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BISMARCK-SCHONHAUSEN, OTTO EDUARD LEOPOLD, VON. 



the SchOnhausen property had fallen to his share 

 by inheritance, in 1845, freed the estate from debt 

 and gave him a comfortable income. When his 

 cares were lifted and the people whom he had 

 trained could manage without his watchful super- 

 vision his restless spirit once more preyed upon 

 itself, and to escape weariness he plunged into dis- 

 sipation, sought an anodyne in deep potations of 

 brown beer and champagne, tried violent athletic 

 exercises as a relief from ennui, and indulged to the 

 full in the pleasures and society of the roistering 

 young nobles of the Mark, galloping from castle to 

 castle in tumult of mind like the Wild Huntsman. 

 His torrential passions suddenly turned into their 

 right channel again, and his impetuous yearnings 

 found a rightful object when he fell in love with 

 the accomplished and pious Johanna von Puttkamer. 

 Ili-r parents had no intention or desire to bestow 

 her on the "mad Bismarck," but when he had 

 wrung from her a confession of love he went to 

 them with dauntless assurance, and, clasping his 

 beloved in his arms, announced solemnly that whom 

 God has joined no man should put asunder. Jour- 

 neying through Switzerland and Italy on the wed- 

 ding trip, in the autumn of 1847, the young Branden- 

 burger happened in Venice at the same time as his 

 hereditary liege, Friedrich Wilhclm IV, who asked 

 him to dinner, and was much impressed with the 

 political views and theories that he boldly and 

 wittily expounded. The young officers and squires. 

 his former boon companions, had been dreadfully 

 bored by such political monologues over the bottle, 

 but the King of Prussia formed a high opinion of 

 the talents revealed in Bismarck's conversation, 

 and thus by haphazard he was a man marked out 

 for his sovereign's favor before he had set his foot 

 on the political ladder. 



Soon after he brought his bride to Kniephoff, 

 the family Schloss in Pomerania, his neighbors, 

 sent him to represent them in the United Diet. 

 There seemed to be no political future for this most 

 bigoted and impracticable of Prussian Junkers. 

 The whole Liberal movement of the century, with 

 which kings and princes had for thirty years sought 

 to make their peace, was the object of his scorn and 

 reproach. Blind reaction he had elevated into a 

 jMilitical philosophy, and absolutism was to him a 

 dogma. Liberal ideas were popular then in Prussia 

 because all Germany looked to Prussian headship 

 for emancipation from the stifling regime of Met- 

 ternich. When Bismarck first entered the Assem- 

 bly, an appreciative house was listening to a Liberal 

 orator who expounded the ideal of the German na- 

 tion united by a free Constitution which had inspired 

 the people in the war of liberation. The new Depu- 

 ty leaped up to reply, and with untrained invective 

 and unpolisned satire decried and scoffed the popu- 

 lar hope in constitutionalism. In inanv such speeches 

 and in the columns of the " Kreuz-ifeitung, which 

 he helped to found, he scouted the idea of a Liberal 

 Constitution and popular parliamentary govern- 

 ment. Sovereigns wear their crown, he said, free 

 from all conditions, by the grace of God, not by 

 the will of the people. When the revolution tri- 

 umphed in 1H4H, and the King himself granted the 

 new Constitution, he retired to the country anathe- 

 matizing the great cities of Europe, which ho 

 thought ought to be razed to the ground, as they 

 were the nurseries of democracy and hotbeds of 

 revolution. An adaptable politician even then, he 

 took his seat in the new Prussian Chamber in 1840 

 to fight the fight of Conservatism for what could 

 still be conserved after " the Crown itself had scat- 

 tered ashes on the coffin " of the buried past. The 

 Prussian nobility, who bent the knee to the Czar 

 Nicholas and were willing to accept the dictation of 

 Austria and Russia regarding the internal govern- 



ment of the German states, in the hope of checking 

 the German people who offered the imperial crown 

 to the King of Prussia, found in Bismarck their 

 fiercest champion, a positive, convinced, fearless, 

 and enthusiastic advocate, who stood up for what 

 he conceived to be the fundamental principles of the 

 Prussian state, not the mere class interests and so- 

 cial privileges of his order. A parliamentary gov- 

 ernment of the English pattern appeared to him a 

 chimera when applied to Prussian conditions, in 

 which the throne was the foundation stone of the 

 state and the nobility were the born functionaries 

 of the Government and officers of the army, whose 

 exclusive position could not be impaired without 

 undermining civil order and military discipline. 

 He spurned the thought that a Hohenzollern could 

 accept the imperial crown from the Frankfort Par- 

 liament at the cost of introducing into Prussia the 

 entering wedge of parliamentarism by sacrificing a 

 jot of the royal prerogative. He was not a political 

 leader, not in any sense a practical politician, for 

 he was so inflamed by passion when he contemplated 

 the rising tide of democracy, so filled with the arro- 

 gant pride of caste, so scornful of parliamentarism 

 in any form, that he disregarded the tactics of his 

 party, and as a free lance trampled upon all the 

 comities of debate, distributed gross insults right 

 and left, and leveled ferocious diatribes against 

 all who gainsaid his irresponsible utterances. All 

 Berlin was astonished therefore when this untam- 

 able Junker was selected by the King and Premier 

 von Mantcuffel in 1851 for the most important and 

 most delicate and political of the diplomatic posts, 

 that of Prussian Minister to the Germanic Confed- 

 eration. 



No sooner had Bismarck taken muster of the 

 Frankfort Diet, whose consequential members he 

 described in a private letter as caricatures of peri- 

 wigged diplomatists, than the relations of Prussia 

 to Austria, of the Prussian military power to Ger- 

 many and Europe, appeared in a new light. The 

 conviction grew upon him that Prussia would be 

 able to humble Austria in a victorious war and 

 wrest from her the primacy in Germany, and would 

 have to do so in order to take her fitting place as a 

 great power. When the horizon of international 

 politics spread itself out before his eyes the consti- 

 tutional difficulties and social interests affecting 

 the internal situation of Prussia were dwarfed into 

 insignificance. From the beginning he lost no op- 

 portunity to challenge, either in high questions 

 of politics or in small matters of precedence, the 

 authority and prestige of the Austrian President, 

 then Count Thun. In the polished circles of the 

 old diplomacy his brusque effrontery was as much 

 a novelty as it was in parliamentary life, but he 

 could be'complaisant and charming when he would. 

 His ability to drink the other diplomats under tin 

 table was the least of his social accomplishments or 

 of his diplomatic arts. His bluff exterior was the 

 foil of insinuating graces, his affected candor of 

 artful reticences and wily schemes that overmatched 

 the diplomacy of Metternich and Schwara-nberg. 

 He scoffed at the ideas of German union and a Ger- 

 man policy in the same language that he had used 

 as a Deputy, but with a far different thought and 

 hidden meaning. Austria had many allies in tho 

 Germanic Confederation, Prussia but few. In tho 

 ripeness of time, by shaping the economic, military, 

 and foreign policy of Prussia to that end, by 

 promoting the expansion of Austrian interests 01 

 the Danube and awaiting the psychological momem; 

 arising from the Oriental or Italian entanglements, 

 Prussia would be ready for the mortal struggle for 

 the extinction of Austria as a German state and 

 the assertion of the supremacy of Prussia. Henco 

 Bismarck worked to perpetuate the weakness and 



