For him it is disorder. He sees in it nothing
but a dust heap of individuals crushed beneath a formula. Even today,
when the German accuses France of anarchy, that is what he means. He
figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an
autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of
communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune.
Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but
impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an
invention of the professors which at heart he despises.
He is agrarian and militarist, that is to say, conservative and enamored
of force. In 1830 four-fifths of the population lived by agriculture and
the landlord governed his peasants patriarchally. He kept the
conservatist spirit of a rustic, a very lively sense of authority and
the military instinct. He had scant liking for distant enterprises or
adventures. He was at once religious, warlike, and realist, knowing how
to nurse his ambitions and to confine his view to what was within reach.
Bismarck for a long time was the decided opponent of naval armaments and
colonial policy, in short, of imperialism. Even his projects for social
reform--insurance against sickness, against old age--which have been
accepted as concessions to modern ideas, were due entirely to his
monarchical and patriarchal conception of the State.
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