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Prince Bismarck: From Waterloo to Versailles
Prince Bismarck From Waterloo to Versailles Author:Charles Lowe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. PARLIAMENTART CAREER. 1.—Prussian Constitutionalism. Bismarck's career as a parliamentary deputy lasted, with several intervals, for about fou... more »r years—or from April, 1847, till May, 1851—when he was appointed secretary to the Prussian repre- mentoryrDt sentative at the Germanic Diet; and in the comparatively few speeches he made during this time—for he was probahly the least loquacious of all his fellow-members—the whole political character of the man was plainly revealed. By his intimate friends he had hitherto been regarded as " somewhat of a Liberal," but it will be for the reader to determine how far the estimate was just. The better, however, to realise the peculiarity of his political views, let us briefly consider the antecedents and nature of the singular Assembly in which he first expressed them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was about as little representative government in Prussia as in Turkey or in Timbuctoo, and it said much for the comparative wisdom of her absolute rulers that they had not hitherto been forced by throat-grasping Revolution to share their power withthe people. Constitutionalism is a plant which has never been found to thrive in the same garden with the doctrine of divine right, and this principle pf Divine ripht sovereignty was never half so vehemently asserted even by the Stuarts as by the Hohenzollerns. Frederick I., in 1701, placed the crown upon his own head in token, not that he had bribed and bargained it out of Kaiser Leopold, as was the sober truth, but that he had received it without episcopal mediation direct from the King of Kings ; and, during the whole of his reign, the sole Constitution enjoyed by his subjects was summed up in the niaxim — A Deo Rex, a Reye Lex. The only Parliament ever summoned b...« less