his own statecraft, and the
king, as he then was, had witnessed the Napoleonic wars.

[6] The heroic founder of the Bavarian monarchy, Otho of
Writtelsbach, was betrayed shamefully by his friend,
the Emperor Philip, of Suabia, and slew him for his
treachery. This is one of the oldest dramas on the
German stage.

Between the crown prince and Bismarck, however, there existed one
point of contact. Each was a _Deutsche Student_, and there, later on,
was to be found the true conversion of the chancellor to national
ideas.

As in every genuine lover of his country (and that Prince Bismarck
is), there lay latent in the famous "White Cuirassier" the same ideal
capacity of warlike action and intellectuality that so distinguished
Frederick II. No one understood better the complex son of Carlyle's
roystering barrack hero, no one knew in reality more deeply that the
ideas planted by him in men's minds were those of the majesty of
intelligence, of the royalty of humanity's brain power.

Count Bismarck proved his political foresight by the rapidity with
which he seized on the Schleswig-Holstein question as being the axis
on which turned the entire evolution (if ever it should be possible!)
of the imperial German unity. About that he hesitated not one moment.
He adopted the whole theory of Dahlmann, who alone spoke it out in
words in 1848-9, but he feared to plunge at one leap into the vortex
of his own threatening conclusions and tried for several years to
stave off the "pay day." He was somewhat slower to recognize the
identity of feeling through all the Germanic races, to realize the
equally strong vibration, the psychologic harmony quivering through
heart and soul from North to South, through the mysteriously hidden
dramas of fifteen hundred years. He believed himself a narrow
Particularist Borussian, a "Pomeranian Giant," and let a score of
years go by before clearly making out by touch that the strange change
of tonality, of sound, and significance that superposed the patriotism
of the South to that of the North was a mere inharmonic change, and
that according to the rotation of the two circles, each, in reality,
underlay the other in turn.

It would be a fatal mistake to imagine that M. von Bismarck allowed
himself to be led into the Danish campaign. He did nothing to bring it
about, but the instant it showed itself on the cards he took advantage
of it in the most predetermi