The relations between Prince Bismarck and the old Emperor, who was over ninety when he died in 1888, form a touching passage in modern history.  Although his grandson has publicly claimed for him a peculiar measure of divine inspiration, his strength lay in his implicit confidence in his great minister.  Bismarck’s attitude to him, as described in his Memoirs, is rather like that of an old family retainer who has earned by long and faithful service the right to assert his views and to pit his judgment against his master’s.  His one formidable antagonist was the Empress; and long experience, he tells us, enabled him to judge whether difficulties in persuading the old Kaiser to adopt a given line of policy were due to his own judgment or conceived “in the interests of domestic peace.”  The faithful servant had his own appropriate methods of winning his way in either case.

But with the new Kaiser the old minister’s astuteness availed nothing, and the story of Bismarck’s curt dismissal, after thirty-eight years of continuous service, from the post which he had created for himself, illustrates the danger of framing a constitution to meet a particular temporary situation.  Bismarck, put out of action by his own machinery, retired growling to his country seat, and lived to see the reversal of his foreign policy and the exposure of Germany, through the Franco-Russian Alliance, to the one danger he always dreaded, an attack on both flanks.

Like Germany’s present rulers, Bismarck was not a scrupulous man; but unlike them he was shrewd and far-sighted, and understood the statesmen and the peoples with whom he had to deal.  The main object of his foreign policy was to preserve the prestige of the German army as the chief instrument of power in Central Europe, and to allow the new Germany, after three wars in seven years, time to develop in peace and to consolidate her position as one of the Great Powers.

The situation was not an easy one; for Germany’s rapid rise to power, and the methods by which she had acquired it, had not made her popular.  Bismarck’s foreign policy was defensive throughout, and he pursued it along two lines.  He sought to strengthen Germany by alliances, and to weaken her rivals by embroiling them with one another.  The great fruit of his policy was the formation, completed in 1882, of the Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.

There was nothing sentimental about the Triple Alliance.  The Italians hate the Austrians, whom they drove out of Venice as recently as 1866, while neither the German Austrians nor the other races in the Dual Monarchy have any love lost for the Prussians.  But Bismarck decided that this combination was the safest in Germany’s interest:  so he set to work to play upon Austria’s fear of Russia, and to embroil Italy with France in North Africa; and his manoeuvres were duly rewarded.