his comrade; it is
easy to forget the conspiracy of opposition of the three women of the
court, the Crown Princess, Frau von Blumenthal, and Frau von Gottberg,
all of English birth, and all using needles against this man
accustomed to the Schlaeger and the sword; it is easy to forget that
even Queen Victoria's influence was used against him to prevent the
reaping of the justifiable fruits of victory in 1871; it is easy to
forget what a bold throw it was to go to war with Austria, and to
array Prussia against the very German states she must later bind to
herself; it is easy to forget the dour patience of this irascible
giant with the petulant and often petty legislature with which he had
to deal.

I cannot understand how any German can criticise Bismarck, but there
are official prigs who do; little decorated bureaucrats who live their
lives out poring over papers, with an eye out for a "von" before their
bourgeois names, and as void of audacity as a sheep; men who creep up
the stairway to promotion and recognition, clinging with cautious grip
to the banisters. One sees them, their coats covered with the ceramic
insignia of their placid servitude, decorations tossed to them by the
careless hand of a master who is satisfied if they but sign his
decrees, with the i's properly dotted, and the t's unexceptionably
crossed. They are the crumply officials who melted into
defencelessness and moral decrepitude after Frederick the Great, and
again at the glance of Napoleon, and who owe the little stiffness they
have to the fact that Bismarck lived. It is one of the things a
full-blooded man is least able to bear in Germany, to hear the querulous
questioning of the great deeds of this man, whose boot-legs were
stiffer than the backbones of those who decry him.

What a splendid fellow he was!

"Give me the spirit that, on this life's rough sea,
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble and his masts do crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is -- there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law."

He was no worshipper of that flimsy culture which is, and has been for
a hundred years, an obsession of the German. He knew, none knew better
indeed, that the choicest knowledge is only mitigated ignorance. He
surprised Disra