nglish are countermarching, and will
take up their former ground,--if they have not already taken it,--that
on which they stood when their Parliament thanked Bluecher and his
Prussians for helping Wellington and his Britons strike down Napoleon
and the French. Prussia now means a united Germany, to be ruled by the
house of Hohenzollern, whose head is an old king of threescore and ten
years, and who must, in the regular course of things, soon be displaced
by a bold young prince, whose brows are thickly covered with laurels
gathered on the field of Sadowa, and whose wife is the eldest child of
Queen Victoria. Why should not Protestant England rejoice with
Protestant Prussia, and see her successes with gladness? Sure enough;
and English joy over the prodigious Prussian triumph of last summer
ought to be the most natural thing in the world. But we cannot forget
what was the color of English opinion down to the time when it was
demonstrated by the logic of cannon that the Prussian cause was
perfectly pure, and that it was to fly in the face of Providence to
question its excellence. If ever a man was hated in England, Count
Bismarck had the honor of being thus hated. And it was an honor; for
next to the love of a great people, their hatred is the best evidence of
a man's greatness. Napoleon in 1807 was not more detested by Englishmen
than Bismarck in 1866. The obnoxious Prussian statesman was not even
respected, for he had done nothing to command the respect of enemies.
From the tone in which he was talked of, it was plain that the English
considered him to be a mischievous, malicious, elfish sort of creature,
who could not do anything that would deserve to be considered great, but
who did his utmost to make himself and his country the nuisances of
Europe. Books have been made from English journals to show how
extraordinarily they berated this country during the Secession war,
because Americans were so brutally perverse and so selfishly silly as
not to submit their country's throat to the Southern sabre for the
benefit of Britain, which condescends to think that our national
existence is something not altogether compatible with her safety. But a
collection made from the same journals of articles assailing Prussia in
general, and Count Bismarck in particular, would be even richer than
anything that has been collected to show English sympathy with gentlemen
who were fighting valiantly to establish that "better kind of
civilizati