CHAPTER IIGERMAN DIPLOMACY AND STATECRAFT

Bismarck, wrote Hohenlohe, who ultimately succeeded him as Imperial Chancellor, “handles everything with a certain arrogance (Uebermut), and this gives him a considerable advantage in dealing with the timid minds of the older European diplomacy.” This native arrogance became accentuated after the triumphs of 1870 until, in Hohenlohe’s words, Bismarck became “the terror” of all European diplomatists. That word is the clue to German diplomacy. The terrorism which the Germans practise in war they indoctrinate in peace. It was a favorite saying of Clausewitz, whose military writings enjoy an almost apostolic authority in Germany, that War and Peace are but a continuation of one another—“War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means.”18The same lesson is written large on every page of von der Goltz19and Bernhardi.20In other words, war projectsits dark shadow over the whole of German diplomacy. The dominant postures in “shining armor” at critical moments in the peace of Europe, and the menacing invocations of the “mailed fist” are not, as is commonly supposed, a passionate idiosyncrasy of the present Emperor. They are a legacy of the Bismarckian tradition. To keep Europe in a perpetual state of nervous apprehension by somber hints of war was, as we shall see, the favorite method by which Bismarck attained his diplomatic ends. For the German Chancellerie rumors of wars are of only less political efficacy than wars themselves. After 1870, metaphors of war became part of the normal vocabulary of the German Government in times of peace. Not only so but, as will be seen in the two succeeding chapters, a belligerent emotion suffused the temperament of the whole German people, and alike in the State Universities, and the stipendiary Press, there was developed a cult of War for its own sake. The very vocabulary of the Kaiser’s speeches has been coined in the lecture-rooms of Berlin University.

Now War is at best but a negative conception andits adoption as theCredoof German thinkers since 1870 explains why their contributions to Political Science have been so sterile. More than that, it accounts for the decline in public morality. Politically, Germany, as we shall see, has remained absolutely stagnant. She is now no nearer self-government than she was in 1870; she is much farther removed from it than she was in 1848. The inevitable result has been, that politics have for her come to mean little more than intrigues in high places, the deadly struggle of one contending faction at court against another, with the peace of Europe as pawns in the game. The German Empire, like the Prussian kingdom, has little more than a paper constitution, alex imperfectaas Gneist called it. The Reichstag has little power and less prestige, and its authority as a representative assembly has been so enervated by the shock tactics practised by the Government in forcing, or threatening to force, a series of dissolutions to punish contumacious behavior, that it is little better than a debating society. A vote of censure on the Government has absolutely no effect. Of the two powers, the Army and the Reichstag, the Army is infinitely the stronger; there is no law such as our Army Annual Act which subjects it to Parliamentary control. Even the Bundesrath21(orFederal Council), strong as it is, is hardly stronger than the German General Staff, for the real force which welds the German Empire together is not so much this council of plenipotentiaries from the States as the military hegemony of Prussia and the military conventions between her and the Southern States by which the latter placed their armies under her supreme control. In this shirt of steel the body politic is enclosed as in a vice.

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Nothing illustrates the political lifelessness of Germany, the arrogance of its rulers and the docility of its people (for whom, as will be seen, the former have frequently expressed the utmost contempt) more than the tortuous course of German diplomacy during the years 1870–1900. I shall attempt to sketch very briefly the political history of those years, particularly in the light of the policy of calculated Terrorism by which the German Chancellerie sought to impose its yoke upon Europe. Well did Lord Odo Russell say that “Bismarck’s sayings inspired respect” (he might, had he not been speaking as an ambassador, have used, like Hohenlohe, a stronger word) “and his silences apprehension.”22If it betrue, as von der Goltz says it is, that national strategy is the expression of national character and that the German method is, to use his words, “a brutal offensive,” nothing could bring out that amiable characteristic more clearly than the study of Bismarck’s diplomacy. The German is brutal in war just because he is insolent in peace. Count Herbert “can be very insolent,” wrote the servile Busch of Bismarck’s son, “which in diplomacy is very useful.”23

Bismarck’s attitude towards treaty obligations is one of the chief clues to the history of the years 1870–1900. International policy, he once wrote, is “a fluid element which under certain conditions will solidify, but on a change of atmosphere reverts to itsoriginal condition.”24The process of solidification is represented by the making of treaties; that of melting is a euphemism for the breaking of them. To reinsure Germany’s future by taking out policies in different countries in the form of secret treaties of alliance while concealing the existence of other and conflicting treaties seemed to him not only astute but admirable. Thus having persuaded Austria-Hungary to enter into a Triple Alliance with Germany and Italy by holding out as the inducement the promise of protection against Russia, Bismarck by his own subsequent confession concluded a secret treaty with Russia against Austria. To play off each of these countries against the other by independent professions of exclusive loyalty to both was theLeit-motifof his diplomacy. Nor did he treat the collective guarantees of European treaties with any greater respect. Good faith was a negotiable security. Hence his skilful exploitation of the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris (1856) when hewished to secure the friendly neutrality of Russia during the Franco-Prussian War. Russia, it will be remembered, suddenly and to every one’s surprise, denounced those clauses. The European Powers, on the initiative of England, disputed Russia’s claim to denouncemotu proprioan international obligation of so solemn a character, and Bismarck responded to Lord Granville’s initiative in words of ostentatious propriety:

“That the Russian Circular of the 19th October [denouncing the clauses in question] hadtaken him by surprise. That while he had always held that the Treaty of 1856 pressed with undue severity upon Russia, he entirely disapproved of the manner adopted and the time selected by the Russian Government to force the revision of the Treaty.”25

Nearly a generation later Bismarck confessed, and prided himself on the confession, in his Reminiscences,26that he had himself instigated Russia to denounce the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty; that he had not only instigated this repudiation but had initiated it as affording “an opportunity of improving our relations with Russia.” Russia succumbedto the temptation, but, as Bismarck cheerfully admits, not without reluctance.

This, however, is not all: Europe “saved her face” by putting on record in the Conference of London (1871) a Protocol, subscribed by the Plenipotentiaries of all the Powers, in which it was laid down as

“an essential principle of the law of nations that no Power can repudiate treaty engagements or modify treaty provisions, except with the consent of the contracting parties by mutual agreement.”

This instrument has been called, not inaptly, the foundation of the public law of Europe. It was in virtue of this principle that Russia was obliged to submit the Russo-Turkish Treaty of San Stefano, and with it the fruits of her victories in 1877–8 to the arbitrament of the Congress of Berlin. At that Congress Bismarck played his favorite rôle of “honest broker,” and there is considerable ground for believing that he sold the same stock several times over to different clients and pocketed the “differences.” What kind of conflicting assurances he gave to the different Powers will never be fully known, but there is good ground for believing that in securing the temporary occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina he had in mind the ultimate Germanization of the Adriatic, and that domination of the Mediterranean at the expenseof England which has long been the dream of German publicists from Treitschke onward.27What, however, clearly emerged from the Congress, and was embodied in Article XXV of the Berlin Treaty, was, that Austria was to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina under a European mandate. She acquired lordship without ownership; in other words, the territory became a Protectorate. Her title, as it originated in, so it was limited by, the Treaty of Berlin. Exactly thirty years later, in the autumn of 1908, Austria, acting in concert with Germany, abused her fiduciary position and without any mandate from the Powers annexed the territory of which she had been made the guardian. This arbitrary action was a violation of the principle to which she and Germany had subscribed at the London Conference, and Sir Edward Grey attempted, as Lord Granville had done before him, to preserve the credit of the public law of Europe by a conference which should consider the compensation due to Servia for an act which so gravely compromised her security. Russia, France, and Italy joined with Great Britain in this heroic, if belated, attempt to save the international situation. It was at this moment (March; 1909) that Germany appeared on the scene “in shining armor,” despatched a veiled ultimatum toRussia, with a covert threat to mobilize, and forced her to abandon her advocacy of the claims of Servia and, with them, of the public law of Europe.

Thus did History repeat itself. Germany stood forth once again as the chartered libertine of Europe whom no faith could bind and no duty oblige. May it not be said of her what Machiavelli said of Alexander Borgia: “E non fu mai uomo che avesse maggiore efficacia in asseveraie, e che con maggiori giuramenti affermasse una cosa, e che l’osservasse meno.”28

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It would carry me far beyond the limits of this Introduction to trace in like detail the German policy ofScharfmachereiwhich consisted, to use the mordant phrase of M. Hanotaux, in putting up to auction that which is not yours to sell and, not infrequently, knocking it down to more than one bidder. That Bismarck encouraged Russian ambitions in Asia and French ambitions in Africa with the view of making mischief between each of them and England is notorious.29In his earlier attitude he was content toplay the rôle oftertius gaudens; in his later he was an activeagent provocateur—particularly during the years 1883–1885, when he joined in the scramble for Africa. The earlier attitude is well indicated in Hohenlohe’s revelations, that Bismarck regarded French colonial operations as a timely diversion from the Rhine, and would not be at all sorry “to see the English and French locomotives come into collision,” and a French annexation of Morocco would have had his benevolent approval. After 1883 his attitude was less passive but not less mischievous. Ten years earlier he had told Lord Odo Russell that colonies “would only be a cause of weakness” to Germany. But by 1883 he had been slowly and reluctantly converted to the militant policy of the Colonial party and the cry ofWeltpolitikwas as good as a war scare for electioneering purposes. It was in these days that hatred of England, a hatred conceived in jealousy of her world-Empire, was brought forth, and the obstetrics of Treitschke materially assisted its birth. Bismarck, however, as readers of his Reminiscences are well aware, had an intellectual dislike of England based on her forms of government. He loved the darker ways of diplomacy and he thought our Cabinet system fatal to them. He had an intense dislike of Parliamentarism, he despised alliances “for which the Crown is not answerable but only the fleeting cabinet of the day,”and above all he hated plain dealing and publicity. “It is astonishing,” wrote Lord Ampthill, “how cordially Bismarck hates our Blue Books.”

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The story of Bismarck’s diplomatic relations with England during these years exhibits the same features of duplicity tempered by violence as marked his relations with the rest of Europe. He acquired Samoa by a deliberate breach of faith, and his pretense of negotiations with this country to delimit the frontiers of English and German acquisitions while he stole a march upon us were properly stigmatized by the Colonial Office as “shabby behavior.” Whether he really egged on France to “take Tunis” in order to embroil her with England will perhaps never be really known,30but it was widely suspected in France that his motives in supporting, if not instigating,31the colonial policy of Jules Ferry would not bear a very close examination. That he regarded it as a timely diversion from the Rhine is certain; that he encouraged it as a promising embarrassment to England is probable. There can be no doubt that much the same construction is to be put on his attitude towards Russia’s aspirations inAsia; that they should divert Russia from Europe was necessary; that they might entangle her with England was desirable.

Fear of Russia has, in fact, always been an obsession of the German Government. That fear is the just Nemesis of Frederick the Great’s responsibility for the infamous Partition of Poland. The reader, who wants to understand the causes of this, cannot do better than study an old map of the kingdom of Poland, and compare it with a map of Poland after the first and second Partitions. The effect of those cynical transactions was to extinguish an ancient “buffer state,” separating Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and by extinguishing it to bring them into menacing contiguity with each other. Never has any crime so haunted its perpetrators. Poland has been the permanent distraction of the three nations who dismembered her, each perpetually suspicious of the other two, and this fact is the main clue to the history of Eastern Europe.32The fear of Russia, and of a Russo-French or a Russo-Austrian Alliance, is the dominant feature of Bismarck’s diplomacy. He was, indeed, the evil genius of Russia for, by his own confession,33he intrigued to prevent her frompursuing a liberal policy towards Poland, for fear that she would thereby be drawn into friendship with France. To induce her to break faith with Russia, her Polish subjects in one case, and with Europe in another—the former by suppressing the Polish constitutional movement; the latter by repudiating the Black Sea clauses—was to isolate her from Europe. German writers to-day affect to speak of “Muscovite barbarism” and “Oriental despotism,” but it has been the deliberate policy of Germany to cut Russia off from the main stream of European civilization—to turn her face Eastwards, thereby Bismarck hoped, to quote his own words, to “weaken her pressure on our Eastern frontiers.”

But Bismarck’s contempt for treaties and his love for setting other Powers by the ears were venial compared with his policy of Terrorism. His attitude to France from 1870 to the day of his retirement from office—and it has been mis-stated many times by his successors—was very much that which Newman ascribed to the Erastian view of the treatment of the church—“to keep her low” and in a perpetual state of terror-stricken servility. That this is no exaggeration will be apparent from what follows here aboutthe war scares with which he terrified France, and with France Europe also, in the years 1873–5, the years, when, as our ambassador at Paris, Lord Lytton, has put it, he “played with her like a cat with a mouse.”34Perhaps the most illuminating account of these tenebrous proceedings is to be derived from Hohenlohe, who accepted the offer of the German Embassy at Paris in May, 1874. The post was no easy one. There had already been a “scare” in the previous December, when Bismarck menaced the Duc de Broglie with war, using the attitude of the French Bishops as a pretext;35and, although Hohenlohe’s appointment was at first regarded as an eirenicon, there followed a period of extreme tension, when, as the Duc Decazes subsequently confessed, French Ministers were “living at the mercy of the smallest incident, the least mistake.”

The truth about the subsequent war scare of 1875 is still a matter of speculation, but the documents published of late years by de Broglie and Hanotaux, and the despatches of Lord Odo Russell, have thrown considerable suspicion of a very positive kind onBismarck’s plea that it was all a malicious invention of Gontaut-Biron, the French Ambassador, and of Gortchakoff. A careful collation of the passages in Hohenlohe’s Memoirs goes far to confirm these suspicions, and, incidentally, to reveal Bismarck’s inner diplomacy in a very sinister light. Hohenlohe was appointed to succeed the unhappy Arnim, who had made himself obnoxious to Bismarck by his independence, and he was instructed by the Chancellor, that it was to the interest of Germany to see that France should become “a weak Republic and anarchical,” so as to be a negligible quantity in European politics, on which the Emperor William I remarked to Hohenlohe that “that was not a policy,” and was not “decent,” subsequently confiding to Hohenlohe that Bismarck was trying “to drive him more and more into war”; whereupon Hohenlohe confidently remarked: “I know nothing of it, and I should be the first to hear of it.” Hohenlohe soon found reason to change his opinion. As Gortchakoff remarked to Decazes, “they have a difficult way with diplomatists at Berlin,” and Hohenlohe was instructed to press the French Ministry for the recall of Gontaut-Biron, against whom Bismarck complained on account of his Legitimist opinions and his friendship with the Empress Augusta. Thereupon, that supple and elusive diplomat, the Duc Decazes, parried by inviting an explanation of the menacingwords which Gontaut-Biron declared had been uttered to him by Radowitz, a Councilor of Legation in Berlin, to the effect that “it would be both politic and Christian to declare war at once,” the Duke adding shrewdly: “One doesn’t invent these things.” Hohenlohe in his perplexity tried to get at the truth from Bismarck, and met with what seems to us a most disingenuous explanation. Bismarck said Radowitz denied the whole thing, but added that, even if he had said it, Gontaut-Biron had no right to report it. He admitted, however, that Radowitz made mischief and “egged on” Bülow, the Foreign Secretary. “You may be sure,” he added, “that these two between them would land us in a war in four weeks if I didn’t act as safety-valve.” Hohenlohe took advantage of this confession to press for the despatch of Radowitz to some distant Embassy “to cool himself.” To this Bismarck assented, but a few days later declared that Radowitz was indispensable. When Hohenlohe attempted to sound Bismarck on the subject the Chancellor showed the utmost reserve. After the war scare had passed, Decazes related to Hohenlohe an earlier example of Imperial truculence on the part of Arnim, who, on leaving after a call, turned round as he reached the door and called out: “I have forgotten one thing. Recollect that I forbid you to get possession of Tunis”; and when Decazes affected to regard thematter as a jest, Arnim repeated with emphasis: “Yes, I forbid it.” Hohenlohe adds that an examination of his predecessor’s papers convinced him that Arnim did not speak without express authorization. When the elections for the French Chamber are imminent in the autumn of 1877, Bismarck informs Hohenlohe that Germany will adopt “a threatening attitude,” but “the scene will be laid in Berlin, not in Paris.” The usual Press campaign followed, much to the vexation of the Emperor, who complained to Hohenlohe that the result of these “pin-pricks” (Nadelstiche) would provoke the French people beyond endurance.

In studying this calculated truculence we have to remember that in Germany foreign and domestic policy are inextricably interwoven. A war scare is with the German Government a favorite method of bringing the Reichstag to a docile frame of mind and diverting it from inconvenient criticism of the Government’s policy at home. Moreover, just as war is, in von der Goltz’s words, a reflection of national character, so is diplomacy. A nation’s character is revealed in its diplomacy just as a man’s breeding is revealed in his conversation.36We must therefore take into account the polity of Germany and its political standards.

The picture of the Prussian autocracy in the later days of Bismarck’s rule which we can reconstruct from different entries in Hohenlohe’s Journal from the year 1885 onwards is a very somber one. It is a picture of suspicion, treachery, vacillation, and calumny in high places which remind one of nothing so much as the Court of the later Bourbons. It is a régime of violence abroad and dissensions at home. Bismarck’s health was failing him, and with his health his temper. He complained to Hohenlohe that his head “grew hot” the moment he worked, and the latter hardly dared to dispute with him on the gravest matters of State. Readers of Busch will remember his frank disclosures of the anarchy of the Foreign Office when Bismarck was away: “if the Chief gives violent instructions, they are carried out with still greater violence.” In Hohenlohe we begin to see all the grave implications of this. Bismarck, with what Lord Odo Russell called his passion for authority, was fond of sneering at English foreign policy as liable to be blown about with every wind of political doctrine; but if Parliamentary control has its defects, autocracy has defects more insidious still. Will becomes caprice, and foreign relations are at the mercy of bureaucrats who have no sense of responsibility so long as they can adroitly flatter their master. When a bureaucrat trained under this system arrives at power, the result maybe nothing less than disastrous. This was what happened when Bismarck’s instrument, Holstein, concentrated power into his own hands at the Foreign Office; and as theNeue Freie Presse37pointed out in its disclosures on his fall (1906), the results are writ large in the narrowly averted catastrophe of a war with France in 1905. Bismarck’s disciples had all his calculated violence without its timeliness. In the Foreign Office, Hohenlohe discovered a kind of anarchical “republicanism”—“nobody,” in Bismarck’s frequent absence “will own responsibility to any one else.” “Bismarck is nervously excitable,” writes Hohenlohe in March, 1885, “and harasses his subordinates and frightens them, so that they see more behind his expression than there really is.” Like most small men, in terror themselves, they terrorized others. Moreover, the disinclination of the Prussian mind, which Bismarck himself once noted, to accept any responsibility which is not covered by instructions, tended to reduce the German Ambassadors abroad to the level of mere aides-de-camp. Hohenlohe found himself involved in the same embarrassments at Paris as Count Münster did in London. Any one who has studied the inner history of German foreign policy must have divined a secret diplomacy as devious of its kind as that ofLouis XV. Of its exact bearings little is known, but a great deal may reasonably be suspected. There is always the triple diplomacy of the Court, the Imperial Chancery, and lastly the Diplomatic Service, which is not necessarily in the confidence of either.

The same debilitating influences of a dictatorship were at work in Ministerial and Parliamentary life. Bismarck had an equal contempt for the collective responsibility of Ministers and for Parliamentary control. Having done his best to deprive the Members of the Reichstag of power, he was annoyed at their irresponsibility. He called men like Bennigsen and Windhorst silly schoolboy politicians (Karlchen-Miesnick-Tertianen) or “lying scoundrels” (verlogene Halunken). He was surprised that representation without control resulted in faction. It is the Nemesis of his own political doctrines. When he met with opposition he clamored for repressive measures, and could not understand some of the scruples of the Liberals as to the exceptional laws against the Socialists. Moreover, having tried, like another Richelieu, to reduce his fellow-Ministers to the position of clerks, he was annoyed at their want of corporate spirit, and when they refused to follow him into his retirement, he declaimed against their apostasy in having “left him in the lurch.” He talked at one time of abolishing the Reichstag; at another of having a special post created for himselfas “General-Adjutant.” He complained of overwork—and his energy was Titanic—but he insisted on keeping his eye on everything, conscientiously enough, because, he tells Hohenlohe, “he could not put his name to things which did not reflect his own mind.” But perhaps the gravest moral of it all is the Nemesis of deception. It is difficult to be both loved and feared, said Machiavelli. There is a somber irony in the remark of the Czar to the Emperor in 1892, which the latter repeated to Hohenlohe. Bismarck had been compelled to retire because he had failed to induce the Emperor to violate Germany’s contractual obligations to Austria by renewing his secret agreement with Russia, and he consoled himself in his retirement with the somewhat unctuous reflection that he was a martyr to the cause of Russo-German friendship, betrayed, according to him, by Caprivi. “Do you know,” said the young Emperor (in August, 1892), “the Czar has told me he has every trust in Caprivi; whereas when Bismarck has said anything to him he has always had the conviction that ‘he is tricking me.’” We are reminded of the occasion when Talleyrand told the truth so frankly that his interlocutor persisted in regarding it as an elaborate form of deception. After all, there are advantages, even in diplomacy, in being what Schuvaloff called Caprivi, a “too honest man.” It was the same with the domestic atmosphere.Bismarck, an adept at deceiving, is always complaining of deception; a master of intrigue, he is always declaiming against the intrigues of others. He inveighs against the Empress Augusta: “for fifty years she has been my opponent with the Emperor.” He lived in an atmosphere of distrust, he was often insolent, and always suspicious. It affected all his diplomatic intercourse, and was not at all to Hohenlohe’s taste. “He handles everything with a certain arrogance (Uebermut),” once wrote Hohenlohe (as we have already said) of a discussion with him over foreign affairs. “This has always been his way.”

All these tendencies came to a head when the scepter passed from the infirm hands of William I to those of a dying King, around whose death-bed the military party and the Chancellor’s party began to intrigue for influence over the young Prince whose advent to empire was hourly expected. Of these intrigues Hohenlohe, who was now Statthalter of Alsace-Lorraine, soon began to feel the effects without at first discovering the cause. He loved the people of the Reichsland, was a friend of France, and an advocate of liberal institutions, and in this spirit he strove to administer the incorporated territories. But the military party worked against him, hoping to secure the abolition of the moderate measure of local government and Reichstag representation whichthe Provinces possessed; and when the latter returned a hostile majority to the Reichstag they redoubled their efforts for a policy of “Thorough.” Bismarck gave but a lukewarm support to Hohenlohe and insisted on the enforcement of drastic passport regulations, which, combined with the Schnaebele affair (on which the Memoirs are very reticent), almost provoked France to War—naturally enough, in the opinion of Hohenlohe, and inevitably, according to the forebodings of the German Military Attaché at Paris. To Hohenlohe’s imploring representations Bismarck replied with grim jests about Alva’s rule in the Netherlands, adding that it is all done to show the French “that their noise doesn’t alarm us.” Meanwhile Switzerland was alienated, France injured, and Austria suspicious. But Hohenlohe, after inquiries in Berlin and Baden, began to discover the reason. Bismarck feared the influence of the military party over the martial spirit of Prince William, and was determined to show himself equally militant in order to secure his dynasty. “His sole object is to get his son Herbert into the saddle,” said Bleichroder; “so there is no hope of an improvement in Alsace-Lorraine,”—although Prince Herbert alienated everybody by his insolence, which was so gross that the Prince of Wales (King Edward), at this time in Berlin, declared that he could scarcely restrain himself from showing him the door.The leader of the military party, Waldersee, was hardly more public-spirited. He had, according to Bismarck, been made Chief of Staff by Moltke, over the heads of more competent men, because he was more docile than they. Between these military and civil autocracies the struggle for the possession of the present Emperor raged remorselessly, and with appalling levity they made the peace of two great nations the pawns in the game. The young Emperor is seen in Hohenlohe’s Memoirs feeling his way, groping in the dark; but those who, like the Grand Duke of Baden, knew the strength of his character, foresaw the end. At first, he “doesn’t trust himself to hold a different opinion from Bismarck”; but, “as soon as he perceives that Bismarck doesn’t tell him everything,” predicted the Grand Duke, “there will be trouble.” Meanwhile Waldersee was working for war, for no better reason than that he was getting old, and spoiling for a fight before it was too late for him to take the field.

For Bismarck’s dismissal there were various causes: differences in domestic policy and in foreign, and an absoluteimpasseon the question whether Bismarck’s fellow-Ministers were to be treated as colleagues or subordinates. “Bismarck,” said Caprivi afterwards, “had made a treaty with Russia by which we guaranteed her a free hand in Bulgaria and Constantinople, and Russia bound herself toremain neutral in a war with France. That would have meant the shattering of the Triple Alliance.” Moreover, the relations of Emperor and Chancellor were, at the last, disfigured by violent scenes, during which the Kaiser, according to the testimony of every one, showed the most astonishing dignity and restraint. But it may all be summed up in the words of the Grand Duke of Baden, reechoed by the Emperor to Hohenlohe, it had to be a choice between the dynasties of Hohenzollern and Bismarck. The end came to such a period of fear, agony, irony, despair, recrimination, and catastrophic laughter as only the pen of a Tacitus could adequately describe. Bismarck’s last years, both of power and retirement, were those of a lost soul. Having tried to intrigue with foreign Ambassadors against his Sovereign before his retirement, he tried to mobilize the Press against him after he had retired, and even stooped to join hands with his old rival, Waldersee, for the overthrow of his successor, Caprivi, being quite indifferent, complained the Kaiser bitterly, to what might happen afterwards. “It is sad to think,” said the Emperor of Austria to Hohenlohe, “that such a man can sink so low.”

When Bismarck was dismissed every one raised his head. It seemed to Hohenlohe to be at last a case of the beatitude: “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Holstein, the Under-Secretary, who, to thedisgust of Bismarck, refused to follow his chief and who now quietly made himself the residuary legatee of the whole political inheritance of the Foreign Office, intended by Bismarck for his son, freely criticized his ex-chief’s policy in a conversation with Hohenlohe:

“He adduced as errors of Bismarck’s policy: The Berlin Congress, the mediation in China in favor of France, the prevention of the conflict between England and Russia in Afghanistan, and the whole of histracasserieswith Russia. As to his recent plan of leaving Austria in the lurch, he says we should then have made ourselves so contemptible that we should have become isolated and dependent on Russia.”

Bismarck, whom Hohenlohe visited in his retirement, with a strange want of patriotism and of perspicuity, pursued “his favorite theme” and inveighed against the envy (der Neid) of the German people and their incurable particularism. He never divined how much his jealous autocracy had fostered these tendencies. One may hazard the opinion that the Germans are no more wanting in public spirit and political capacity than any other nation; but if they are deprived of the rights of private judgment and the exercise of political ability, they are no more likely to be immune from the corresponding disabilities. Certainly, in no country where public men are accustomed to the exercise of mutual toleranceand loyal cooperation by the practise of Cabinet government, and where public opinion has healthy play, would such an exhibition of disloyalty and slander as is here exhibited be tolerated, or even possible. When in 1895 Caprivi succumbed to the intrigues of the military caste and the Agrarian Party, Hohenlohe, now in his seventy-sixth year, was entreated to come to the rescue, his accession being regarded as the only security for German unity. To his eternal credit, Hohenlohe accepted; but, if we may read between the lines of the scanty extracts here vouchsafed from the record of a Ministerial activity of six years, we may conjecture that it was mostly labor and sorrow. He was opposed to agrarianism and repressive measures, and anxious “to get on with the Reichstag,” seeing in the forms of public discussion the only security for the public peace. But “the Prussian Junkers could not tolerate South German Liberalism,” and the most powerful political caste in the world, with the Army and the King on their side, appear to have been too much for him. His retirement in 1900 marks the end of a fugitive attempt at something like a liberal policy in Germany, and during the fourteen years which have elapsed since that event autocracy has held undisputed sway in Germany. The history of these latter years is fresh in the minds of most students of public affairs, and we will not attempt to pursue it here.

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