Unifying Influence of Germany’s Army

An appeal to fear,” said Bismarck once, “never found an echo in German hearts,” but an appeal to them about their armor ever had.

Continuing Consolidation of Germany,
our selection from Prince Bismarck by Charles Lowe. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Consolidation of Germany.

Time: 1881-1890
Place: Germany

During Roon’s interregnum, so to speak, as Prussian Premier, the Liberal Jewish deputy, Herr Lasker, delivered his famous philippics in the Chamber on the subject of malpractices in certain high places connected with railway concessions. The influx of the milliards had led to a period of feverish over-speculation in all fields of commerce and business enterprise; and this Gruender Era, as it was called, had led to the inevitable Krach (“crash”), with its accompanying ruin to purses and reputations. Some Opposition prints even made bold to insinuate that Bimarck himself had brought his influence to bear on the Minister of Commerce, Count Itzenplitz, in favor of Herr Wagener, his old and steadfast henchman of the Kreuz-Zeitung; but the Chancellor courted the most searching inquiry into the matter, and emerged from the ordeal without the faintest blot on his scutch eon. With all his unique opportunities for enriching himself on the Stock Exchange by his knowledge of State secrets, Bismarck had never yielded to the temptation to do so — or only once, as he confessed during the French War, and that was connected with the Neuchatel incident in 1857. But even then he had done so against the advice of the Frankfort Rothschilds, and lost heavily by the transaction.

The Gruender-Era scandals, however, resulted in the resignation of Count Itzenplitz, this being the first instance in the parliamentary history of Prussia where public opinion had forced the King to part with one of his Ministers. But the voice of scandal was not hushed even by this concession; and the Kreuz-Zeitung carried its party spite so far, for Bismarck had now estranged the sympathies of his old Conservative friends, as to accuse him of having virtually farmed out the finances of the empire to a Jewish banker as a requital for the services which this discriminating Hebrew had been the first to render to him in the early days of his political difficulties and pecuniary need. To this foul aspersion Bismarck could only reply by calling upon all the readers of a journal, whose reputation he had himself helped to found, to mark their sense of its baseness by ceasing to take it in; though the aristocratic subscribers to the scurrilous print “refused,” in their own words, “to take their notions of honor and decency from the Herr Reichs-Kanzler.”

The Chancellor’s fulmination against the Kreuz-Zeitung was part of a general lamentation on the license of the press, and the inability of the law to reach some of its excesses. The press he still looked upon in much the same light as he regarded Parliament — as a necessary evil — in spite of the apparent zeal which he had shown years before in promising a newspaper law for the empire. This was in the session of 1873, when the Government consented to make a move in the matter, but only after the Liberals them selves had taken the initiative by framing a bill. But as the Liberals had shown no great eagerness to discuss matters of in finitely more account in Bismarck’s eyes than the liberty of un licensed printing, he disciplined them by disappointing their hopes till next year (1874), when a law was passed, after the usual compromise, which relieved the German press from some of the vexatious restraints under which it had hitherto sighed, though it was still far from being as free as that of England or America. At the same time it was another gratifying proof of national unity that the press laws for all the various States had been merged in one for the whole Fatherland.

But a much better symbol of this national unity was the army, which for about four years had been under the control of one directing mind — that of Moltke — and was now, in point of organization, equipment, and human material, the most perfect fighting-machine of its kind that the world ever had seen. Germany had become a school of arms for the whole world, and no higher compliment could have been paid her military system than the fact that it was carefully copied by the nation — France — which had succumbed to its merits. It was copied by all nations, by none more sedulously than by the Japanese.

Moltke said that what Germany had won by the sword in half a year she would have to keep with the sword for half a century; and it was this simple argument — for Moltke’s arguments were ever brief and simple — which, more than anything else, finally induced the Reichstag to restrict its own financial power over the army. Professor Gneist, a great constitutional authority, and a Liberal member of Parliament, had laid down that ” the theory of fixing the strength of the army by an annual budget was incompatible with the idea of conscription”; and in accordance with this agreeable theory the Government had asked the Reichstag to fix the peace establishment (about four hundred thousand men) “until otherwise provided by law.” But the Reichstag could not be prevailed upon to part so indefinitely with its power of the purse.

The Emperor, however, who never could brook to be gain said in military matters, however much he might bow to the will of the people in other respects, proved to be just as dogged as the Reichstag seemed determined, and it looked as if the nation were on the eve of another “conflict time” with its budget-less rule. But from this danger it was ultimately saved by Bismarck, who, from his bed of suffering, solemnly counselled his Majesty to accept the compromise which had meanwhile been proposed by the National Liberal Herr von Bennigsen — ever the “honest broker” in Parliament, as the Chancellor was out of it — and which fixed the peace strength of the army for a period of seven years. This Military Septennate was repeatedly renewed, each time with an enormous increase of men, seeing that it behooved Germany to keep pace with the armaments of her neighbors, though on the last occasion (1887) Bismarck could effect his purpose only by the ever-effective means of dissolving the Reichstag. For, with all their pride in their Parliament, the Germans are still prouder of their army, knowing what it has done for them. “An appeal to fear,” said Bismarck once, “never found an echo in German hearts,” but an appeal to them about their armor ever had.

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