Bismarck stood for election in this new Assembly, for he could accept the basis on which it had been summoned; he took his seat for the district of the West Havel in which the old city of Brandenburg, the original capital of the Mark, was situated.  He had come forward as an opponent of the Revolution.  “Everyone,” he said in his election address, “must support the Government in the course they have taken of combating the Revolution which threatens us all.”  “No transaction with the Revolution,” was the watchword proposed in the manifesto of his party.  He appealed to the electors as one who would direct all his efforts to restore the old bond of confidence between Crown and people.  He kept his promise.  In this Assembly the Extreme Left was still the predominant party; in an address to the Crown they asked that the state of siege at Berlin should be raised, and that an amnesty to those who had fought on the 18th of March should be proclaimed.  Bismarck did not yet think that the time for forgiveness had come; the struggle was indeed not yet over.  He opposed the first demand because, as he said, there was more danger to liberty of debate from the armed mob than there was from the Prussian soldiers.  In one of the most careful of his speeches he opposed the amnesty.  “Amnesty,” he said, “was a right of the Crown, not of the Assembly”; moreover the repeated amnesties were undermining in the people the feeling of law; the opinion was being spread about that the law of the State rested on the barricades, that everyone who disliked a law or considered it unjust had the right to consider it as non-existent.  Who that has read the history of Europe during this year can doubt the justice of the remark?  Then he continues: 

“My third reason for voting against the amnesty is humanity.  The strife of principles which during this year has shattered Europe to its foundations is one in which no compromise is possible.  They rest on opposite bases.  The one draws its law from what is called the will of the people, in truth, however, from the law of the strongest on the barricades.  The other rests on authority created by God, an authority by the grace of God, and seeks its development in organic connection with the existing and constitutional legal status ... the decision on these principles will come not by Parliamentary debate, not by majorities of eleven votes; sooner or later the God who directs the battle will cast his iron dice.”

These words were greeted with applause, not only by the men who sat on his side of the House, but by those opposite to him.  The truth of them was to be shewn by the events which were taking place at that very time.  They were spoken on the 22d of March.  The next day was fought the battle of Novara and it seemed that the last hopes of the Italian patriots were shattered.  Within a few months the Austrian army subdued with terrible vengeance the rising in Lombardy and Venetia; Hungary was prostrate before