increasing frequency on the most important questions of European diplomacy.  He strove to inspire them with greater jealousy of Austria.  He favored closer relations with Napoleon III., as a make-weight against the Austrian influence, and was charged by some of his opponents with an undue leaning toward France; but as he explained in a letter to a friend, if he had sold himself, it was “to a Teutonic and not to a Gallic devil.”

[Illustration:  Bismarck]

In the winter of 1858-9, as the Franco-Austrian war drew nearer, Bismarck’s anti-Austrian attitude became so pronounced that his government, by no means ready to break with Austria, but rather disposed to support that power against France, felt it necessary to put him, as he himself expressed it, “on ice on the Neva.”  From 1859 to 1862 he held the position of Prussian ambassador at St. Petersburg.  In 1862 he was appointed ambassador at Paris.  In the autumn of the same year he became Minister-President of Prussia.

The new Prussian King, William I., had become involved in a controversy with the Prussian Chamber of Deputies over the reorganization of the army; his previous ministers were unwilling to press the reform against a hostile majority; and Bismarck, who was ready to assume the responsibility, was charged with the premiership of the new cabinet.  “Under some circumstances,” he said later, “death upon the scaffold is as glorious as upon the battlefield.”  From 1862 to 1866 he governed Prussia without the support of the lower chamber and without a regular budget.  He informed a committee of the Deputies that the questions of the time were not to be settled by-debates, but by “blood and iron.”

In the diplomatic field it was his effort to secure a position of advantage for the struggle with Austria for the control of Germany,—­a struggle which, six years before, he had declared to be inevitable.  During his stay in St. Petersburg he had strengthened the friendly feeling already subsisting between Prussia and Russia; and in 1863 he gave the Russian government useful support in crushing a Polish insurrection.  To a remonstrance from the English ambassador, somewhat arrogantly delivered in the name of Europe, Bismarck responded, “Who is Europe?” While in Paris he had convinced himself that no serious interference was to be apprehended from Napoleon.  That monarch overrated Austria; regarded Bismarck’s plans, which appear to have been explained with extraordinary frankness, as chimerical; and pronounced Bismarck “not a serious person.”  Bismarck, on the other hand, privately expressed the opinion that Napoleon was “a great unrecognized incapacity.”  When, in 1863, the death of Frederick VII. of Denmark without direct heirs raised again the ancient Schleswig-Holstein problem, Bismarck saw that the opportunity had come for the solution of the German question.