o have met him
and by those who have not, is, I think, indisputable. He is of the
stuff that would have made a first-rate American. He would have been a
sovereign there as he is a sovereign here. He would have enjoyed the
risks, and turmoil, and competition; he would have enjoyed the fine,
free field of endeavor, and he would have jousted with the best of us
in our tournament of life, which has trained as many knights sans peur
et sans reproche as any country in the world.

I believe in a man who takes what he thinks belongs to him, and holds
it against the world; in the man who so loves life that he keeps a
hearty appetite for it and takes long draughts of it; who is ever
ready to come back smiling for another round with the world, no matter
how hard he has been punished. I believe that God believes in the man
who believes in Him, and therefore in himself. Why should I debar a
man from my sympathy because he is a king or an emperor? I admire your
courage, Sir; I love your indiscretions; I applaud your faith in your
God, and your confidence in yourself, and your splendid service to
your country. Without you Germany would have remained a second-rate
power. Had you been what your critics pretend that they would like you
to be, Germany would have been still ruling the clouds.

Here's long life to your power, Sir, and to your possessions, and to
you! And as an Anglo-Saxon, I thank God, that all your countrymen are
not like you!

IV GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS

In the days when Bismarck was welding the German states into a federal
organization and finally into an empire, he used the press to spray
his opinions, wishes, and suspicions over those he wished to instruct
or to influence. He used it, too, to threaten or to mislead his
enemies at home and abroad. The Hamburger Nachrichten was the
newspaper for which he wrote at one time, and which remained his
confidential organ, though as his power grew he used other journals
and journalists as well.

As Germany has few traditions of freedom, having rarely won liberty as
a united people, but having been beaten into national unity by her
political giants, or her robuster sovereigns, so the press before and
during Bismarck's long reign, from 1862 to 1890, was kept well in hand
by those who ruled. It is only lately that caricature, criticism, and
opposition have had freer play. That a journalist like Maximilian
Harden (a friend and confidant of Bismarck, by the