Bismarck was the finished type, the representative par excellence of this class of men.  He had their intellectual and moral qualities carried to the highest degree of superiority.  But he underwent evolution after 1871, and his caste with him, under the pressure of general circumstances.

Bismarck was a Junker, a Prussian rustic, monarchist, particularist, agrarian and militarist.  Each of his qualities is an attribute of a mentality of caste, a very curious one, not lacking in grandeur, but very narrow and not always adequate to the conduct of affairs.

Monarchist means anti-Parliamentarian.  The fine scorn of rhetoric and even of public discussion, a conviction that democracy will not lead to anything beyond a display of mediocrity, that is one of the salient features of his mind.  Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by the word faithful, (feal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary because it is without meaning in our present moral state.

The Junker is particularist, at least he was.  The political and administrative centralization which the Jacobins achieved in France inspires him with horror.  For him it is disorder.  He sees in it nothing but a dust heap of individuals crushed beneath a formula.  Even today, when the German accuses France of anarchy, that is what he means.  He figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune.  Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the professors which at heart he despises.

He is agrarian and militarist, that is to say, conservative and enamored of force.  In 1830 four-fifths of the population lived by agriculture and the landlord governed his peasants patriarchally.  He kept the conservatist spirit of a rustic, a very lively sense of authority and the military instinct.  He had scant liking for distant enterprises or adventures.  He was at once religious, warlike, and realist, knowing how to nurse his ambitions and to confine his view to what was within reach.

Bismarck for a long time was the decided opponent of naval armaments and colonial policy, in short, of imperialism.  Even his projects for social reform—­insurance against sickness, against old age—­which have been accepted as concessions to modern ideas, were due entirely to his monarchical and patriarchal conception of the State.  He copied the ancient decrees of Colbert as to naval personnel.  He would have gone as far as assurance against non-employment.  In the dominion of the King, he said, no one should die of hunger.