Granted the principle of personal intervention, of the success of either one man or of even a group of two or three leading spirits, who was the original inventor, who the doer of the deed, the framer of the fact that threatened the world with a new master?
This query was not started for eighteen long years; not until the catastrophe that threatened the House of Hohenzollern with the loss of its noblest son, served to recall to the mind of all Europe what a thorough hero and citizen, what a perfect, undeviating German the crown prince had always been.
The first emperor of United Germany, the agent of the illustrious chancellors will, had gone to his eternal rest when the German mind began to reflect that only a dying man stood between the late ruler and a boy emperor! But was not that dying man the creator (if creator there had been) of the restored Teutonic state? Did not the revived empire spring from the races in which Prussia was incarnate? was it not in good earnest the Hohenzollern line, the descendant of the Great Elector that answered for the regeneration? Thence the dispute between the partisans of Bismarck and those of Frederick III. Supposing a creation according to both Heinrich von Sybel and the chroniclers of French vain-gloriousness, who was the creator? The answer of history was, No one. The German nationor truer still, the thought of all Germany, for long ages, was the genuine source, it was the very soul of the entire people that from the ancient Germania of the Roman, breathed anew in the remnants of its primeval entity and clamored for its old integrity.
But we must not outstrip chronology; the first record of the events of the war of 1870, and of the mighty changes brought on thereby, is that of Sybel, not altogether wrongly entitled an historical monument. Professor Sybels five volumes do, assuredly, constitute a history founded on documentary evidence, if ever such a one existed, but for that very reason they are, perhaps, somewhat wanting in actual life. They are fashioned after the methods employed and approved of in bygone days, and present rather the character of a register than a record of deeds done by living men. As far as the testimony of hard, dry acts went, it is probably impeachable; but we then come to the question, Is documentary evidence in such a case sufficient to give all that is true? Is not truth, where human impulses and irrationalities are concerned, derived from sources lying higher than the regions sacred to Blue Books? Whereas it was to the certificates vouchsafed by state papers, and instruments of such like order, that Sybels reliability was chiefly due. Once admit the value of these vouchers (and their corroborative weight none can deny), and it becomes difficult to overrate the importance of Sybels still unconcluded Begründung des Deutschen Reiches.
The reader who for the first time takes cognizance of the contents of these formidable volumes, is overwhelmed by the amount of attestations they present him with, by his own inability to refute them, or by counter statements substitute a truer appreciation of what did really occur. The dry narrative of mere fact is thus, but the impression it should produce as of a fact lived through is wanting.
This history of Professor Sybels is a Prussian one; for which it is obvious that such extraordinary materials would not have been furnished him had it not been tacitly understood that his final verdict must be completely favorable to the Emperor Wilhelm I. and his powerful minister.
In the curious and wide-spreading complications, whence eventually resulted the Franco-German war of 1870, there are two distinct parts: the part before hostilities broke out, and the part after the victory of the Germans might be inevitably foreseen: the first period counts in its dramatis personæ all the states and all the statesmen of Europe. From the Crimean War to the cession of Venetia to Italy through France, there is not an event that is not a connecting link in a long serpentine chain. At the moment this may have escaped the eye, but, once fixed in its one perspective of distance, the chain shows unbroken and all is far less than has been supposed,occasioned by any arts, manœuvres, or intrigues of the chief actors; the vulgar notions of Prince Bismarcks incessant wiles, or of Louis Napoleons base designs against his neighbors may be discarded as relatively subordinate. The incidents that marked the gigantic game of chess played (not in Europe only) from the overthrow of the Orleans dynasty to the death of Friedrich III. and the fall of Bismarck in the winter of last year were neither the outcome of individual Machiavelianism nor entirely attributable to chance; both were all but in equal degree cause and effect. The actors personally in each case replied to the suggestions of circumstances they had but indirectly helped to bring about.
From 1848-50 to 1889-90, observe the rapid succession of so-called unexpected events: The rise to the rule of Democracy in France; the restoration to power of the despotic Bonapartist empire, whence issued the revival of the nationalistic theory, leading on one side to revolution, on the other to conservative resistance and the supremacy of a warlike state like Prussia. We need go no further for the determining cause of the two sovereign influences! Cavour and Bismarck, the two men who predominate our half century, spring from a common necessity, and in reality emerge from the conference of 1856, misnamed the Crimean Race!
I was the egg, the chancellor was wont to say, whence my royal master foresaw that unity might perhaps be hatched; and on Orsinis scaffold the Piedmontese seer knew full well that the Corsican Carbonaro could not elude the fate lying in wait for him, disguised in the freedom of Italy. You can dissever none of these facts one from the other, and we now approach the one man principle. The protagonists stand face to face, rather than side by side, but both are equally the unconscious promoters of that antagonism between Germany and France which, in fact, has shaped, and still shapes, the whole policy of Europe.
From this single grand outline, all the minor lines either start, or towards it tend, indirectly, in convergent curves.
From the vast system formed by the monster-questionsUnited Germany, the Latin races, the East, the future of catholicism and the papacy, the strife of liberty against despotismfrom all these parent problems you can detach none of the smaller incidents of the age; you are obliged to take count of the little Danish Campaign, which taught Prussia those deficiencies, impelling her directly to the attainment of her future military omnipotence, and which, under the abortive attempts of the Saxon minister, M. de Beust,* gave a timid reminder to Germany of what her unity had been and might once again be. Each incident, however local or however remote, formed a feature of the whole; between 1854 and 1870, you cannot ignore the would-be secession of the Southern Confederates, which ended in making all America the counterpoise to our older worldneither dare you neglect the Indian meeting whence England issued, clad in moral as in political glory, and gave the noblest sign of the Christian significancy of the Victorian Era; all holds together, men and facts succeed each other in quick alternation; the light that fades on one hand shines with dazzling glare on the other. Cavour dies. Greatest of all, and genuine creator, with his disappearance the equilibrium is endangered. Right ceases to reign, force asserts itself, and Bismarck, ironhanded, invincible, holds sway over a scared, unresisting, one may say a soulless world.
This is the turning-point. The one man theory apparently endures; but physically and morally, the vision of disintegration rises, threatening all; and whence the New Order is to come, above all morally, none divine.