ue who had been in Vienna during the siege.
Beust condemned it as a political blunder. "No, you are wrong," said
Bismarck; "when I have my enemy in my power I must destroy him."

The event fully justified Bismarck's forecast that nothing was required
but courage and resolution. After Brandenburg had been appointed
Minister, the Prussian troops under Wrangel again entered Berlin, a
state of siege was proclaimed, the Assembly was ordered to adjourn to
Brandenburg; they refused and were at once ejected from their
meeting-place, and as a quorum was not found at Brandenburg, were
dissolved. The Crown then of its own authority published a new
Constitution and summoned a new Assembly to discuss and ratify it. Based
on the discipline of the army the King had regained his authority
without the loss of a single life.

Bismarck stood for election in this new Assembly, for he could accept
the basis on which it had been summoned; he took his seat for the
district of the West Havel in which the old city of Brandenburg, the
original capital of the Mark, was situated. He had come forward as an
opponent of the Revolution. "Everyone," he said in his election address,
"must support the Government in the course they have taken of combating
the Revolution which threatens us all." "No transaction with the
Revolution," was the watchword proposed in the manifesto of his party.
He appealed to the electors as one who would direct all his efforts to
restore the old bond of confidence between Crown and people. He kept his
promise. In this Assembly the Extreme Left was still the predominant
party; in an address to the Crown they asked that the state of siege at
Berlin should be raised, and that an amnesty to those who had fought on
the 18th of March should be proclaimed. Bismarck did not yet think that
the time for forgiveness had come; the struggle was indeed not yet over.
He opposed the first demand because, as he said, there was more danger
to liberty of debate from the armed mob than there was from the Prussian
soldiers. In one of the most careful of his speeches he opposed the
amnesty. "Amnesty," he said, "was a right of the Crown, not of the
Assembly"; moreover the repeated amnesties were undermining in the
people the feeling of law; the opinion was being spread about that the
law of the State rested on the barricades, that everyone who disliked a
law or considered it unjust had the right to consider it as
non-existent. Who that has read the