At that time the absolute excellence of a democratic constitution was a dogma which few cared to dispute; it appeared to his hearers as a mere paradox when Bismarck pointed out how little evidence there was that a great country could prosper under the government of a Parliament elected by an extended franchise.  Strictly speaking, there was no evidence from experience; 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.