with the shouting as if a great Sovereign had passed ; and in the railway-station itself even Prussian order was lost under the pressure of the great Ambassadors, nobles, soldiers, Representatives, who swarmed in crowds towards the departing statesman, and strove to say farewell. The going of this man, " who had no friends," moved a great capital to tears, and broke down utterly the reserved formality of demeanour in which Prussians are commonly believed to surpass even English- men. That the emotion was called forth mainly by the career of its object, by the marvellous and continued gratification which he had afforded to the national pride, needs no demonstration ; but it may be worth while to inquire whether there was not in Prince Bismarck's character some attraction felt by his countrymen far more than by foreigners, which rivetted and made complete their admiration.
We believe there was, and that this half-forgotten characteristic, patent to all Prussians, not so patent to the world, which judged him through a haze of victory, was a certain solid sense, what we should define, if we were writing of a Southerner, as a certain sanity, which inspired in men under his rule a pleasurable sense of safety. There never was a great conqueror—for that was essentially his position—who was so little mad, who, after his one great end was accomplished, applied himself so entirely to the protection of his work. Controlling the greatest of military machines, conscious, if memoirs may be trusted, of almost irresistible force, Prince Bismarck displayed through twenty years a moderation towards the world which to the usual type of conqueror—to a man, for example, like Napoleon—would have seemed incredible. Napoleon asked what Wellington would do ; but what would have been his predictions about Bismarck ? No dream of conquering the world, or of mastering Europe, or even of making the dominion of Germany conterminous with her language, ever appears to have visited his mind. He rent two provinces from Denmark, he struck down and swept away kinglets by the dozen, for those provinces and little kingdoms were within his idea of Prussia as she should be ; but he not only stopped short always of the impracticable, but he con- descended to acknowledge the necessity of equal alliances. It was known at the time, and Sir Rowland Blennerhasset this week confirms the story, that immediately after Sadowa, when the House of Hapsburg lay prostrate, and when even the old King insisted on territorial extension, Count Bismarck, with his reputation just made, his power just established, an adequate career just opened to his ambition, threatened resignation rather than take one inch of territory from Austria, the Power which he expelled from Germany, and which for years before had in Frankfort made his life a burden to him. Call it calculation, statecraft, diplomacy, what you will, that was a supreme instance of sanity in an hour which would have upset an ordinary conqueror ; and we all know how it succeeded. The League of Peace is a stronger bulwark for Germany than any province could have been. In 1870 he repeated the same advice about Lorraine—not Alsace—and was only beaten by his master's final decision that the value of Metz, as the Imperial out- work on the side of France, was a question for soldiers with which diplomatists had nothing to do. From 1870 downwards for twenty years, during half of which Bismarck seemed irresistible in Europe, he made no effort to enlarge Germany ; cast no eyes on the German provinces either of Austria or Russia ; made no aggression upon the German_ Princes who had been spared ; did not even threaten Holland, though it is certain, from one over-frank speech of his, that an idea of the value of Holland,. as a maritime arsenal with magnificent dependencies, had repeatedly crossed his mind. He confined himself to making Germany strong, first by unification, and after- wards by alliances ; and never spent a German soldier.
He even resisted projects of colonisation, and only yielded. about them to popular pressure, to the strong wish of the ultimate heir, the present Emperor, and to the idea, once, we- believe, openly expressed, that a day might come for asking- something from England, and that it was well to have some- thing in hand to be her price. He gave way to France and to his master in the Schnaebele affair ; he courted Russia in Balkan matters ; he strove on every side to create the idea that, though the German Empire would accept war, he wished its predominant position to be a. guarantee of peace. His Prussians understood him, and felt that there would with him be no mad adventures, no wars for the sake of war, no projects of conquest, but that, though Germany had been turned into a barrack- room, they and their sons were, as far as their ruler was concerned, permanently safe. He at least would remain within the region of practicable endeavour, and never slay them for mere renown. Reflect on the Prussian tempera- ment, its horror of merely wasteful war, its reluctance to• fight at all without a reason adequate to its own mind, and we may perceive how this sanity of Prince Bismarck's. and the consequent safety of German conscripts, added to the influence secured by his great powers, and the haughty self-assertion with which he wielded them, a self-assertion, however, limited, like his ambition, by his sane sense. He pushed his powers to their limit, but he never punished a. foe without law on his side, or suggested the striking of a. coup d'etat.
The influence was not diminished by the perception, which we think Berliners had half-consciously attained, that this moderation sprang in Prince Bismarck rather from the circumstances of his life than from his character alone. Personally, we take it, the great Chancellor was a. man of intense and rather fierce impulse, as when he challenged the braggart in a beerhouse who had used some insulting expression about the Royal family, when he crushed Count Arnim, when he suddenly exploded in the House of Peers against one of his own Ministers. An irascible man, a haughty man, and a man with a deep trace in him of vindictiveness at variance with much else in his nature, and for all these reasons a man of impulse, he was to a degree which it is difficult for foreigners to remember, essentially a great Prussian, a man with rigid confines to his impulses. He loved Prussia, her special organisation, so separate in Europe ; her singular "clan- like feeling," as the Crown Prince is reported to have called it ; her long history of struggle and war, from the day when the Hohenzollerns in 1609 became Dukes of Prussia, to the day when, upwards of two hundred and fifty years later, they overthrew the Hapsburgs at Sadowa. He wanted Prussia. to be great, to be as strong as iron, to be acknowledged by all the world as the grand State of Germany ; and he wanted heartily but little more. His haughtiness, his ambition. his imaginativeness, were all held in check by that limitation which had become by indulgence at once the barrier and the buttress of his mind. It is very doubtful if he intended originally to " make Germany," or greatly cared whether it were made or not. The immense prudence, the perfectly unintelligible dread of the South German Powers, which• he displayed in his conversations on this subject with the Crown Prince, and which were revealed in the celebrated Diary, are utterly inconsistent with his character, except on the single theory that the idea of Germany did not greatly attract him, that he could wait very well for its completion, that he had more pride in his own Prussia than in any brand-new Empire it was possible to form. He would have absorbed all Germany gladly, but to amalgamate all Germany was to him a task. He accepted the Empire, indeed, being a German, organised it, and would from the first have defended it to the death ; but he was not enthusiastic to increase it, knowing well that every new province, or people, or even Colony brought within the Empire, diminished the proportionate place of Prussia not only in the new dominion, but in the imaginations of mankind. He risked everything in 1866 to aggrandise Prussia, and to expel her ancient rival from Germany, holding the hegemony among Germans to be a Prussian prerogative ; but he shrank from taking provinces that Prussia could not absorb, shrank from placing the great crown upon his master's head, shrank from a line of policy which in 1866 would have submerged Prussia in Germany far more than it did in 1871, when at last the rapid French campaign, the fall of Paris, the sudden collapse of the Second Empire, had revealed the terrible strength of Prussia fully to the world, which up to Speicheren had half-doubted whether the secret laid bare at Sadowa was the military strength of Prussia or the military weakness of the composite Empire she had crushed. This patriotism—which you may call narrow if you please, but which was shared by our own William who fought for Europe and governed England, but loved only Holland—gave Prince Bismarck's imaginativeness bounds, and his ambition limits, and his purposes a concen- tration which was of the essence of strength, and which, above all, saved him from that snare of all the conquerors the world has ever seen, the desire for ever-increasing dominion. The notion of conquering England, for in- stance, and so transferring a fifth of the world to himself, which so entranced and deceived Napoleon for years, would have seemed to Prince Bismarck simple folly, not only because he could not do it—which was true of Napoleon also—but because in doing it there was and could be no true Prussian object. He had, if we may be pardoned the illustration for the sake of clearness, the true feeling of the squire who wants this farm and that farm, and this right of shooting and that monopoly of a neighbouring stream, and who will make great sacrifices to surround his estate with a ring-fence, but who regards farms in distant counties as property only, and can, as regards them, resist any temptation to a costly aggrandisement. That devotion to Prussia was, we are convinced, at the very centre of Prince Bismarck's mind, and if it sometimes diminished the apparent grandeur of his purposes, it made him safer for Europe, and an idol with all true Prussians.
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