departed from his ultra-royalist principles; he has merely modified their application temporarily to meet emergencies. Entirely accordant with this key-note of a feudalistic royalty, indeed merging inseparably in its tone, is his principle of a united Germany, a solid nation gathered round the Prussian throne as its nucleus, its very heart and brain, from which must come every throb and impulse of the nation's vital power, and in upholding which the nation is but defending its own life. The na tion should be an armed camp around a citadel-throne. To appreciate a key-note in such utter discord with all the march-music of our modern days, we need to look at the Germany whose thirty-nine states Bismarck saw-a snarled web of superannuated dukedoms, a tangle of interests mutually jealous and suspicious, a wrangle of petty and pompous kinglets, a heterogeneous mass of turbulent peoples, which-as Bismarck and his old king, William I., used to say-"God had set in central Europe' between two powerful and threatening military empires. Statesmen and generals, not as a rule given to much seeking after God, readily find a convenient use for Him as the author of any disabilities under which they labor; they indulge in the luxury of piety then; and it is not for us to say that their thought is not sincere and true as far as it goes. However, as a fact, internal wars, and invasion, oppression, and ravage from without, had been for centuries the lot of Prussia.

Our man of strong will, who knew nothing else about obstacles than that they were things to be brushed aside, found himself in the national arena in 1851, for he had been sent to represent Prussia in the Germanic diet of seventeen diplomatic delegates at Frankfort. It had become plain to him that there must be a German empire for safety, and naturally he saw that the true German headship belonged not to Austria with its mixed races in the southeast, but to his own more Germanic Prussia in the northwest; and he determined that his king, who reigned by direct right from God Almighty, should write himself Kaiser. Whereupon this young lieutenant of militia took this for his little task, not counting at a feather's weight the objection of any duke, king, or nation, not even the objections of his own countrymen, with whom he had already made himself by his feudalist theories the most unpopular of all public men. Only King Frederick William IV. stood by him, dully holding the same principles of absolutism and the same desire for German unity, but with

no intellectual grasp of the directness and the scope of Bismarck's plan. For more than fifteen years of Prussian diplomatic and high ministerial office, this man with a will kept his unpopularity, waiting the time when Austria should be remanded to a subordinate place.

In 1859 he was appointed Prussian ambassador to St. Petersburg, where his aristocratic views, with that peculiar freshness, breeziness, and frankness of manner which was the natural movement of his fearlessness and pride-for there was nothing pretentious or frivolous in him-made him a marked favorite. He was a new and refreshing kind of diplomat, avoiding ceremonies and pompous assemblies, performing exploits in shooting deer and bears, which delighted the czar, while his modest and lovable wife helped him by charming the whole court.

In 1861 the king died; and the prince regent, afterward Emperor William I., who succeeded him, sent Bismarck as ambassador to Paris, that he might acquaint himself with Napoleon III. and his ways before entering on office at home. He duly acquainted himself, as was afterward seen. He went to Paris in the spring of 1862, but was suddenly recalled in autumn to help his master in serious trouble. The regent, a soldier from his youth, seeing the clouds of war slowly gathering, and knowing the necessity of thorough military reorganization with large increase of the army, found his plan thwarted by the determined opposition of the deputies of the lower chamber, who rejected the budget which the upper chamber had adopted. Iron was wanted. Bismarck was summoned home, made minister of foreign affairs, and invested with the high office of president of the cabinet--next to the throne in administrative power. Unpopular before, his course now made him the abhorrence of all classes below the old nobility. He doubtless saw the danger of war ultimately arising with Austria on the Schleswig-Holstein question, which came to an issue two years later; and in any event he was fixed in his design of humbling the ancient Austrian pride and power and combining Germany in imperialism under Prussia. But to reveal this design would have been to wreck it at once. So he proceeded placidly on lines which he coolly admitted were unconstitutional, while claiming that they were justified by the public necessity, and which in debate he upheld with sarcasm and a provokingly calm contempt of opposition. The lower house remained obstinate in their refusal to increase the war taxes as requisite. Bismarck, in the name of the king, dis

solved the chambers in October, 1862, notifying them that the king found himself obliged to proceed without their sanction. It was despotism. The press protested; and numerous officials, magistrates and others, denounced the government. These all he severely dealt with and promptly silenced. Four successive chambers were dissolved, and the preparations for war went on. Meanwhile Prussia seemed nearing the verge of bloody revolution.

At this stage the man of will showed himself a man of skill. He seemed to take no further thought about the mutinous diet, but turned to bring to bear on Austria a diplomacy whose methods, whether of promise or threat, have never yet been made known. The death of the king of Denmark in November, 1863, reopened the old question as to the rightful ruler over the partly Danish, partly German province of Schleswig, and over the German province of Holstein. Bismarck, looking far ahead, persuaded Austria to join with Prussia in asserting the German claim; and an Austro-Prussian army marched into the provinces in 1864, and wrested them from Denmark, while all Europe raised indignant protest, and even the Prussian house of deputies refused to sanction the act or to grant money for the expense incurred. Bismarck instantly dissolved the chamber again. This marks the culminating point of his unpopularity, which had now risen to a height beyond expression in ordinary words. The juncture however offered Bismarck his opportunity long waited for; for the two unscrupulous powers soon fell into a wrangle about the division of their territorial spoil, which wrangle Bismarck managed in such a way that he aroused among his countrymen a new sentiment of German nationality and a dim hope of some good to arise for Prussia from his strange course, while also his management was such that Austrian pride, always ready to be wounded, led to her carrying in the Germanic Bund by a great majority (June 14, 1866) a resolution to proceed against Prussia as a public enemy. The "proceeding" was done very promptly, but it was done by Prussia, which had long been preparing thus to proceed. Count von Moltke's three great armies were instantly on the move converging toward Vienna. Within three weeks (July 3) they struck the main Austrian army at Sadowa (or Königgrätz) and utterly crushed it-the Austrians losing in killed and wounded 16,235, in prisoners 22,684-nearly 40,000 in all. In seven weeks the whole war was ended. The first point in Bismarck's great plan was achieved. Austria was

humbled; his Prussia held the headship of Germany, and took its place in the first rank of military nations; its territory was increased by one-fourth of its former area, and its population by four and a-half millions. As to Bismarck, never was there a more sudden, complete, and frantic revulsion of popular feeling. The secret of his years of preparation for war and of his successive stages of diplomacy, stood revealed in a blaze of glory. The king, who had always given him full confidence, had made him a count in the preceding year; now the nation added honors and rewards. Four hundred thousand thalers (nearly $300,000) were granted him, which he used in buying the estate of Varzin. Each of his coadjutors, General von Moltke and the war minister, Von Roon, received three hundred thousand thalers. The war indemnity to Prussia, which Austria in the treaty of peace had agreed to pay for her seven week's campaign, was forty millions of thalers (nearly $30,000,000). In the estimate of Europe and of the world Bismarck now ranked as the greatest living diplomatist and statesman. This estimate was entirely just according to all current standards of statesmanship, which are largely pagan modified by mediævalism; though a standard hitherto dimly seen in distant skies is slowly taking form, according to which one who is least in the kingdom of peace may be greater than he. But Bismarck, armed in that impregnable pride which in some natures serves as a conscience, was no more puffed up by praise than he had been cast down by unpopularity.

The great victory was followed in 1867 by the ruling out of Austria as a German state, and by the forming of the North German Confederation with the Prussian king as its civil and military head, under a liberal constitution drafted by Bismarck, who was made chancellor. His ultra-royalism did not prevent his granting as a gracious gift from the king a constitution involving with other liberties, popular suffrage, which he would scarcely have yielded if claimed by the people as of their own right. A fine stroke of his diplomacy was in his treaties of alliance offensive and defensive with the South German states outside of the confederation. This was to forestall the designs and intrigues of Napoleon III. for keeping those states apart from German interests till his time should come to set France in battle array against Germany in a struggle for the headship of continental Europe. Bismarck's penetrating mind had measured this crowned ad

venturer, and knew him for a vain, shallow, and ambitious schemer, who, at the head of a proud, excitable people, was aping the first Napoleon as an arbiter of national destinies. He was Bismarck's plaything.

The war with France which in 1867 seemed imminent but was averted by the efforts of the great powers, was declared by France July 19, 1870, on an absurd point of honor relating to the succession to the throne of Spaina mere pretext. France, dazzled by the Napoleonic tradition, was expecting that its army would be within the Prussian capital in a few weeks; but its plans were only half formed and its military administration was utterly corrupt and inefficient; while the German armies, thoroughly prepared in every minutest detail, and directed by the great strategist Von Moltke as chief of staff with the precision of a vast and perfect mechanism, were set immediately in motion led by the aged King William himself as commander-in-chief. The French forces never even reached their own border. After battles frightful in carnage, they were driven within the vast fortifications of Metz and Sedan. At Sedan, after a terrific battle, the French army surrendered, September 2, with the loss of nearly 150,000 men killed, wounded, or prisoners-the Emperor Napoleon himself and thirty-nine generals among the prisoners. Metz surrendered October 27 with its army of 173,000. Paris was invested by nearly half a million German soldiers on September 19; and after a siege of more than four months capitulated according to terms which, with those of the treaty of peace, were dictated by Bismarck, who had accompanied his sovereign to the field. By this treaty France was compelled to restore to Germany the two provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, which Louis XIV. had taken, and to pay a war indemnity of nearly one thousand million dollars. On January 18, 1871, in a concourse of princes and generals in the magnificent palace of the French kings at Versailles, King William I. of Prussia was formally proclaimed by Bismarck, German Emperor, pursuant to a vote of the North German Confederation. Bismarck's task, which he had set himself twenty years before, was done. His rewards were magnificent; his sovereign gave him an immense landed estate; he was created a prince of the empire, of which he was also made chancellor with the powers almost of a dictator.

As chancellor of the empire he made it his task to consolidate it with authoritative and stable institutions within, while forming alliances and political combinations