A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878 Part 52

[Fall of Ancona, Sept. 25.]

As soon as it had become evident that the entry of Garibaldi into Naples could not be antic.i.p.ated by the establishment of Victor Emmanuel's own authority, Cavour recognised that bold and aggressive action on the part of the National Government was now necessity. Garibaldi made no secret or his intention to carry the Italian arms to Rome. The time was past when the national movement could be checked at the frontiers of Naples and Tuscany.

It remained only for Cavour to throw the King's own troops into the Papal States before Garibaldi could move from Naples, and, while winning for Italy the last foot of ground that could be won without an actual conflict with France, to stop short at those limits where the soldiers of Napoleon would certainly meet an invader with their fire. The Pope was still in possession of the Marches, of Umbria, and of the territory between the Apennines and the coast from Orvieto to Terracina. Cavour had good reason to believe that Napoleon would not strike on behalf of the Temporal Power until this last narrow district was menaced. He resolved to seize upon the Marches and Umbria, and to brave the consequences. On the day of Garibaldi's entry into Naples a despatch was sent by Cavour to the Papal Government requiring, in the name of Victor Emmanuel, the disbandment of the foreign mercenaries who in the previous spring had plundered Perugia, and whose presence was a continued menace to the peace of Italy. The announcement now made by Napoleon that he must break off diplomatic relations with the Sardinian Government in case of the invasion of the Papal States produced no effect. Cavour replied that by no other means could he prevent revolution from mastering all Italy, and on the 10th of September the French amba.s.sador quitted Turin. Without waiting for Antonelli's answer to his ultimatum, Cavour ordered the King's troops to cross the frontier. The Papal army was commanded by Lamoriciere, a French general who had gained some reputation in Algiers; but the resistance offered to the Piedmontese was unexpectedly feeble. The column which entered Umbria reached the southern limit without encountering any serious opposition except from the Irish garrison of Spoleto. In the Marches, where Lamoriciere had a considerable force at his disposal, the dispersion of the Papal troops and the incapacity shown in their command brought the campaign to a rapid and inglorious end. The main body of the defenders was routed on the Musone, near Loreto, on the 19th of September. Other divisions surrendered, and Ancona alone remained to Lamoriciere. Vigorously attacked in this fortress both by land and sea, Lamoriciere surrendered after a siege of eight days. Within three weeks from Garibaldi's entry into Naples the Piedmontese army had completed the task imposed upon it, and Victor Emmanuel was master of Italy as far as the Abruzzi.

[Cavour, Garibaldi, and the Party of Action.]

Cavour's successes had not come a day too soon, for Garibaldi, since his entry into Naples, was falling more and more into the hands of the Party of Action, and, while protesting his loyalty to Victor Emmanuel, was openly announcing that he would march the Party of on Rome whether the King's Government permitted it or no. In Sicily the officials appointed by this Party were proceeding with such violence that Depretis, unable to obtain troops from Cavour, resigned his post. Garibaldi suddenly appeared at Palermo on the 11th of September, appointed a new Pro-Dictator, and repeated to the Sicilians that their union with the Kingdom of Victor Emmanuel must be postponed until all members of the Italian family were free. But even the personal presence and the angry words of Garibaldi were powerless to check the strong expression of Sicilian opinion in favour of immediate and unconditional annexation. His visit to Palermo was answered by the appearance of a Sicilian deputation at Turin demanding immediate union, and complaining that the island was treated by Garibaldi's officers like a conquered province. At Naples the rash and violent utterances of the Dictator were equally condemned. The Ministers whom he had himself appointed resigned. Garibaldi replaced them by others who were almost Republicans, and sent a letter to Victor Emmanuel requesting him to consent to the march upon Rome and to dismiss Cavour. It was known in Turin that at this very moment Napoleon was taking steps to increase the French force in Rome, and to garrison the whole of the territory that still remained to the Pope. Victor Emmanuel understood how to reply to Garibaldi's letter. He remained true to his Minister, and sent orders to Villamarina at Naples in case Garibaldi should proclaim the Republic to break off all relations with him and to secure the fleet. The fall of Ancona on September 28th brought a timely accession of popularity and credit to Cavour. He made the Parliament which a.s.sembled at Turin four days later arbiter in the struggle between Garibaldi and himself, and received from it an almost unanimous vote of confidence. Garibaldi would perhaps have treated lightly any resolution of Parliament which conflicted with his own opinion: he shrank from a breach with the soldier of Novara and Solferino. Now, as at other moments of danger, the character and reputation of Victor Emmanuel stood Italy in good stead. In the enthusiasm which Garibaldi's services to Italy excited in every patriotic heart, there was room for thankfulness that Italy possessed a sovereign and a statesman strong enough even to withstand its hero when his heroism endangered the national cause. [501]

[The armies on the Volturno.]

[Meeting of Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, Oct. 26.]

[Fall of Gaeta, Feb. 14, 1861.]

The King of Naples had not yet abandoned the hope that one or more of the European Powers would intervene in his behalf. The trustworthy part of his army had gathered round the fortress of Capua on the Volturno, and there were indications that Garibaldi would here meet with far more serious resistance than he had yet encountered. While he was still in Naples, his troops, which had pushed northwards, sustained a repulse at Cajazzo.

Emboldened by this success, the Neapolitan army at the beginning of October a.s.sumed the offensive. It was with difficulty that Garibaldi, placing himself again at the head of his forces, drove the enemy back to Capua. But the arms of Victor Emmanuel were now thrown into the scale. Crossing the Apennines, and driving before him the weak force that was intended to bar his way at Isernia, the King descended in the rear of the Neapolitan army.

The Bourbon commander, warned of his approach, moved northwards on the line of the Garigliano, leaving a garrison to defend Capua. Garibaldi followed on his track, and in the neighbourhood of Teano met King Victor Emmanuel (October 26th). The meeting is said to have been cordial on the part of the King, reserved on the part of Garibaldi, who saw in the King's suite the men by whom he had been prevented from invading the Papal States in the previous year. In spite of their common patriotism the volunteers of Garibaldi and the army of Victor Emmanuel were rival bodies, and the relations between the chiefs of each camp were strained and difficult.

Garibaldi himself returned to the siege of Capua, while the King marched northwards against the retreating Neapolitans. All that was great in Garibaldi's career was now in fact accomplished. The politicians about him had attempted at Naples, as in Sicily, to postpone the union with Victor Emmanuel's monarchy, and to convoke a Southern Parliament which should fix the conditions on which annexation would be permitted; but, after discrediting the General, they had been crushed by public opinion, and a popular vote which was taken at the end of October on the question of immediate union showed the majority in favour of this course to be overwhelming. After the surrender of Capua on the 2nd of November, Victor Emmanuel made his entry into Naples. Garibaldi, whose request for the Lieutenancy of Southern Italy for the s.p.a.ce of a year with full powers was refused by the King, [502] declined all minor honours and rewards, and departed to his home, still filled with resentment against Cavour, and promising his soldiers that he would return in the spring and lead them to Rome and Venice. The reduction of Gaeta, where King Francis II. had taken refuge, and of the citadel of Messina, formed the last act of the war. The French fleet for some time prevented the Sardinians from operating against Gaeta from the sea, and the siege in consequence made slow progress. It was not until the middle of January, 1861, that Napoleon permitted the French admiral to quit his station. The bombardment was now opened both by land and sea, and after a brave resistance Gaeta surrendered on the 14th of February. King Francis and his young Queen, a sister of the Empress of Austria, were conveyed in a French steamer to the Papal States, and there began their life-long exile. The citadel of Messina, commanded by one of the few Neapolitan officers who showed any soldierly spirit, maintained its obstinate defence for a month after the Bourbon flag had disappeared from the mainland.

[Cavour's policy with regard to Rome and Venice.]

[The Free Church in the Free State.]

Thus in the spring of 1861, within two years from the outbreak of war with Austria, Italy with the exception of Rome and Venice was united under Victor Emmanuel. Of all the European Powers, Great Britain alone watched the creation of the new Italian Kingdom with complete sympathy and approval. Austria, though it had made peace at Zurich, declined to renew diplomatic intercourse with Sardinia, and protested against the a.s.sumption by Victor Emmanuel of the t.i.tle of King of Italy. Russia, the ancient patron of the Neapolitan Bourbons, declared that geographical conditions alone prevented its intervention against their despoilers. Prussia, though under a new sovereign, had not yet completely severed the ties which bound it to Austria. Nevertheless, in spite of wide political ill-will, and of the pa.s.sionate hostility of the clerical party throughout Europe, there was little probability that the work of the Italian people would be overthrown by external force. The problem which faced Victor Emmanuel's Government was not so much the frustration of reactionary designs from without as the determination of the true line of policy to be followed in regard to Rome and Venice. There were few who, like Azeglio, held that Rome might be permanently left outside the Italian Kingdom; there were none who held this of Venice. Garibaldi might be mad enough to hope for victory in a campaign against Austria and against France at the head of such a troop as he himself could muster; Cavour would have deserved ill of his country if he had for one moment countenanced the belief that the force which had overthrown the Neapolitan Bourbons could with success, or with impunity to Italy, measure itself against the defenders of Venetia or of Rome. Yet the mind of Cavour was not one which could rest in mere pa.s.sive expectancy as to the future, or in mere condemnation of the unwise schemes of others. His intelligence, so luminous, so penetrating, that in its utterances we seem at times to be listening to the very spirit of the age, ranged over wide fields of moral and of spiritual interests in its forecast of the future of Italy, and spent its last force in one of those prophetic delineations whose breadth and power the world can feel, though a later time alone can judge of their correspondence with the destined course of history. Venice was less to Europe than Rome; its transfer to Italy would, Cavour believed, be effected either by arms or negotiations so soon as the German race should find a really national Government, and refuse the service which had hitherto been exacted from it for the maintenance of Austrian interests. It was to Prussia, as the representative of nationality in Germany, that Cavour looked as the natural ally of Italy in the vindication of that part of the national inheritance which still lay under the dominion of the Hapsburg. Rome, unlike Venice, was not only defended by foreign arms, it was the seat of a Power whose empire over the mind of man was not the sport of military or political vicissitudes. Circ.u.mstances might cause France to relax its grasp on Rome, but it was not to such an accident that Cavour looked for the incorporation of Rome with Italy. He conceived that the time would arrive when the Catholic world would recognise that the Church would best fulfil its task in complete separation from temporal power. Rome would then a.s.sume its natural position as the centre of the Italian State; the Church would be the n.o.blest friend, not the misjudging enemy, of the Italian national monarchy. Cavour's own religious beliefs were perhaps less simple than he chose to represent them. Occupying himself, however, with inst.i.tutions, not with dogmas, he regarded the Church in profound earnestness as a humanising and elevating power. He valued its independence so highly that even on the suppression of the Piedmontese monasteries he had refused to give to the State the administration of the revenue arising from the sale of their lands, and had formed this into a fund belonging to the Church itself, in order that the clergy might not become salaried officers of the State. Human freedom was the principle in which he trusted; and looking upon the Church as the greatest a.s.sociation formed by men, he believed that here too the rule of freedom, of the absence of State-regulation, would in the end best serve man's highest interests. With the pa.s.sing away of the Pope's temporal power, Cavour imagined that the const.i.tution of the Church itself would become more democratic, more responsive to the movement of the modern world. His own effort in ecclesiastical reform had been to improve the condition and to promote the independence of the lower clergy. He had hoped that each step in their moral and material progress would make them more national at heart; and though this hope had been but partially fulfilled, Cavour had never ceased to cherish the ideal of a national Church which, while recognising its Head in Rome, should cordially and without reserve accept the friends.h.i.+p of the Italian State. [503]

[Death of Cavour, June 6, 1861.]

[Free Church in Free State.]

It was in the exposition of these principles, in the enforcement of the common moral interest of Italian nationality and the Catholic Church, that Cavour gave his last counsels to the Italian Parliament. He was not himself to lead the nation farther towards the Promised Land. The immense exertions which he had maintained during the last three years, the indignation and anxiety caused to him by Garibaldi's attacks, produced an illness which Cavour's own careless habits of life and the unskilfulness of his doctors rendered fatal. With dying lips he repeated to those about him the words in which he had summed up his policy in the Italian Parliament: "A free Church in a free State." [504] Other Catholic lands had adjusted by Concordats with the Papacy the conflicting claims of temporal and spiritual authority in such matters as the appointment of bishops, the regulation of schools, the family-rights of persons married without ecclesiastical form. Cavour appears to have thought that in Italy, where the whole nation was in a sense Catholic, the Church might as safely and as easily be left to manage its own affairs as in the United States, where the Catholic community is only one among many religious societies. His optimism, his sanguine and large-hearted tolerance, was never more strikingly shown than in this fidelity to the principle of liberty, even in the case of those who for the time declined all reconciliation with the Italian State. Whether Cavour's ideal was an impracticable fancy a later age will decide. The ascendency within the Church of Rome would seem as yet to have rested with the elements most opposed to the spirit of the time, most obstinately bent on setting faith and reason in irreconcilable enmity. In place of that democratic movement within the hierarchy and the priesthood which Cavour antic.i.p.ated, absolutism has won a new crown in the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Catholic dogma has remained impervious to the solvents which during the last thirty years have operated with perceptible success on the theology of Protestant lands. Each conquest made in the world of thought and knowledge is still noted as the next appropriate object of denunciation by the Vatican. Nevertheless the cautious spirit will be slow to conclude that hopes like those of Cavour were wholly vain. A single generation may see but little of the seed-time, nothing of the harvests that are yet to enrich mankind. And even if all wider interests be left out of view, enough remains to justify Cavour's policy of respect for the independence of the Church in the fact that Italy during the thirty years succeeding the establishment of its union has remained free from civil war. Cavour was wont to refer to the Const.i.tution which the French National a.s.sembly imposed upon the clergy in 1790 as the type of erroneous legislation. Had his own policy and that of his successors not been animated by a wiser spirit; had the Government of Italy, after overthrowing the Pope's temporal sovereignty, sought enemies among the rural priesthood and their congregations, the provinces added to the Italian Kingdom by Garibaldi would hardly have been maintained by the House of Savoy without a second and severer struggle. Between the ideal Italy which filled the thoughts not only of Mazzini but of some of the best English minds of that time--the land of immemorial greatness, touched once more by the divine hand and advancing from strength to strength as the intellectual and moral pioneer among nations--between this ideal and the somewhat hard and commonplace realities of the Italy of to-day there is indeed little enough resemblance.

Poverty, the pressure of inordinate taxation, the physical and moral habits inherited from centuries of evil government,--all these have darkened in no common measure the conditions from which Italian national life has to be built up. If in spite of overwhelming difficulties each crisis has. .h.i.therto been surmounted; if, with all that is faulty and infirm, the omens for the future of Italy are still favourable, one source of its good fortune has been the impress given to its ecclesiastical policy by the great statesman to whom above all other men it owes the accomplishment of its union, and who, while claiming for Italy the whole of its national inheritance, yet determined to inflict no needless wound upon the conscience of Rome.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Germany after 1858--The Regency in Prussia--Army re-organisation--King William I.--Conflict between the Crown and the Parliament--Bismarck--The struggle continued--Austria from 1859--The October Diploma--Resistance of Hungary--The Reichsrath--Russia under Alexander II.--Liberation of the Serfs--Poland--The Insurrection of 1863--Agrarian measures in Poland--Schleswig-Holstein--Death of Frederick VII.--Plans of Bismarck--Campaign in Schleswig--Conference of London--Treaty of Vienna--England and Napoleon III.--Prussia and Austria--Convention of Gastein--Italy--Alliance of Prussia with Italy--Proposals for a Congress fail--War between Austria and Prussia--Napoleon III.--Koniggratz-- Custozza-Mediation of Napoleon--Treaty of Prague--South Germany--Projects for compensation to France--Austria and Hungary--Deak--Establishment of the Dual System in Austria-Hungary.

[Germany from 1858.]

[The Regency in Prussia, Oct. 1858.]

Shortly before the events which broke the power of Austria in Italy, the German people believed themselves to have entered on a new political era.

King Frederick William IV., who, since 1848, had disappointed every hope that had been fixed on Prussia and on himself, was compelled by mental disorder to withdraw from public affairs in the autumn of 1858. His brother, Prince William of Prussia, who had for a year acted as the King's representative, now a.s.sumed the Regency. In the days when King Frederick William still retained some vestiges of his reputation the Prince of Prussia had been unpopular, as the supposed head of the reactionary party; but the events of the last few years had exhibited him in a better aspect.

Though strong in his belief both in the Divine right of kings in general, and in the necessity of a powerful monarchical rule in Prussia, he was disposed to tolerate, and even to treat with a certain respect, the humble elements of const.i.tutional government which he found in existence. There was more manliness in his nature than in that of his brother, more belief in the worth of his own people. The espionage, the servility, the overdone professions of sanct.i.ty in Manteuffel's regime displeased him, but most of all he despised its pusillanimity in the conduct of foreign affairs. His heart indeed was Prussian, not German, and the destiny which created him the first Emperor of united Germany was not of his own making nor of his own seeking; but he felt that Prussia ought to hold a far greater station both in Germany and in Europe than it had held during his brother's reign, and that the elevation of the State to the position which it ought to occupy was the task that lay before himself. During the twelve months preceding the Regency the retirement of the King had not been treated as more than temporary, and the Prince of Prussia, though constantly at variance with Manteuffel's Cabinet, had therefore not considered himself at liberty to remove his brother's advisers. His first act on the a.s.sumption of the const.i.tutional office of Regent was to dismiss the hated Ministry.

Prince Antony of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was called to office, and posts in the Government were given to men well known as moderate Liberals. Though the Regent stated in clear terms that he had no intention of forming a Liberal party-administration, his action satisfied public opinion. The troubles and the failures of 1849 had inclined men to be content with far less than had been asked years before. The leaders of the more advanced sections among the Liberals preferred for the most part to remain outside Parliamentary life rather than to cause embarra.s.sment to the new Government; and the elections of 1859 sent to Berlin a body of representatives fully disposed to work with the Regent and his Ministers in the policy of guarded progress which they had laid down.

[Revival of idea of German union.]

This change of spirit in the Prussian Government, followed by the events that established Italian independence, told powerfully upon public opinion throughout Germany. Hopes that had been crushed in 1849 now revived. With the collapse of military despotism in the Austrian Empire the clouds of reaction seemed everywhere to be pa.s.sing away; it was possible once more to think of German national union and of common liberties in which all Germans should share. As in 1808 the rising of the Spaniards against Napoleon had inspired Blucher and his countrymen with the design of a truly national effort against their foreign oppressor, so in 1859 the work of Cavour challenged the Germans to prove that their national patriotism and their political apt.i.tude were not inferior to those of the Italian people. Men who had been prominent in the National a.s.sembly at Frankfort again met one another and spoke to the nation. In the Parliaments of several of the minor States resolutions were brought forward in favour of the creation of a central German authority. Protests were made against the infringement of const.i.tutional rights that had been common during the last ten years; patriotic meetings and demonstrations were held; and a National Society, in imitation of that which had prepared the way for union with Piedmont in Central and Southern Italy, was formally established. There was indeed no such preponderating opinion in favour of Prussian leaders.h.i.+p as had existed in 1848. The southern States had displayed a strong sympathy with Austria in its war with Napoleon III., and had regarded the neutrality of Prussia during the Italian campaign as a desertion of the German cause. Here there were few who looked with friendly eye upon Berlin. It was in the minor states of the north, and especially in Hesse-Ca.s.sel, where the struggle between the Elector and his subjects was once more breaking out, that the strongest hopes were directed towards the new Prussian ruler, and the measures of his government were the most anxiously watched.

[The Regent of Prussia and the army.]

[Scheme of reorganisation.]

The Prince Regent was a soldier by profession and habit. He was born in 1797, and had been present at the battle of Arcis-sur-Aube, the last fought by Napoleon against the Allies in 1814. During forty years he had served on every commission that had been occupied with Prussian military affairs; no man better understood the military organisation of his country, no man more clearly recognised its capacities and its faults. The defective condition of the Prussian army had been the princ.i.p.al, though not the sole, cause of the miserable submission to Austria at Olmutz in 1850, and of the abandonment of all claims to German leaders.h.i.+p on the part of the Court of Berlin. The Prince would himself have risked all chances of disaster rather than inflict upon Prussia the humiliation with which King Frederick William then purchased peace; but Manteuffel had convinced his sovereign that the army could not engage in a campaign against Austria without ruin. Military impotence was the only possible justification for the policy then adopted, and the Prince determined that Prussia should not under his own rule have the same excuse for any political shortcomings. The work of reorganisation was indeed begun during the reign of Frederick William IV., through the enforcement of the three-years' service to which the conscript was liable by law, but which had fallen during the long period of peace to two-years'

service. The number of troops with the colours was thus largely increased, but no addition had been made to the yearly levy, and no improvement attempted in the organisation of the Landwehr. When in 1859 the order for mobilisation was given in consequence of the Italian war, it was discovered that the Landwehr battalions were almost useless. The members of this force were mostly married men approaching middle life, who had been too long engaged in other pursuits to resume their military duties with readiness, and whose call to the field left their families without means of support and chargeable upon the public purse. Too much, in the judgment of the reformers of the Prussian army, was required from men past youth, not enough from youth itself. The plan of the Prince Regent was therefore to enforce in the first instance with far more stringency the law imposing the universal obligation to military service; and, while thus raising the annual levy from 40,000 to 60,000 men, to extend the period of service in the Reserve, into which the young soldier pa.s.sed on the completion of his three years with the colours, from two to four years. a.s.serting with greater rigour its claim to seven years in the early life of the citizen, the State would gain, without including the Landwehr, an effective army of four hundred thousand men, and would practically be able to dispense with the service of those who were approaching middle life, except in cases of great urgency. In the execution of this reform the Government could on its own authority enforce the increased levy and the full three years' service in the standing army; for the prolongation of service in the Reserve, and for the greater expenditure entailed by the new system, the consent of Parliament was necessary.

[The Prussian Parliament and the army, 1859-1861.]

[Accession of King William, Jan., 1861.]

The general principles on which the proposed reorganisation was based were accepted by public opinion and by both Chambers of Parliament; it was, however, held by the Liberal leaders that the increase of expenditure might, without impairing the efficiency of the army, be avoided by returning to the system of two-years service with the colours, which during so long a period had been thought sufficient for the training of the soldier. The Regent, however, was convinced that the discipline and the instruction of three years were indispensable to the Prussian conscript, and he refused to accept the compromise suggested. The mobilisation of 1859 had given him an opportunity for forming additional battalions; and although the Landwehr were soon dismissed to their homes the new formation was retained, and the place of the retiring militiamen was filled by conscripts of the year. The Lower Chamber, in voting the sum required in 1860 for the increased numbers of the army, treated this arrangement as temporary, and limited the grant to one year; in spite of this the Regent, who on the death of his brother in January, 1861, became King of Prussia, formed the additional battalions into new regiments, and gave to these new regiments their names and colours. The year 1861 pa.s.sed without bringing the questions at issue between the Government and the Chamber of Deputies to a settlement. Public feeling, disappointed in the reserved and hesitating policy which was still followed by the Court in German affairs, stimulated too by the rapid consolidation of the Italian monarchy, which the Prussian Government on its part had as yet declined to recognise, was becoming impatient and resentful. It seemed as if the Court of Berlin still shrank from committing itself to the national cause. The general confidence reposed in the new ruler at his accession was pa.s.sing away; and when in the summer of 1861 the dissolution of Parliament took place, the elections resulted in the return not only of a Progressist majority, but of a majority little inclined to submit to measures of compromise, or to shrink from the a.s.sertion of its full const.i.tutional rights.

[First Parliament of 1862.]

[Dissolution, May, 1862.]

[Second Parliament of 1862.]

[Bismarck becomes Minister, Sept., 1862.]

The new Parliament a.s.sembled at the beginning of 1862. Under the impulse of public opinion, the Government was now beginning to adopt a more vigorous policy in German affairs, and to re-a.s.sert Prussia's claims to an independent leaders.h.i.+p in defiance of the restored Diet of Frankfort.

But the conflict with the Lower Chamber was not to be averted by revived energy abroad. The Army Bill, which was pa.s.sed at once by the Upper House, was referred to a hostile Committee on reaching the Chamber of Deputies, and a resolution was carried insisting on the right of the representatives of the people to a far more effective control over the Budget than they had hitherto exercised. The result of this vote was the dissolution of Parliament by the King, and the resignation of the Ministry, with the exception of General Roon, Minister of War, and two of the most conservative among his colleagues. Prince Hohenlohe, President of the Upper House, became chief of the Government. There was now an open and undisguised conflict between the Crown and the upholders of Parliamentary rights. "King or Parliament" was the expression in which the newly-appointed Ministers themselves summed up the struggle. The utmost pressure was exerted by the Government in the course of the elections which followed, but in vain. The Progressist Party returned in overwhelming strength to the new Parliament; the voice of the country seemed unmistakably to condemn the policy to which the King and his advisers were committed. After a long and sterile discussion in the Budget Committee, the debate on the Army Bill began in the Lower House on the 11th of September. Its princ.i.p.al clauses were rejected by an almost unanimous vote. An attempt made by General Roon to satisfy his opponents by a partial and conditional admission of the principle of two-years'

service resulted only in increased exasperation on both sides. Hohenlohe resigned, and the King now placed in power, at the head of a Ministry of conflict, the most resolute and unflinching of all his friends, the most contemptuous scorner of Parliamentary majorities, Herr von Bismarck. [505]

[Bismarck.]

The new Minister was, like Cavour, a country gentleman, and, like Cavour, he owed his real entry into public life to the revolutionary movement of 1848. He had indeed held some obscure official posts before that epoch, but it was as a member of the United Diet which a.s.sembled at Berlin in April, 1848, that he first attracted the attention of King or people. He was one of two Deputies who refused to join in the vote of thanks to Frederick William IV. for the Const.i.tution which he had promised to Prussia.

Bismarck, then thirty-three years old, was a Royalist of Royalists, the type, as it seemed, of the rough and masterful Junker, or Squire, of the older parts of Prussia, to whom all reforms from those of Stein downwards were hateful, all ideas but those of the barrack and the kennel alien.

Others in the spring of 1848 lamented the concessions made by the Crown to the people; Bismarck had the courage to say so. When reaction came there were naturally many, and among them King Frederick William, who were interested in the man who in the heyday of const.i.tutional enthusiasm had treated the whole movement as so much midsummer madness, and had remained faithful to monarchical authority as the one thing needful for the Prussian State. Bismarck continued to take a prominent part in the Parliaments of Berlin and Erfurt; it was not, however, till 1851 that he pa.s.sed into the inner official circle. He was then sent as the representative of Prussia to the restored Diet of Frankfort. As an absolutist and a conservative, brought up in the traditions of the Holy Alliance, Bismarck had in earlier days looked up to Austria as the mainstay of monarchical order and the historic barrier against the flood of democratic and wind-driven sentiment which threatened to deluge Germany. He had even approved the surrender made at Olmutz in 1850, as a matter of necessity; but the belief now grew strong in his mind, and was confirmed by all he saw at Frankfort, that Austria under Schwarzenberg's rule was no longer the Power which had been content to share the German leaders.h.i.+p with Prussia in the period before 1848, but a Power which meant to rule in Germany uncontrolled. In contact with the representatives of that outworn system which Austria had resuscitated at Frankfort, and with the instruments of the dominant State itself, Bismarck soon learnt to detest the paltriness of the one and the insolence of the other. He declared the so-called Federal system to be a mere device for employing the secondary German States for the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of Austria and the humiliation of Prussia. The Court of Vienna, and with it the Diet of Frankfort, became in his eyes the enemy of Prussian greatness and independence. During the Crimean war he was the vigorous opponent of an alliance with the Western Powers, not only from distrust of France, and from regard towards Russia as on the whole the most constant and the most natural ally of his own country, but from the conviction that Prussia ought to a.s.sert a national policy wholly independent of that of the Court of Vienna. That the Emperor of Austria was approaching more or less nearly to union with France and England was, in Bismarck's view, a good reason why Prussia should stand fast in its relations of friends.h.i.+p with St.

Petersburg. [506] The policy of neutrality, which King Frederick William and Manteuffel adopted more out of disinclination to strenuous action than from any clear political view, was advocated by Bismarck for reasons which, if they made Europe nothing and Prussia everything, were at least inspired by a keen and accurate perception of Prussia's own interests in its present and future relations with its neighbours. When the reign of Frederick William ended, Bismarck, who stood high in the confidence of the new Regent, was sent as amba.s.sador to St. Petersburg. He subsequently represented Prussia for a short time at the Court of Napoleon III., and was recalled by the King from Paris in the autumn of 1862 in order to be placed at the head of the Government. Far better versed in diplomacy than in ordinary administration, he a.s.sumed, together with the Presidency of the Cabinet, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

[Bismarck and the Lower Chamber, 1862.]

There were now at the head of the Prussian State three men eminently suited to work with one another, and to carry out, in their own rough and military fas.h.i.+on, the policy which was to unite Germany under the House of Hohenzollern. The King, Bismarck, and Roon were thoroughly at one in their aim, the enforcement of Prussia's ascendency by means of the army. The designs of the Minister, which expanded with success and which involved a certain daring in the choice of means, were at each new development so ably veiled or disclosed, so dexterously presented to the sovereign, as to overcome his hesitation on striking into many an unaccustomed path. Roon and his workmen, who, in the face of a hostile Parliament and a hostile Press, had to supply to Bismarck what a foreign alliance and enthusiastic national sentiment had supplied to Cavour, forged for Prussia a weapon of such temper that, against the enemies on whom it was employed, no extraordinary genius was necessary to render its thrust fatal. It was no doubt difficult for the Prime Minister, without alarming his sovereign and without risk of an immediate breach with Austria, to make his ulterior aims so clear as to carry the Parliament with him in the policy of military reorganisation. Words frank even to brutality were uttered by him, but they sounded more like menace and bl.u.s.ter than the explanation of a well-considered plan. "Prussia must keep its forces together," he said in one of his first Parliamentary appearances, "its boundaries are not those of a sound State. The great questions of the time are to be decided not by speeches and votes of majorities but by blood and iron." After the experience of 1848 and 1850, a not too despondent political observer might well have formed the conclusion that nothing less than the military overthrow of Austria could give to Germany any tolerable system of national government, or even secure to Prussia its legitimate field of action. This was the keystone of Bismarck's belief, but he failed to make his purpose and his motives intelligible to the representatives of the Prussian people.

He was taken for a mere bully and absolutist of the old type. His personal characteristics, his arrogance, his sarcasm, his habit of banter, exasperated and inflamed. Roon was no better suited to the atmosphere of a popular a.s.sembly. Each encounter of the Ministers with the Chamber embittered the struggle and made reconciliation more difficult. The Parliamentary system of Prussia seemed threatened in its very existence when, after the rejection by the Chamber of Deputies of the clause in the Budget providing for the cost of the army-reorganisation, this clause was restored by the Upper House, and the Budget of the Government pa.s.sed in its original form. By the terms of the Const.i.tution the right of the Upper House in matters of taxation was limited to the approval or rejection of the Budget sent up to it from the Chamber of Representatives. It possessed no power of amendment. Bismarck, however, had formed the theory that in the event of a disagreement between the two Houses a situation arose for which the Const.i.tution had not provided, and in which therefore the Crown was still possessed of its old absolute authority. No compromise, no negotiation between the two Houses, was, in his view, to be desired. He was resolved to govern and to levy taxes without a Budget, and had obtained the King's permission to close the session immediately the Upper House had given its vote. But before the order for prorogation could be brought down the President of the Lower Chamber had a.s.sembled his colleagues, and the unanimous vote of those present declared the action of the Upper House null and void. In the agitation attending this trial of strength between the Crown, the Ministry and the Upper House on one side and the Representative Chamber on the other the session of 1862 closed. [507]

[King William.]

[The conflict continued, 1863.]

[Measures against the Press.]

The Deputies, returning to their const.i.tuencies, carried with them the spirit of combat, and received the most demonstrative proofs of popular sympathy and support. Representations of great earnestness were made to the King, but they failed to shake in the slightest degree his confidence in his Minister, or to bend his fixed resolution to carry out his military reforms to the end. The claim of Parliament to interfere with matters of military organisation in Prussia touched him in his most sensitive point.