d the new crown on the King of Prussia's head. When offered,
it was haughtily declined under the applause of Bismarck and his
friends. The king refused because its origin lay in a popular assembly;
in Bismarck's eyes its chief defect was that Prussia would be dictated
to by the minor states. It was not until later, in 1851, when appointed
Prussian ambassador to the Germanic Diet, chiefly because of his defence
of the Treaty of Olmuetz, which placed Prussia at the mercy of Austria,
that he recognized the central point to be the necessity of thrusting
Austria out of the confederation. It is proved now that he was sagacious
enough also to perceive that such a wrench would not lead to a permanent
estrangement, but that Austria, removed once and for all from her
incubus-like and dog-in-the-manger position within the federate body,
would become, in her own interest and that of European peace, New
Germany's permanent ally.

These, then, became the two purposes of his active life ever since the
day when, at the age of thirty-six, he obtained a share of the
responsibility in the management of affairs as ambassador in Frankfort;
first, to transfer _Austria to a position in the East_, and then to
bestow upon the Fatherland _political unity under Prussia, the royal
prerogative in the latter remaining uncurtailed_, so far as
circumstances would allow. Thirty-four years have now elapsed. His
opponents, in his own country or out of it, are at liberty to reiterate
that he was born under a lucky star; that he merely took up the thread
of German unification where the Frankfort Parliament of 1849 had let it
drop; that anybody could have utilized such mighty armaments as those of
Prussia with the same effect; that, given total disregard of principle
or moral obligations, the result, in the hands of any political
gamester, must have been what it was. There is something to be set
against each of these assertions. For it was not the goddess of Fortune
which pursued Bismarck in the ungainly shape of his former friend, that
spiteful Prince Gortschakoff. The Frankfort assembly had left the
Austrian riddle unsolved, and apparently insoluble. There was no hand in
the country firm or skilful enough, no brain sufficiently hard or
enlightened as to the needs of the day--not the king's, not Count
Arnim's, nor certainly that of any other known to his contemporaries.
And finally, when a public man so deftly gauges the mental capacities or
extent of powe