Part 8 (1/2)

For the moment the centre of interest lay in the House. The new Minister began by what he intended as an attempt at reconciliation: he announced that the Budget for 1863 would be withdrawn; the object of this was to limit as much as possible the immediate scope of difference; a fresh Budget for the next year would be laid before them as soon as possible.

There would remain only the settlement of the Budget for the current year. This announcement was badly received; the House was distrustful, and they interpreted it as an attempt to return to the old practice of deferring consideration of the Budget until the beginning of the year to which it applied. The first discussion in which Bismarck took part was not in the House itself, but in the Budget Committee. The Committee proposed a resolution requiring the Government at once to lay before the House the Budget for 1863, and declaring that it was unconst.i.tutional to spend any money which had been expressly and definitely refused by the House of Representatives. On this there took place a long discussion, in which Bismarck spoke repeatedly; for the discussions in Committee, which consisted only of about thirty members, were conversational in their nature. There was no verbatim report, but the room was crowded with members who had come to hear the new Minister.

They were not disappointed. He spoke with a wit, incisiveness, and versatility to which, as one observer remarked, they were not accustomed from Prussian Ministers. He warned them not to exaggerate their powers.

The Prussian Const.i.tution did not give the House of Representatives the sole power of settling the Budget; it must be settled by arrangement with the other House and the Crown. There was a difference of opinion in the interpretation of the Const.i.tution; all const.i.tutional government required compromise; a const.i.tution was not something dead, it must be enlivened; it was interpreted by custom and practice; it would be wiser not to hasten this practice too quickly; then the question of law might easily become one of power. It was not the fault of the Government that they had got into this position; people took the situation too tragically, especially in the press; they spoke as though the end of all things was come; ”but,” he added, ”a const.i.tutional struggle is not a disgrace, it is rather an honour; after all we are all children of the same country.” A true note, but one which he was not always able to maintain in the struggle of the coming years. Then he expounded the view of the German character which we have learnt from his letters: it was customary to speak of the sobriety of the Prussian people; yes, but the great independence of the individual made it difficult in Prussia to govern with the Const.i.tution; in France it was different; there this individual independence was wanting; ”we are perhaps too educated to endure a const.i.tution; we are too critical”; the capacity for judging measures of the Government and acts of the Representatives was too universal; there were in the country too many Catilinarian existences, which had an interest in revolutions. He reminded them that Germany did not care for the Liberalism of Prussia, but for its power; Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden, might indulge in Liberalism; Prussia must concentrate its power and hold itself ready for the favourable moment which had already been pa.s.sed over more than once; Prussia's boundaries, as fixed by the Congress of Vienna, were not favourable to a sound political life; ”not by speeches and majority votes are the great questions of the time decided--that was the great blunder of 1848 and 1849--but by blood and iron.” He appealed for confidence: ”Do not force a quarrel; we are honest people and you can trust us.”

The effect of these speeches was very unfavourable; the very quickness of thought and originality of expression produced a bad impression; even the free indulgence in long foreign words offended patriotic journalists. They seemed to his audience reckless; what was this reference to the Treaties of Vienna but an imitation of Napoleonic statesmans.h.i.+p? They had the consciousness that they were making history, that they were involved in a great and tragic conflict, and they expected the Minister to play his part seriously and solemnly; instead of that they had listened to a series of epigrams with no apparent logical connection. We know how dangerous it is, even in England, for a responsible statesman to allow himself to be epigrammatic in dealing with serious affairs. Much more was it in Germany, where the Ministers were nearly always officials by training. Bismarck had the dangerous gift of framing pregnant and pithy sentences which would give a ready handle to his opponents: _Macht geht vor Recht_; he had not said these words, but he had said something very much like them, and they undoubtedly represented what seemed to his audience the pith of his speeches. And then these words, _blood and iron_. He has told us in later years what he really meant:

”Put the strongest possible military power, in other words, as much blood and iron as you can, into the hands of the King of Prussia, then he will be able to carry out the policy you wish; it cannot be done with speeches and celebrations and songs, it can only be done by blood and iron.” [7]

What everyone thought he meant was that blood must be shed and iron used; and perhaps they were not so far wrong.

The attempt at conciliation failed; the report of the Committee was adopted, and an amendment proposed by Vincke, which Bismarck was prepared to accept, was rejected. Bismarck warned the House not to push the conflict too far; the time would come when the prospect of a peaceful solution would have disappeared; then the Government too would be prepared to oppose theory to theory and interpretation to interpretation.

He showed to the President of the House a twig of olive. ”I gathered this in Avignon to bring it to the House; it does not seem to be time yet.”

The Budget was sent up to the House of Lords in the amended form in which the House of Representatives had pa.s.sed it; the Lords unanimously threw it out, as they were legally justified in doing; not content with that, they altered it to the original form in which it had been proposed by the Government and sent it down again to the Lower House. This was clearly illegal. Their action, however, was most useful to the Government. A conflict had now arisen between the two Houses, and technically the responsibility for the failure to bring the conciliation about was taken away from the Government; they could entrench themselves behind the impregnable position that the law required the Budget to be pa.s.sed by both Houses; until this was done they could do nothing. The Houses would not agree; the Government was helpless. The House of Representatives at once pa.s.sed a motion declaring the vote of the Upper House for altering the Budget null and void, as indeed it was; in the middle of the discussion a message was brought down by the President announcing that the House was to be prorogued that afternoon; they had just time to pa.s.s the resolution and to send it in a cab which was waiting at the door to the Upper House, where it was read out amidst the boisterous laughter of the Peers; then both Chambers were summoned to the Palace, and the session closed. The first round in the conflict was over.

The recess was short; the next session was by the Const.i.tution obliged to begin not later than January 15th; there were many who expected that the Const.i.tution would be ignored and the Parliament not summoned. This was not Bismarck's plan; he fulfilled all the technical requirements in the strictest way; he carefully abstained from any action which he could not justify by an appeal to the letter of the Const.i.tution; the government of the country was carried on with vigour and success; he allowed no loophole by which his opponents might injure his influence with the King. It is true that they were spending money which had not been voted, but then, as he explained, that was not his fault; the provisions of the law were quite clear.

It was the duty of the Government to submit the Budget to the Lower House, who could amend it; it had then to be pa.s.sed in the form of a law, and for this the a.s.sent of both Houses of Parliament and of the Crown was required. The Upper House had not the right of proposing amendments, but they had the right of rejecting them. In this case they had made use of their right; no law had been pa.s.sed the two Houses had not agreed. What was to happen? The Const.i.tution gave no help; there was a gap in it. The Government therefore had to act as best they could.

They could not be expected to close the Government offices, cease to pay the troops, and let the government of the country come to an end; they must go on as best they could, taking all the responsibility until they could come to some agreement.

As soon as the House met it began to vote an address to the King. They adopted the obvious fiction, which, in fact, they could not well avoid, that he was being misled by his Ministers, and the att.i.tude of the country misrepresented to him; even had they known as well as we do that the Ministers were only carrying out the orders of the King, they could not well have said so. Bismarck, however, did not attempt to conceal the truth; the address, he said, touched the King; the acts complained of were done in the name of the King; they were setting themselves against him. The contest was, who was to rule in Prussia, the House of Hohenzollern or the House of Parliament. He was at once accused of disloyalty; he was, they said, protecting himself behind the person of the sovereign, but, of course, it was impossible for him not to do so.

The whole justification for his action was that he was carrying out the King's orders. What was at the root of the conflict but the question, whether in the last resort the will of the King or the majority of the House should prevail? To have adopted the English practice, to have refrained from mentioning the King's name, would have been to adopt the very theory of the Const.i.tution for which the House was contending, the English theory that the sovereign has neither the right of deciding nor responsibility; it would have been to undermine the monarchical side of the Const.i.tution which Bismarck was expressly defending. The King himself never attempted to avoid the responsibility; in a public speech he had already said that the army organisation was his own work: ”It is my own and I am proud of it; I will hold firmly to it and carry it through with all my energy.” In his answer to the address from the House, both on this and on later occasions, he expressly withdrew the a.s.sumption that he was not well informed or that he did not approve of his Ministers' action.

The address was carried by a majority of 255 to 68; the King refused to receive it in person. The House then proceeded to throw out a Bill for military reorganisation which was laid before them; they adopted a resolution that they reserved for later discussion the question, for what part of the money illegally spent in 1862 they would hold the Ministry personally responsible. They then proceeded to the Budget of 1863, and again rejected the army estimates; they refused the money asked for raising the salaries of the amba.s.sadors (Bismarck himself, while at St. Petersburg, had suffered much owing to the insufficiency of his salary, and he wished to spare his successors a similar inconvenience); and they brought in Bills for the responsibility of Ministers. The public attention, however was soon directed from these internal matters to even more serious questions of foreign policy.

At the beginning of February the Poles had once more risen in revolt against the Russian Government. Much sympathy was felt for them in Western Europe. England, France, and Austria joined in representations and remonstrances to the Czar; they expected that Prussia would join them.

Nothing could have been more inconvenient to Bismarck; he was at the time fully occupied in negotiations about German affairs, and he was probably anxious to bring to a speedy issue the questions between Prussia and Austria; it was therefore most important to him to be on good terms with France and England, for he would not challenge Austria unless he was sure that Austria would have no allies; now he must quarrel with either Russia or with France. An insurrection in Poland was, however, a danger to which everything else must be postponed; on this his opinion never varied, here there could be no compromise. He was perfectly open: ”The Polish question is to us a question of life and death,” he said to Sir Andrew Buchanan. There were two parties among the Poles; the one, the extreme Republican, wished for the inst.i.tution of an independent republic; the other would be content with self-government and national inst.i.tutions under the Russian Crown; they were supported by a considerable party in Russia itself. Either party if successful would not be content with Russian Poland; they would demand Posen, they would never rest until they had gained again the coast of the Baltic and deprived Prussia of her eastern provinces. The danger to Prussia would be greatest, as Bismarck well knew, if the Poles became reconciled to the Russians; an independent republic on their eastern frontier would have been dangerous, but Polish aspirations supported by the Panslavonic party and the Russian army would have been fatal. Russia and Poland might be reconciled, Prussia and Poland never can be. Prussia therefore was obliged to separate itself from the other Powers; instead of sending remonstrances to the Czar, the King wrote an autograph letter proposing that the two Governments should take common steps to meet the common danger; General von Alvensleben, who took the letter, at once concluded a convention in which it was agreed that Prussian and Russian troops should be allowed to cross the frontier in pursuit of the insurgents; at the same time two of the Prussian army corps were mobilised and drawn up along the Polish frontier.

The convention soon became known and it is easy to imagine the indignation with which the Prussian people and the House of Representatives heard of what their Government had done. The feeling was akin to that which would have prevailed in America had the President offered his help to the Spanish Government to suppress the insurrection in Cuba. The answers to questions were unsatisfactory, and on February 26th Heinrich von Sybel rose to move that the interests of Prussia required absolute neutrality. It was indeed evident that Bismarck's action had completely isolated Prussia; except the Czar, she had now not a single friend in Europe and scarcely a friend in Germany. Bismarck began his answer by the taunt that the tendency to enthusiasm for foreign nationalities, even when their objects could only be realised at the cost of one's own country, was a political disease unfortunately limited to Germany. It was, however, an unjust taunt, for no one had done more than Sybel himself in his historical work to point out the necessity, though he recognised the injustice, of the part Prussia had taken in the part.i.tion of Poland; n.o.body had painted so convincingly as he had, the political and social demoralisation of Poland. Bismarck then dwelt on the want of patriotism in the House, which in the middle of complicated negotiations did not scruple to embarra.s.s their own Government. ”No English House of Commons,” he said, ”would have acted as they did,” a statement to which we cannot a.s.sent; an English Opposition would have acted exactly as the majority of the Prussian Parliament did.

When a Minister is in agreement with the House on the general principles of policy, then indeed there rests on them the obligation not to embarra.s.s the Government by constant interpolation with regard to each diplomatic step; self-restraint must be exercised, confidence shewn.

This was not the case here; the House had every reason to believe that the objects of Bismarck were completely opposed to what they wished; they could not be expected to repose confidence in him. They used this, as every other opportunity, to attempt to get rid of him.

The question of Poland is one on which Bismarck never altered his att.i.tude. His first public expression of opinion on foreign affairs was an attack on the Polish policy of the Prussian Government in 1848.

”No one then,” he wrote, ”could doubt that an independent Poland would be the irreconcilable enemy of Prussia and would remain so till they had conquered the mouth of the Vistula and every Polish-speaking village in West and East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia.”

Forty years later one of the last of his great speeches in the Reichstag was devoted to attacking the Polish sympathies of the Catholic party in Prussia. He was never tired of laughing at the characteristic German romanticism which was so enthusiastic for the welfare of other nations.

He recalled the memories of his boyhood when, after the rebellion of 1831, Polish refugees were received in every German town with honours and enthusiasm greater than those paid to the men who had fought for Germany, when German children would sing Polish national airs as though they were their own.

Nothing shews the change which he has been able to bring about in German thought better than the att.i.tude of the nation towards Poland. In the old days the Germans recollected only that the part.i.tion of Poland had been a great crime; it was their hope and determination that they might be able to make amends for it. In those days the Poles were to be found in every country in Europe, foremost in fighting on the barricades; they helped the Germans to fight for their liberty, and the Germans were to help them to recover independence. In 1848, Mieroslawski had been carried like a triumphant hero through the streets of Berlin; the Baden rebels put themselves under the leaders.h.i.+p of a Pole, and it was a Pole who commanded the Viennese in their resistance to the Austrian army; a Pole led the Italians to disaster on the field of Novara. At a time when poets still were political leaders, and the memory and influence of Byron had not been effaced, there was scarcely a German poet, Platen, Uhland, Heine, who had not stirred up the enthusiasm for Poland. It was against this att.i.tude of mind that Bismarck had to struggle and he has done so successfully. He has taught that it is the duty of Germany to use all the power of the State for crus.h.i.+ng and destroying the Polish language and nationality; the Poles in Prussia are to become Prussian, as those in Russia have to become Russian. A hundred years ago the Polish State was destroyed; now the language and the nation must cease to exist.

It is a natural result of the predominance of Prussia in Germany. The enthusiasm for Poland was not unnatural when the centre of gravity of Germany was still far towards the West. Germany could be great, prosperous, and happy, even if a revived Poland spread to the sh.o.r.es of the Baltic, but Prussia would then cease to exist and Bismarck has taught the Germans to feel as Prussians.

The danger during these weeks was real; Napoleon proposed that Austria, England, and France should present identical notes to Prussia remonstrating with and threatening her. Lord Russell refused; it was, as Bismarck said in later years, only the friendly disposition of Lord Russell to Germany which saved Prussia from this danger. Bismarck's own position was very insecure; but he withstood this attack as he did all others, though few knew at what expense to his nerves and health; he used to attribute the frequent illnesses of his later years to the constant anxiety of these months; he had a very nervous temperament, self-control was difficult to him, and we must remember that all the time when he was defending the King's Government against this public criticism he had to maintain himself against those who at Court were attempting to undermine his influence with the King.