# Littell's Living Age/Volume 128/Issue 1656/Prince Bismarck and his Master

From The Spectator.
PRINCE BISMARCK AND HIS MASTER.
The two memoranda or confidential reports to the king just published by Prince Bismarck in the Reichsanzeiger have almost as much interest for the student of history as for the politician. It has always been believed that Prince Bismarck, like Richelieu, like Stein, like Marlborough, like Sir Robert Walpole, like, perhaps, most of the great statesmen of modern Europe, had always to maintain two equally difficult and simultaneous struggles, — one with external opponents, and one in the cabinet of his king. It is well known that the prince had the utmost difficulty in persuading his master into the war of 1866, into the dethronement of so many "legitimate" princes, into giving up Bohemia — which the king considered had twice been conquered by the Hohenzollems — and into the acceptance of the imperial crown. The king, on great occasions, has always yielded to the genius of his subject, but the struggle has often been severe, and Prince Bismarck, though always loyal, must have chafed fiercely from time to time under a restraint which, by keeping down his natural ύβρις and tendency to impulse, and by forcing him to think out every plan, has probably been one element in his success. He has stated at least once that "the conceit of kings is limitless;" he has confessed openly in Parliament that he detests the arrangement of the Prussian ministry, under which every minister deals directly with the sovereign, and the premier has no constitutional supervision over all; he has declared his resolve not to work under a similar system in Germany, and now he appears confessing that he has even in the empire a battle to fight over many details of his administration. He was in 1872 and 1873 chancellor of the empire and head of the foreign office, yet he sent in "reports" to the king, he himself being at Varzin, which are really complaints that he could not remove an ambassador to Paris whom he utterly distrusted. Whether he had grounds for distrusting Count Arnim or not, whether his furious charges were libels, as Count Arnim's friends would say, or are statements necessary to the conduct of serious business, as the chancellor's friends would say, or are, as we should be inclined to think, just objections exaggerated, and so to speak, poisoned, by personal hatred and contempt, will never be known while the emperor lives, and is not our point to-day. What is certain is that the all-powerful chancellor distrusted and hated his most important agent, distrusted him till he suspected him of grave suppressions of facts, hated him till he accused him of a character for habitual untruthfulness, and still was obliged to keep him on. He might, no doubt, have sent in his resignation, but then the king might have accepted it, and to a man brimming with a consciousness of exceptional competence for great affairs, and bursting with plans for the future, that risk may well have seemed too great to be ​endured. Hohenzollerns are not constitutional emperors, either in fact or by law — the German constitution containing no clause making ministers responsible only to Parliament — and the emperor might not always bear with resignations intended to limit his prerogative. At all events, without resignation there was no removing Count Arnim, and the great chancellor admits himself to have been as annoyed, and limited, and overstrained by the difificulties of the imperial closet, as ever Richelieu was by the still unexplained character of Louis XIII., who, like the Emperor William, had the faculty of recognizing men. He has, as he murmurs, "actually to compete" with Count Arnim for the confidence of his sovereign. That the prince is over-jealous, over-suspicious, and does not quite understand the character of his sovereign, who we take to be a man quite incapable of making a mistake as to the comparative value of the two men, though not disinclined to retain instruments whom the chancellor dreads, is little to the purpose. The fact remains, that the German chancellor felt himself hampered, to the extent of threatening to resign, by a trouble which never became patent to the public.
The incident brings out in the strongest light one immense executive embarrassment, which exists in all those despotisms or "strong monarchies" which are supposed to work in all executive departments so smoothly. If the monarch is not himself his own prime minister, the premier under an "independent" monarch has to encounter a difficulty at least as great and absorbing as that of conciliating or convincing Parliament. He has to retain his ascendancy over a sovereign who may not have quite the same objects, who is necessarily his inferior in political genius, and who is bound by his position to keep his eye steadily fixed on men who may be fit on a vacancy for the premiership. When such a man appears, the monarch must protect him, or must leave himself virtually without alternative premiers, — that is, must surrender his own independence to the "necessary" premier of the hour. This protection inspires jealousy, and suspicion once excited, the course of government is at once impeded by a palace-struggle scarcely to be distinguished from an intrigue. In Russia, where the czar is really absolute, and can dismiss a chancellor by a nod, the personal struggle is a grand difficulty of government, and frequently affects the policy of the State. The czar must have his alternative man, and the instinct of the premier in office is not to allow that man to show himself too successful. If rumour may be trusted, the Bismarck-Arnim quarrel exists in Russia between Prince Gortschakoff and General Ignatieff, ambassador at Constantinople, and the policy of both is constantly affected by the necessity each feels of not putting the other too much in the right. Ignatieff can neither coincide with the chancellor nor disobey him — for either course would leave the chancellor master of the field — and Gortschakoff can neither support his ambassador nor remove him, for either course might bring him to St. Petersburg as the emperor's adlatus. Germany is not an autocracy, but the emperor, partly from his legal position, partly from the traditionary respect paid to him by all Prussians, and partly from his own force of character, which is much greater than his intellectual insight into affairs, holds a position which renders his favour all-important even to Prince Bismarck, and makes victory in his closet at least as essential and exhausting as victory in Parliament is to a British premier. The full advantages of personal government are not reaped except in the rare cases in which the man with hereditary rights is also the man most competent to govern. In Germany they are not reaped at all, except in those extreme cases in which the sovereign, feeling the momentary superiority of his man of genius, effaces himself, and accepts for the time the role of his own premier's chief administrator. In ordinary times, the situation only produces collisions in which the man of genius, even if not beaten, finds his strength wasted; or, as Prince Bismarck in this case has done, voluntarily wastes it himself on what is no better than an intrigue. He has not the resource of the statesman in a free country of flinging himself openly on Parliament, and is compelled to seek his support indirectly by bills, such as the present one for the modification of t!ie penal code. No doubt he is seeking it, and it is this, we imagine, which the National Liberals have seen, and which is the cause of the great effect produced on them by the publication of the reports. They think that Prince Bismarck is fighting, consciously or unconsciously, their battle, that he is maintaining the power of the removable premier against that of the irremovable sovereign, and are disposed to let him strengthen his own hands in his own way, — that is, to enable liini to prosecute a diplomatist for a disobedience ​which the emperor might overlook. They are purchasing a temporary victory at a terrible price — that of destroying the independence and frankness of the German diplomatic service — but still their course becomes partially intelligible. What remains unexplained, and we suspect inexplicable, is the dread which a man so exceptional as the prince, so full of confidence in himself, and so popular with the people, evidently feels of a rival who, whatever his powers, has no hold on the country, and who palpably lacks the discretion which is the necessary armour for such a war.