The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X | Page 3

within the reach of our own frailties and
shortcomings.
Three of the military qualities that made Bismarck great seem to me to
stand out with particular distinctness: his readiness to take the most
tremendous responsibilities, if he could justify his action by the worth
of the cause for which he made himself responsible; his moderation
after success was assured; his unflinching submission to the dictates of
monarchical discipline.
Moritz Busch has recorded an occurrence, belonging to the autumn of
1877, which most impressively brings before us the tragic grandeur and
the portentous issues of Bismarck's career. It was twilight at Varzin,
and the Chancellor, as was his wont after dinner, was sitting by the
stove in the large back drawing-room. After having sat silent for a

while, gazing straight before him, and feeding the fire now and anon
with fir-cones, he suddenly began to complain that his political activity
had brought him but little satisfaction and few friends. Nobody loved
him for what he had done. He had never made anybody happy thereby,
he said, not himself, nor his family, nor any one else. Some of those
present would not admit this, and suggested "that he had made a great
nation happy." "But," he retorted, "how many have I made unhappy!
But for me three great wars would not have been fought; eighty
thousand men would not have perished; parents, brothers, sisters, and
wives would not have been bereaved and plunged into mourning....
That matter, however, I have settled with God." "Settled with
God!"--an amazing statement, a statement which would seem the height
of blasphemy if it were not an expression of noblest manliness, if it did
not reveal the soul of a warrior dauntlessly fighting for a great cause,
risking for it the existence of a whole country as well as his own
happiness, peace, and salvation, and being ready to submit the
consequences, whatever they might be, to the tribunal of eternity. To
say that a man who is willing to take such responsibilities as these
makes himself thereby an offender against morality appears to me
tantamount to condemning the Alps as obstructions to traffic. A people,
at any rate, that glories in the achievements of a Luther has no right to
cast a slur upon the motives of a Bismarck.
Whatever one may think of the worth of the cause for which Bismarck
battled all his life--the unity and greatness of Germany--it is impossible
not to admire the policy of moderation and self-restraint pursued by
him after every one of his most decisive victories. And here again we
note in him the peculiarly German military temper. German war-songs
do not glorify foreign conquest and brilliant adventure; they glorify
dogged resistance and bitter fight for house and home, for kith and kin.
The German army, composed as it is of millions of peaceful citizens, is
essentially a weapon of defense. And it can truly be said that Bismarck,
with all his natural aggressiveness and ferocity, was in the main a
defender, not a conqueror. He defended Prussia against the intolerable
arrogance and un-German policy of Austria; he defended Germany
against French interference in the work of national consolidation; he
defended the principle of State sovereignty against the encroachments
of the Papacy; he defended the monarchy against the republicanism of

the Liberals and Socialists; and the supreme aim of his foreign policy
after the establishment of the German Empire was to guard the peace of
Europe.
The third predominant trait of Bismarck's character that stamps him as
a soldier--his unquestioning obedience to monarchical discipline--is so
closely bound up with the peculiarly German conceptions of the
functions and the Purpose of the State, that it will be better to approach
this Part of his nature from the political instead of the military side.
II
In no other of the leading countries of the world has the laissez faire
doctrine had as little influence in political matters as in Germany.
Luther, the fearless champion of religious individualism, was, in
questions of government, the most pronounced advocate of paternalism.
Kant, the cool dissector of the human intellect, was at the same time the
most rigid upholder of corporate morality. It was Fichte, the ecstatic
proclaimer of the glory of the individual will, who wrote this dithyramb
on the necessity of the constant surrender of private interests to the
common welfare: "Nothing can live by itself or for itself; everything
lives in the whole; and the whole continually sacrifices itself to itself in
order to live anew. This is the law of life. Whatever has come to the
consciousness of existence must fall a victim to the progress of all
existence. Only there is a difference whether you are dragged to the
shambles like a beast with bandaged eyes, or whether, in full and
joyous