The war which he waged with the spiritual power was perhaps the most important event of his administration, and in which he had not altogether his own way, underrating, as is natural to such a man, spiritual forces as compared with material.  In his memorable quarrel with Rome he appeared to the least advantage,—­at first rigid, severe, and arbitrary with the Catholic clergy, even to persecution, driving away the Jesuits (1872), shutting up schools and churches, imprisoning and fining ecclesiastical dignitaries, intolerant in some cases as the Inquisition itself.  One-fourth of the people of the empire are Catholics, yet he sternly sought to suppress their religious rights and liberties as they regarded them, thinking he could control them by material penalties,—­such as taking away their support, and shutting them up in prison,—­forgetting that conscientious Christians, whether Catholics or Protestants, will in matters of religion defy the mightiest rulers.  No doubt the policy of the Catholics of Germany was extremely irritating to a despotic ruler who would exalt the temporal over the spiritual power; and equally true was it that the Pope himself was unyielding in regard to the liberties of his church, demanding everything and giving back nothing, in accordance with the uniform traditions of Papal domination.  The Catholics, the world over, look upon the education of their children as a thing to be superintended by their own religious teachers,—­as their inalienable right and imperative duty; and any State interference with this right and this duty they regard as religious persecution, to which they will never submit without hostility and relentless defiance.  Bismarck felt that to concede to the demands which the Catholic clergy ever have made in respect to religious privileges was to “go to Canossa,”—­where Henry IV.  Emperor of Germany, in 1077, humiliated himself before Pope Gregory VII. in order to gain absolution.  The long-sighted and experienced Thiers remarked that here Bismarck was on the wrong track, and would be compelled to retreat, with all his power.  Bismarck was too wise a man to persist in attempting impossibilities, and after a bitter fight he became conciliatory.  He did not “go to Canossa,” but he yielded to the dictates of patriotism and enlightened policy, and the quarrel was patched up.

His long struggles with the Catholics told upon his health and spirits, and he was obliged to seek long periods of rest and recreation on his estates,—­sometimes, under great embarrassments and irritations, threatening to resign, to which his imperial master, grateful and dependent, would never under any circumstances consent.  But the prince-president of the ministers and chancellor of the empire was loaded down with duties—­in his cabinet, in his office, and in the parliament—­most onerous to bear, and which no other man in Germany was equal to.  His burdens at times were intolerable:  his labors were prodigious, and the opposition he met with was extremely irritating to a man accustomed to have his own way in everything.