CHAPTER I THE BISMARCKIAN EPOCH

All nations dream—some more than others; while some are more ready than others to follow their dreams into action. Nor does the prevalence, or even the intensity, of these national dreams seem to bear any fixed relation to the strength of will which seeks to turn them into achievement.

After 1789 there was a great deal of dreaming among the nations of Europe. At the beginning of it all was revolutionary France, who dreamed of offering freedom to all mankind. A few years later, an altogether different France was dreaming furiously of glory for her own arms. In the end it was still France who dreamed; and this time she sought to impose the blessings of peace, order, and uniformity upon the whole world. Her first dream was realised in part, the second wholly; but the third ended in ruin.

Following upon this momentous failure came a short period when the exhausted nations slept much too soundly to dream dreams. During this epoch Europe was parcelled out artificially, like a patch-work quilt, by practical and unimaginative diplomatists, anxious certainly to take securities for a lasting {88} peace, but still more anxious to bolster up the ancient dynasties.

Against their arbitrary expedients there was soon a strong reaction, and dreaming began once more among the nations, as they turned in their sleep, and tried to stretch their hampered limbs. At the beginning their dreaming was of a mild and somewhat futile type. It called itself 'liberalism'—a name coined upon the continent of Europe. It aimed by methods of peaceful persuasion, at reaching the double goal of nationality as the ideal unit of the state, and popular representation as the ideal system of government. Then the seams of the patchwork, which had been put together with so much labour at Vienna[1] and Aix-la-Chapelle,[2] began to gape. Greece struggled with some success to free herself from the Turk,[3] and Belgium broke away from Holland,[4] as at a much later date Norway severed her union with Sweden.[5] In 1848 there were revolutions all over Europe, the objects of which were the setting up of parliamentary systems. In all directions it seemed as if the dynastic stitches were coming undone. Italy dreamed of union and finally achieved it,[6] expelling the Austrian encroachers—though not by peaceful persuasion—and disordering still further the neatly sewn handiwork of Talleyrand, Metternich, and Castlereagh. Finally, the Balkans began to dream of Slav destinies, unrealisable either under the auspices of the Sublime Porte or in tutelage to the Habsburgs.[7]

MAKING OF THE GERMAN union

But of all the nations which have dreamed since days long before Napoleon, none has dreamed more {89} nobly or more persistently than Germany. For the first half of the nineteenth century it seemed as if the Germans were satisfied to behold a vision without attempting to turn it into a reality. Their aspirations issued in no effective action. They dreamed of union between their many kingdoms, principalities, and duchies, and of building up a firm empire against which all enemies would beat in vain; but until 1864 they had gone but a few steps towards the achievement of this end.

Then within a period of seven years, Prussia, the most powerful of the German states, planned, provoked, and carried to a successful issue three wars of aggression. By a series of swift strokes, the genius of Bismarck snatched Schleswig-Holstein from the Danes, beat down the pretensions of Austria to the leadership of the Teutonic races, and wrested the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from France. When Denmark was invaded by Germanic armies in February 1864, the vision of unity seemed as remote as ever; by January 1871 it was fully achieved. When at Versailles, in the Hall of Mirrors, in the stately palace of the Bourbons, King William accepted from the hands of his peers—the sovereign rulers of Germany—an imperial crown, the dream of centuries was fulfilled.

Austria, indeed, stood aloof; but both by reason of her geographical situation and the heterogeneous ancestry of her people that was a matter only of small account. union was, for all practical purposes complete. And what made the achievement all the more marvellous was the fact, that the vision had been realised by methods which had no place in the gentle speculations of those, who had cherished the {90} hope of unity with the most fervent loyalty. It had been accomplished by the Prussians, who of all races between the Alps and the Baltic, between the mountain barriers of Burgundy and the Polish Marshes, are the least German in blood,[8] and who of all Germans dream the least. It had been carried through, not by peaceful persuasion, nor on any principles of Liberalism, nor in any of the ways foreseen by the philosophers and poets who had beheld visions of the millennium. union was the triumph of craft and calculation, courage and resolve, 'blood and iron.'

The world in general, whose thoughts at this time were much more congenially occupied with International Exhibitions, and Peace Societies, and the ideals of Manchester statesmanship, was inclined to regard the whole of this series of events as an anachronism—as the belated offspring of 'militarism' and 'feudalism.' These were well known to be both in their dotage; they could not possibly survive for many years. What had happened, therefore, did not startle mankind simply because the nature of it was not understood. The spirit of the age, wholly possessed, as it was, by an opposite set of ideas, was unable to comprehend, to believe in, or even to consider with patience, phenomena which, according to prevailing theories, had no reasonable basis of existence.

In some quarters, indeed, efforts were made to gloss over the proceedings of Prince Bismarck, and to fit them into the fashionable theory of a universe, flowing with the milk of human kindness and the {91} honey of material prosperity. It was urged that the Germans were a people, pure in their morals, industrious in their habits, the pioneers of higher education and domestic economy. For the most part, British and American public opinion was inclined to regard these various occurrences and conquests as a mediaeval masquerade, in rather doubtful taste, but of no particular significance and involving no serious consequences. Even in that enlightened age, however, there were still a few superstitious persons who saw ghosts. To their eyes the shade of Richard Cobden seemed in some danger of being eclipsed in the near future by that of Niccolo Machiavelli; though the former had died in great honour and prestige only a few years earlier, while the latter had been dead, discredited, and disavowed for almost as many centuries.

GERMAN PROSPERITY AFTER union

After 1870 Germany entered upon a period of peaceful prosperity. Forges clanged, workshops throbbed, looms hummed, and within twenty years, the ebb of emigration had entirely ceased. Indeed, not only was there work in the Fatherland for all its sons, but for others besides; so that long before another twenty years had passed away, the tide had turned and immigrants were pouring in.

At first the larger part of German exports was cheap and nasty, with a piratical habit of sailing under false colours, and simulating well-known British and other national trade-marks. But this was a brief interlude. The sagacity, thoroughness, and enterprise of manufacturers and merchants soon guided their steps past this dangerous quicksand, and the label made in Germany ceased to be a reproach.

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Students and lovers of truth laboured at discovery; and hard upon their heels followed a crowd of practical inventors—the gleaners, scavengers, and rag-pickers of science. Never had the trade of any country thriven with a more wonderful rapidity. Though still of necessity a borrower by very reason of her marvellous expansion, Germany nevertheless began to make her influence felt in the financial sphere. Her own ships carried her products to the ends of the earth, and fetched home raw materials in exchange. And not only this, her merchant fleets began to enter into successful competition for the carrying trade of the world, even with the Mistress of the Seas herself.

LIFE'S WORK OF BISMARCK

For a score of years after the fall of Paris, Germany found but little time for dreaming. Meanwhile, by an astute if somewhat tortuous policy, and under the impenetrable shield of the finest army in Europe, Bismarck kept safe the empire which he had founded. He declined to be drawn into adventures either at home or abroad, either in the new world or the old. He opposed the colonial aspirations of a few visionaries, who began to make some noise towards the end of his long reign, and silenced them with some spacious but easy acquisitions in Africa and the East. He consolidated the Prussian autocracy, and brought its servant, the bureaucracy, to the highest pitch of efficiency. He played with the political parties in the Reichstag as if they had been a box of dominoes, combining them into what patterns he pleased. At the same time he fostered the national well-being with ceaseless vigilance, and kept down popular discontent by the boldness and thoroughness of his social legislation. But for Bismarck himself {93} the age of adventure was past. It was enough that by the labours of an arduous lifetime, he had made of Germany a puissant state, in which all her children, even the most restless, could find full scope for their soaring ambitions.


[1] 1814.

[2] 1818.

[3] 1821-1829.

[4] 1830.

[5] 1905.

[6] 1859-1861.

[7] 1875-1878.

[8] The admixture of Slavonic and Wendish blood in the Prussian stock is usually calculated by ethnologists at about half and half.