policy was then less severely criticised
than his domestic, which was alternate success and failure.

The war which he waged with the spiritual power was perhaps the most
important event of his administration, and in which he had not
altogether his own way, underrating, as is natural to such a man,
spiritual forces as compared with material. In his memorable quarrel
with Rome he appeared to the least advantage,--at first rigid, severe,
and arbitrary with the Catholic clergy, even to persecution, driving
away the Jesuits (1872), shutting up schools and churches, imprisoning
and fining ecclesiastical dignitaries, intolerant in some cases as the
Inquisition itself. One-fourth of the people of the empire are
Catholics, yet he sternly sought to suppress their religious rights and
liberties as they regarded them, thinking he could control them by
material penalties,--such as taking away their support, and shutting
them up in prison,--forgetting that conscientious Christians, whether
Catholics or Protestants, will in matters of religion defy the mightiest
rulers. No doubt the policy of the Catholics of Germany was extremely
irritating to a despotic ruler who would exalt the temporal over the
spiritual power; and equally true was it that the Pope himself was
unyielding in regard to the liberties of his church, demanding
everything and giving back nothing, in accordance with the uniform
traditions of Papal domination. The Catholics, the world over, look upon
the education of their children as a thing to be superintended by their
own religious teachers,--as their inalienable right and imperative duty;
and any State interference with this right and this duty they regard as
religious persecution, to which they will never submit without hostility
and relentless defiance. Bismarck felt that to concede to the demands
which the Catholic clergy ever have made in respect to religious
privileges was to "go to Canossa,"--where Henry IV. Emperor of Germany,
in 1077, humiliated himself before Pope Gregory VII. in order to gain
absolution. The long-sighted and experienced Thiers remarked that here
Bismarck was on the wrong track, and would be compelled to retreat,
with all his power. Bismarck was too wise a man to persist in attempting
impossibilities, and after a bitter fight he became conciliatory. He did
not "go to Canossa," but he yielded to the dictates of patriotism and
enlightened policy, and the quarrel was patched up.

His long stru