ience; France, as he said, was the parent of all these theories,
but the example of France was certainly not seductive. "I see in the
present circumstances of France nothing to encourage us to put the
_Nessus_ robe of French political teaching over our healthy body." (This
was in September, 1849, when the struggle between the Prince President
and the Assembly was already impending.) The Liberals appealed to
Belgium; it had, at least, stood the storm of the last year, but so had
Russia, and, after all, the Belgian Constitution was only eighteen years
old, "an admirable age for ladies but not for constitutions." And then
there was England.

"England governs itself, although the Lower House has the right
of refusing taxes. The references to England are our misfortune;
give us all that is English which we have not, give us English
fear of God and English reverence before the law, the whole
English Constitution, but above all the complete independence of
English landed property, English wealth and English common-sense,
especially an English Lower House, in short everything which we
have not got, then I will say, you can govern us after the
English fashion."

But this was not all. How could they appeal to England as a proof that a
democratic Parliament was desirable? England had not grown great under a
democratic but under an aristocratic constitution.

"English reform is younger than the Belgian Constitution; we have
still to wait and see whether this reformed Constitution will
maintain itself for centuries as did the earlier rule of the
English aristocracy."

That, in Bismarck's opinion, it was not likely to do so, we see a few
years later; with most Continental critics of English institutions, he
believed that the Reform Bill had destroyed the backbone of the English
Constitution. In 1857 he wrote:

"They have lost the 'inherited wisdom' since the Reform Bill;
they maintain a coarse and violent selfishness and the ignorance
of Continental relations."

It was not merely aristocratic prejudice; it was a wise caution to bid
his countrymen pause before they adopted from foreign theorists a form
of government so new and untried, and risked for the sake of an
experiment the whole future of Prussia.

In later years Bismarck apologised for many of the speeches which he
made at this period: "I was a terrible Junker in those days," he said;
and biographers generally speak of them as though th