ect. At
the time of the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 he capitulated to the
Berlin mob and declared for a constitutional regime in which Prussia
should merge herself in Germany; but when the excesses of the democrats
had weakened their authority, he put them down by military force,
refused the German Crown offered him by the popularly elected German
Parliament assembled at Frankfurt-on-Main (April 1849); and thereupon
attempted to form a smaller union of States, namely, Prussia, Saxony,
and Hanover. This Three Kings' League, as it was called, soon came to
an end; for it did not satisfy the nationalists who wished to see
Germany united, the constitutionalists who aimed at the supremacy of
Parliament, or the friends of the old order of things. The vacillations
of Frederick William and the unpractical theorisings of the German
Parliament at Frankfurt having aroused general disgust, Austria found
little difficulty in restoring the power of the old Germanic
Confederation in September, 1850. Strong in her alliance with Russia,
she next compelled Frederick William to sign the Convention of Olmuetz
(Nov. 1850). By this humiliating compact he agreed to forbear helping
the German nationalists in Schleswig-Holstein to shake off the
oppressive rule of the Danes; to withdraw Prussian troops from
Hesse-Cassel and Baden, where strifes had broken out; and to acknowledge
the supremacy of the old Federal Diet under the headship of Austria.
Thus, it seemed that the Prussian monarchy was a source of weakness and
disunion for North Germany, and that Austria, backed up by the might of
Russia, must long continue to lord it over the cumbrous Germanic
Confederation.

But a young country squire, named Bismarck, even then resolved that the
Prussian monarchy should be the means of strengthening and binding
together the Fatherland. The resolve bespoke the patriotism of a sturdy,
hopeful nature; and the young Bismarck was nothing if not patriotic,
sturdy, and hopeful. The son of an ancient family in the Mark of
Brandenburg, he brought to his life-work powers inherited from a line of
fighting ancestors; and his mind was no less robust than his body. Quick
at mastering a mass of details, he soon saw into the heart of a problem,
and his solution of it was marked both by unfailing skill and by sound
common sense as to the choice of men and means. In some respects he
resembles Napoleon the Great. Granted that he was his inferior in the
width of vision