He had their intellectual and moral qualities carried
to the highest degree of superiority. But he underwent evolution after
1871, and his caste with him, under the pressure of general
circumstances.
Bismarck was a Junker, a Prussian rustic, monarchist, particularist,
agrarian and militarist. Each of his qualities is an attribute of a
mentality of caste, a very curious one, not lacking in grandeur, but
very narrow and not always adequate to the conduct of affairs.
Monarchist means anti-Parliamentarian. The fine scorn of rhetoric and
even of public discussion, a conviction that democracy will not lead to
anything beyond a display of mediocrity, that is one of the salient
features of his mind. Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal
relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the
King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an
abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by
the word faithful, (feal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary
because it is without meaning in our present moral state.
The Junker is particularist, at least he was. The political and
administrative centralization which the Jacobins achieved in France
inspires him with horror.
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