hus Bismarck, of all living men the most unlikely to
succeed in the race after a world-wide popularity, is probably at this
moment the best-liked man in either hemisphere.

His own countrymen have shown a decided indisposition to admit him among
their household gods. To them he was, from the commencement of his
political career, the very embodiment of what had gradually become the
most objectionable type of Teuton existence--the unmitigated squireen or
Junker, with his poverty and arrogance, with his hunger and thirst
after position and good living, with his hatred for the upstart liberal
burgher class. "Away with the cities! I hope I may yet live to see them
levelled to the ground." Is there not a ring of many centuries of social
strife, so laboriously kept down by the reigning dynasty, in these
stupendous words, which were pronounced by Bismarck in 1847, when among
the leaders of the conservatives in the first embryo parliament of the
Prussian monarchy? And if uncongenial to the generation of Prussians
among whom he had grown up, how infinitely greater was the dislike
against him of South Germans, more gifted, as a rule, by nature, to whom
the name of Prussian is synonymous of all that is strait-laced and
overweening and unnatural and--generally inconvenient.

Little of that sentiment remains among the Germans of the present day.
Such strangers as have had the opportunity of observing the attitude of
the nation during the late celebration of his seventieth birthday, agree
in declaring them to have been spontaneous, enthusiastic, and at times
almost aggressive. Some tell us, to be sure, that the farther from
Berlin the more gushing has been the ecstasy. The electors of Professor
Virchow and of Herr Loewe, in whose electoral districts a torchlight
procession on the eve of Bismarck's birthday had to elbow its way
through immense crowds, must have kept at home. The municipality of
Berlin, a model body of civic administrators, sent a birthday letter to
their "honorary citizen," but abstained, with proper self-respect, from
tendering their congratulations through a deputation. No Berlin citizen
of any importance had a hand in the management of the procession. Yet,
if thousands kept aloof, tens of thousands shared the national
enthusiasm--students of universities chiefly, but older men too, even in
distrustful, radical Berlin. And as for South Germany, where the gospel
of protection seems, perhaps, to be more firmly believed