pugnant petitioner to a second ballot. But the
Chancellor will be completely undeceived; he possesses no
qualifications whatever for the position he has chosen. An orator, a
great orator, he one day failed to keep his pledged word, and the
apostate word condemns him to never regain the executive power through
its intervention. In the sessions of parliament he will resemble the
plucked and cackling hen thrown by the Sophists into Socrates'
lecture-room. The admired Heine, so fertile in genial ideas,
represented the gods of Phidias and Plato, besides being downfallen
and vagabond, selling rabbit skins on the seashore, and being forced
to light brushwood fires by which to warm their benumbed bodies during
the winter nights. To-day the writers, salaried by Bismarck, known as
reptiles, now turn on him, for a similar salary, the venomous fangs
which he formerly aimed at his innumerable enemies. And yonder, in the
parliament where formerly he strode in with sabre, and belt, and
spurred boots, a helmet under his arm, a cuirass on his breast, he
will now enter like a chicken-hearted charity-school boy, and that
assembly which he formerly whipped with a strong hand, like
school-boys, laughed at and caricatured in often brutal sarcasm,
ridiculed at every instant, ignored in the calculation of the budget
and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and
dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like
the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and
eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in
Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon.

IV.

In few statesmen has it been seen so clearly as in the case of the
Chancellor that no great man can make himself greater than a great
idea. Opposed to the Germanic union in the commencement of its
creative period, at the time of the revolution of '48, he accepted it
much later, not so much of his own initiative and free will as in
obedience to the teachings of unpleasant experiences. Between his
anti-union and almost feudal speeches which softened the disaster of
Olmutz, and his conversion, more than fourteen years ensued, the whole
space of time which extended from the dawn of the revolution to the
triumph of Italy. In that conversion lay the veritable glory of his
life, and he proved therein, by successive and tardy gradations, that
he could tenaciously avail himself of his courage, and lead up to the
triumph