ed its acme about
1860. Complete civil and religious liberty was gained for Jews
throughout Western Europe during the next decade,--in the German
confederation and in Switzerland, 1866, in Austria and Hungary, 1867,
and in the German Empire, 1871, while even in Spain the expulsion
order was practically repealed and toleration, if not liberty, was
given to Jews there in 1869. By that time Liberalism, both in the
French sense of liberty and equality before the law and in the English
sense of constitutional government and free-trade, had gained its
fullest triumph and had spent its force. Its negative work had been
most valuable; it had freed the human spirit from intolerable shackles
and thrown into the lumber-room the clogging survivals of medieval
feudalism. But to the human spirit thus freed it had little
instruction to give of a constructive kind; its slogan seemed to be,
"Go as you please," or, to use its own formula, "laissez faire,
laissez aller." It was rather superficial in its treatment of national
and social forces and made no appeal to the more generous imaginative
emotions. It was inevitable that a reaction should set in if only to
fill the void. Nationalism which had given vitality to France under
Napoleon, and in Spain, Russia and Prussia had brought down his
downfall, was opposed to Liberal cosmopolitanism. Protection to native
industry, which had, only for a moment and in England, lost its hold,
replaced free trade, and the strong individualism of "Manchestertum"
was drowned in the rising flood of Collectivism, whether in the more
formal guise of socialism or in the vaguer tendencies of philanthropy.
In none of these currents of opinion had Jews a prominent voice
except, as we have seen, in the latter, though there they were mainly
effective in opposition and criticism.

_Bismarck and the Forces of Reaction_

ALL these tendencies, which may roughly be summed up as the
Counter-Revolution, found a home in victorious Prussia and a voice in
Otto von Bismarck, its representative statesman. As we have seen, his
views on the nature of the State had been influenced in his formative
period by F. J. Stahl, and his socialistic sympathies may possibly
have been aroused by Ferdinand Lassalle, but he was of too independent
a character to submit much to external influences, and the tendencies
he represented, Junkertum and Militarism, were entirely opposed to
Jewish Liberalism. For some fifteen years he found it conv