In later years Bismarck apologised for many of the speeches which he made at this period:  “I was a terrible Junker in those days,” he said; and biographers generally speak of them as though they required justification or apology.  There seems no reason for this.  It would have been impossible for him, had he at that time been entrusted with the government of the State, entirely to put into practice what he had said from his place in the Chamber.  But he was not minister; he was only a party leader; his speeches were, as they were intended to be, party speeches; they had something of the exaggeration which conflict always produces.  They were, moreover, opposition speeches, for he was addressing not so much the Government as the Chamber and the country, and in them the party to which he belonged was a very small minority.  But why was there not to be a Conservative party in Prussia?

It was necessary for the proper development of constitutional life that the dominant Liberal doctrines should be opposed by this bold criticism.  Bismarck was only doing what in England was done by the young Disraeli, by Carlyle, and by Ruskin; the world would not be saved by constitutional formulae.

There were some of his party whose aims went indeed beyond what may be considered morally legitimate and politically practicable.  The Gerlachs and many of their friends, and the purely military party which was headed by Prince Charles Frederick, the King’s youngest brother, desired to do away with the Constitution, to dismiss the Parliament, and to restore the absolute monarchy in a form which would have been more extreme than that which it had had since 1815.  The King himself sympathised with their wishes and he probably would have acted according to them were it not that he had sworn to maintain the Constitution.  He was a religious man and he respected his oath.  There does not appear any evidence that Bismarck wished for extreme action of this kind.  Even in his private correspondence, at least in that part of it which has been published, one finds no desire to see Prussia entirely without a Parliament.  It was a very different thing to wish as he did that the duties of the Parliament should be strictly limited and that they should not be allowed completely to govern the State.  We must always remember how much he owed to representative assemblies.  Had the Estates General never been summoned, had the Revolution never taken place, he would probably have passed his life as a country gentleman, often discontented with the Government of the country but entirely without influence.  He owed to Parliament his personal reputation, but he owed to it something more than that.  Up to 1847 the only public career open to a Prussian subject was the Civil Service; it was from them that not only the subordinate officials but the Ministers of the State were selected.  Now we have seen that Bismarck had tried the Civil Service and deliberately retired from it.  The hatred