answered by the fact that no especial diplomatic remark of his ever came into vogue, although diplomacy occupied the best years of his life. If his felicitous condensations of thoughts into words be looked into, they are found to be homely references partaking of Platt ruggedness, and are like farm crowbars, that hoist wayside, common truths on end. The characteristic French axiom, on the contrary, is always a very superfine thing, and poniard-like in direction and aim. The Chancellor could get such off; he could split argumentative hairs, and spin, weave, and READY FOR A WALK From a photograph taken in 1894. brocade a political texture fit to beat the oldest hand at such work. His dispatches and circular notes are confounding as much because of the tight, neat, firm speciousness of their logic as for their audaciousness. But this refinement is the result of labor, not of inspiration. Bismarck's genius lay else where; and in corsequence his happy hits lie elsewhere too. They have synthesis, not analysis, for their nature. For this reason he could sum up the case of Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg, in the one sententious phrase, The same hands that rear chickens always know how to wring their necks" a wonderful multum in parvo in 6. view of the fact that the Duke was, in truth, a pretender of Prussian incubation, and had his neck wrung, politically speaking, soon after by the Prussian Minister. Very apt condensation lies, too, in the assertion that he "gathered his views from the green land, not from the green table." Then consider the amusing slur cast at Great Britain: "And the hereditary parliamentary kings, who are wont to be led from out behind the coulisses where they are kept when a change of minis. try is demanded, in order to sign fresh appointments, and are then made to retire again after having supplied the opposition with a new fortress to storm and new men to point its arrows at." In this connection, furthermore, it becomes noticeable, I think, that the Chancellor's policy is not set forth, like most statesmen's, in selected terms, but gets summed up in single phrases which have himself for their author; "ferro et igni," " might goes before right." These verbal nutshells are characteristic, not merely of the spirit of his statecraft, but of his synthetically mental grasp, and natural style of expression. The fact is, Bismarck knew the secret of writing well and graphically. Whether he learned the art through precept or discovered it by himself does not appear; but only that he possessed it, and possessed it consciously. "After your departure," he writes to his sister, Malvina, in 1844, "I naturally found the house very lonely. I sat down by the hearth, smoked and philosophized on how unnatural and egoistic it is when girls who have brothers-and above all unmarried brothers-go and marry and carry on as if there was not ing in the world for them to do but follow their affections; a selfishness our sex, and I personally, know ourselves to be happily free from. On seeing how unfruitful these reflections were, I got up from the green leather chair, on which you used to whisper and exchange kisses with Miss and Oscar, and plunged into election affairs, from which I emerged with the conviction that five votes for certain and two uncertainly inclined towards my election, four for Krug's, sixteen to eighteen for Arnim's, and twelve to fifteen for Alvensleven's, so I chose to retire altogether. Now I live here with father. reading, smoking, and walking out, helping him eat lampreys and play at what he is pleased to call fox-hunting We go out namely with Ihle, Bellin, and Carl in the rain, or with Réaumur pointing as at present to six degrees of cold, encircle, in the greatest silence and with every precaution against giving the wind, a pine knoll which we three are as good as certain contains not a living creature except a couple of old women perhaps, gleaning dry twigs, and Ihle, Carl, and two dogs enter it, giving vent to the most fearful and curious cries, particularly Ihle. Father stands motionless and attentive, with his rifle cocked, precisely as if he really expected game, until Ihle calls out close by: Ha la la he he at 'm he he,' in the strangest gutturals, when father asks me innocently if I haven't seen anything?' I answer, No! not the least thing!' in a tone of astonishment as natural as I can possibly make it. Thereupon we go to some other piece of wood whose certainty of game Ihle knows how to make believe he is sure of, grumble about the weather, and begin the same comedy over again. The thing is kept up three to four hours, without the zeal of father, Ihle, and Fingal cooling for one moment. "Besides these diversions, we amuse ourselves by looking at the orange-house twice a day, the sheepfold once, the thermometers hourly, and, since the weather has cleared up, have set the clocks striking after the sun in such harmony that only the library clock now gives one stroke after those of the other rooms have finished striking a tempo. Charles V. was a stupid fellow! You can easily see that I have no time left over on my hand, after such manifold occupations, to visit the curate; as he has no voice to give for the county council, I haven't been there once; it wasn't possible. The Elbe is full of ice; the wind is east by southeast; the new thermometer from Berlin stands at 8°; the barometer at 28.8. I tell you these things in order to set you an example how to write! Mention in your letters to father more of the small incidents of your life, and it will give him the most infinite pleasure; tell him who have visited you and Curt, whom you have called on, what you have to eat, how the horses are, how the servants behave, if the doors squeak, and whether the windows close tightly; in short, give facts, details." The library referred to here is shown nowadays, as it may be mentioned in passing, to public sightseers, as is the case, indeed, with pretty nearly the whole spacious house, with its numerous low rooms and chambersSchoenhausen having been turned into a museum of Bismarckian memorials, In 1844 PRINCESS BISMARCK From a photograph taken in 1888. always what a layman would call "a great reader." And in Pomerania, where he was managing Kniphof, at this date, his law studies and one year of military service not having led to anything, chiefly because both inclination and money were wanting-in Kniephof there were no books, or as good as none, which was one reason why he drank and caroused so there. Here, on the other hand, were nearly two hundred, and it would be hard for a man to find more knowledge in an equally small number of volumes. The fact that their number was limited had proved an advantage, rather than otherwise; for their turn to be read came round the oftener. and the contents were remembered the better because of the frequency of the reperusals. How much he had absorbed from the "Theatrum Europæum " be was surprised himself to see on entering into public life. His historical knowledge was not only much completer than most men's, it had a governmental coloring that showed differently from the school-room information of the run of politicians. He fell into traps sometimes. to be sure, for this same reason. For example, he was sitting in the Assembly of the Three Estates, just about three years subsequent to this date, when a Liberal speaker, in arguing for the adoption of a written constitution for Prussia, mentioned the fact of the people having roused themselves in 1813, in order to obtain the promised grant of a constitution; a fact which Bismarck's historical authorities had failed to emphasize. So he rose from his seat and said he objected to that interpretation; the ground of the uprising was the popular hatred of the French occupation of the country. "You know little about the matter," cried an elder deputy. You were not living then. The King published a proclamation promising a constitution if we would take up arms; it was posted up in Breslau and here in Berlin." Bismarck was nor plused. But he had always had a way of extracting himself from pitfalls, and knew how to perform it, moreover, in such manner as to damage his adversary more by his liberation than he had suffered hurt by his tumble; and so now. Rising again calmly, he said in substance that "it was true he was not living at the time, and had often regretted it, for he should have liked to fight against Napoleon. He had taken it for granted that it was his despotic yoke which the country was resenting. He had to hear now it was a national one. was not grateful for the information, and no longer regretted not having lived then." He In Kniephof he had enjoyed ruffling the tempers of his fellow-squires by giving vent to the liberal opinions which he had heard advanced by "Jack" Motley and other chums of his university and Rhineland days, and which, for that matter, were being preached pretty generally by Germans, too, in as far as they belonged to the political parties which were demanding parliamentary government and the unification of German States. But when matters became serious, as they did in this year (1847) and the next, "the blood of nature proved stronger than the water of adoption." He realized that he was "the King's man, from the crown of his head to the calves of his legs," and felt moved to his uttermost depths to work in behalf of the throne. The family were willing to make things easy for him, in the hope of his really doing something at last towards starting into a diplomatic career, which their mother had always said was the one he was most suited for; so he set out for Berlin, from whence he traveled up and down the country, forming tory unions and establishing a tory press. His first journalistic writing was done for such a paper of his own founding, the "New Prussian Gazette," which still survives and is known widely under its popular sub-title " Die Kreuz-Zeitung," a remarkable newspaper, which is as feudalistic in tone to-day as it was fifty years ago, as much an organ of Prussian squiredom, and the credo of monarchical orthodoxy; for which reasons it turned on its founder in the sixties and combated him in the eighties (during the Kultur Kampf), and outlived his disgrace and fall, in the beginning of the nineties. But at this period, in the fifties, Bismarck in his speeches outdoes the "Kreuz-Zeitung" in ultra-monarchicalism, advocating resistance to the popular cry for a Constitution, and objecting to all reforms. When the Constitution was ratified finally in 1850, after the Revolution had been crushed by the steel arm of the military, he expresses himself as being "grateful only for the clause in it which makes the ministers responsible to the crown and not to parlia ment." He detests parliaments, and a republican reader can hardly read his perorations against popular government without mixed amusement and resentment. But they were reported in Pomerania in those days, as they would be still, by the local Sir Roger de Coverleys with untinctured approbation, and the general gratification of the Pomeranian country-side society was witnessed with rapture by the girl who had pledged her troth to the speaker while he was without credit and unknown. Bismarck certainly reached the zenith of his emotional life, attained the high niveau of his intellectual circumspection, and enjoyed the best health he ever had, in "the Frankfort period." It includes the seven years after his marriage with Johanna in 1849, from 1852-59. The beginning is marked in the letters by the confessions to Johanna and longings for moonshine and sonatas from Beethoven; the end, by the Little Book, as it is usually entitled-or a recapitulation of the political relation between Austria and Prussia. The marvelous fullness of the latter is as much the harvest of jealous patriotism as of professional experience. In between lie abundant accounts of numerous journeys, scenes in Hungary, at fashionable watering-places, royal courts and hunting-grounds, all in a strain of humorness and pitch of robust joyousness, such as never appear in his correspondence again. "I have just come from the steamboat," he writes to Johanna from Ofen, on the 23d of June, 1853, “and am sitting at an open window in a spacious, vaulted hall, the Emperor having lodged me in his hill castle, to which of thousands of white and brown-flecked the vesper bells of Pesth are sending up their A couple of days later he goes to Szolnok, where he deposits his money with Prince W—————, and after eating a breakfast under a Schoenhausen-like lime, gets into "a very low hay-cart, with bags stuffed with straw for cushions, and drawn by three Hungarian horses. The Uhlans loaded their pieces [the Prince had insisted on his taking an escort], mounted, and off we set in a furious gallop. Hildebrand and my extra Hungarian valet sat in front on a straw bolster with the drivera dark, brown peasant with a mustache, broad-brimmed hat, long black hair made glistening with grease, a shirt that reached only to his stomach, where a band of hairy, naked skin was visible, and a pair of trousers, each leg of which was ample enough for a woman's skirt, and extended only as far down as to the knees, where the leather spurred heeled boots began. Fancy a firm, elastic soil under you, level as the top of a table, on which nothing is visible for miles round to the distant horizon, except tall well-poles marking the watering-places for cattle; droves oxen, with horns as long as your arms, shy as wild animals, and watched over by halfnaked men, provided with long sticks and mounted on shaggy, poor horses; immense herds of swine, accompanied invariably by a swineherd with an ass to carry his sheepskin greatcoat, and occasionally himself; and great flocks of wild fowl." The party halted for the night at the garrison station Ketskemet, then proceeded southward, as Bismarck "hoped to see something of the robbers, in their heavy fur coats, guns in hand and pistols in belt, and the captains, some of whom are said to belong to the native gentry, in black masks. A few days ago several gens d'armes were killed in a fight with them, while two men of the band were seized and shot by court martial in Ketskemet. But no robbers showed themselves. The lieutenant in my escort said they knew before daylight probably that I was traveling under protection; some of them possibly were the peasants who greeted us at the post-stations with the dignified, earnest manner of their caste, uttering their istem adiamek, Praise be unto God!'" Five years later, after having visited most of the other countries of Europe, Bismarck went to Denmark to pass a few weeks of his summer vacation, and the same animal spirits which had impelled him in Hungary to seek adventures on the steppes led him here into a party of courtly sportsmen, bound for "a wilderness four hundred miles square. The very land of my dreams!" he writes; "sixty miles distant from the last post-station, and a hundred to the next, at this wild spot where I should like to build a cottage; the country between is sprinkled with swamps, and has forests of birch, cedar, pine, ash, and oak, sometimes too thick, almost, to penetrate, sometimes very thin with only scattered trees, but the whole everywhere close covered with stones of all sizes, from that of your hand to rocks as big as houses." A day later he is laid up with a sprained leg, his foot having turned on one of these loose stones; and the accident, with its subsequent spell of invalidism, proves to be the beginning of notices of bad health, which recur from this time on, both in the private letters and the accounts of public reports and speeches. He became liable to fits of suffering from swollen veins in the once sprained leg; and to this evil a facial neuralgia associated itself, which he attributes sometimes to the cold seasons he spent in St. Petersburg sometimes to the wearing worries and vexations of office, and sometimes to the exhaustion attendant in the wake of social attendance at court festivities. There are up-flickerings of the old humor and zest in life throughout the rest of the letters, it is true, but the large, major note of sustained propulsiveness is no longer in them to the same exuberant extent as before; so, if a stranger must make a choice, let him leave the rest, and grasp instead the one volume descriptive of the Frankfort days. This volume contains more of the man Bismarck than all of the later volumes put together, and the essence of the patriot, the diplomatist, and the statesman besides. In Frankfort his political views clarified and systematized themselves. "Nobody, not even the most malicious skeptic of a democrat, would believe that charlatanism and pretension compose the substance of the diplomacy carried on here," he writes to his wife at the commencement; and, behold, the keynote of the whole historic period that follows is struck for once and all! Bismarck masters the charlatanism and practices the pretentiousness. His watchword becomes, Nur dreist und consequent-Be persistent in audaciousness and all will be well; and this does not change again. There had still been enough of the raw young country squire in him when he came down to the Diet at first to incline him loyally towards the Emperor Franz and Austria, they being the liege lords of the King and Prussia. A perception, however, of the fact that such fealty is one-sided, that Austria regards Prussia as a young vassal to be used without compensation, and restricted, by means fair or foul, in her lusty young instinct of aggrandizement, suffices to transform him at once and fundamentally. A resolve ripens in him promptly to defy Austria; and thenceforward diplomatic opposition is what he practices at the Diet, and political opposition what he advises at Berlin, where spirits are divided, Roon and the war party, the members of which are likewise ambitious, taking sides against the traditional head of German affairs, while the pious and timid preach the feudal gospel of traditional allegiance. The King wavers, and this situation continues till the end of the story, it being the same at bottom whether the monarch occupying the throne goes by the name of Frederick William IV., William I., or Frederick III.; and whether the oppos ing parties at his right hand and left be Bismarck and Roon against Gerlach and Queen Elizabeth, or Bismarck, Moltke, and Poon against Prince Frederick William, Empress Augusta, and the Crown Princess. When the situation did change, and the occupant of the throne stepped from the golden middle ground of moderation, when, in other words, to Frederick III. succeeded William II., Bismarck's occupation was gone. In order to influence the King in favor of alliances with western powers against the one which is blocking Prussia's way to greater might, he goes so far as to write apologies for revolution and republicanism; he goes further, and favors national parliaments; and still further, and lends an ear to the popular demand for the union of German States. "The demand offers a means for winning popular allegiance to whatever State will take it up," he reasons with Manteuffel. Later (in the final volumes) he is reported as having assured a deputation that "he had worked and lived in order to give his faithful German countrymen unification and so fulfill their patriotic dream." The true dash of spirit, the bold maneuvers, the restless, resistless forces of will and mind, are in the early volumes, I repeat. In these there lies more between the lines than the later interpretations afford in all their thousand pages. One is meat and core; the other palaver and shell. He lived for power, not ideas, and for power only. If that had incurred to Prussia from disunion, cisunion is what he would have wrought for. Little cared he for dreams. He was an incarnation of the pioneer soul of his northern Fatherland, and stretched out for room and empire, as the great Elector had done before him, and Frederick called the Great. If he turned out to be an agent of the national life, it is one example more in history of how much greater is life than the disposition of the mightiest of men. At the Diet, meanwhile, the intuition of his secret enmity to Austria growing into certainty, his colleagues urged his being recalled, and the King, yielding, thought of making him Prime Minister, but, wavering as usual, sent him first to St. Petersburg for a couple of years, and then to Paris as his Ambassador. Then, however, mustering up all his courage, he took the decided step of calling Bismarck to Berlin. The year was 1862. And, sure enough, the expected took place, for in little less than ten years Bismarck had let the Prussian army loose with its "mailed |