86 



Prince Bismarck and his Policy. 



suspicious espionage. If one had any thing indeed to de- 

 tect or to conceal ! The people here worry themselves 

 about the merest trifles ; and these diplomatists, with their 

 important nothings, already appear more ridiculous to 

 me than a deputy of the second chamber in his full-blown 

 dignity. Unless outward events take place, which we 

 clever members of the Diet can neither guide nor prede- 

 termine, I now know accurately what we shall have 

 done in one, two, or five years, and could bring it about 

 in twenty-four hours, if the others would for a single day 

 be reasonable and truthful. I never doubted that they all 

 made soup with water, but such a simple, thin water-gruel, 

 in which one cannot see a globule of fat, astonishes me ! 

 Send me Justice X. or Herr You?arsky hither from the 

 toll-gate, when they are washed and combed, and I will 

 lord it in diplomacy with them. I am making enormous 

 progress in the art of saying nothing in a great many 

 words. I write reports of many sheets, which read as 

 tersely and roundly as leading articles ; and if ManteuiFel 

 can say what there is in thera, after he has read them, he 

 can do more than I. 



" Each of us pretends to believe of his neighbor that he is 

 full of thought and plans, if he would only tell ; and at 

 the same time we none of us know an atom more of what 

 is going to happen to Germany than of next year's snow. 

 Nobody, not even the most malicious skeptic of a demo- 

 crat, suspects what quackery and selt-importance there is 

 in this diplomatizing. Well, I have railed long enough, 

 and now I will tell you that I am very well. Yesterday I 

 was in Mainz : the neighborhood is lovely. The rye is 

 in full ear, although it is infamously cold at night and in 

 the mornings. Excursions by railroad are the best here. 

 One can reach Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Odenwald, 

 Homburg, Soden, Weisbaden, Bingen, Kiidesheim, and 

 one makes here — being, in fact, nothing more than mutual 



