fer to Prussia as an example of the
success of social legislation. The state ownership of railroads, old-age
pensions, accident and sickness insurance, and the like are one
thing in Prussia which is a close corporation, and quite another in
any community or country under democratic government. What takes place
in Prussia would certainly not take place in America or in England. To
draw inferences from a state governed as is Prussia, for application
to such democratic communities as America or England, is as valuable
as to argue from the habits of birds, that such and such a treatment
would succeed with fish.

It was with this autocratic Prussia at his back, that the greatest man
Germany has produced, succeeded in bringing about German unity and the
foundation of the German Empire. As the representative of Prussia in
the Diet, as her ambassador to Russia, and to France, he gained the
insight into the European situation which led him to hold as his
political creed, that only by blood and iron, and not by declamations
and resolutions, could Germany be united.

"During the time I was in office," he writes, "I advised three wars,
the Danish, the Bohemian, and the French; but every time I have first
made clear to myself whether the war, if successful, would bring a
prize of victory worth the sacrifices which every war requires, and
which now are so much greater than in the last century. ... I have
never looked at international quarrels which can only be settled by a
national war from the point of view of the Goettingen student code; ...
but I have always considered simply their reaction on the claim of
the German people, in equality with the other great states and powers
of Europe, to lead an autonomous political life, so far as is possible
on the basis of our peculiar national capacity." In 1863 he writes to
von der Goltz, then German ambassador in Paris: "The question is
whether we are a great power or a state in the German federation, and
whether we are conformably to the former quality to be governed by a
monarch, or, as in the latter case would be at any rate admissible, by
professors, district judges, and the gossips of the small towns. The
pursuit of the phantom of popularity in Germany which we have been
carrying on for the last forty years has cost us our position in
Germany and in Europe; and we shall not win this back again by
allowing ourselves to be carried away by the stream in the persuasion
that we are direct