Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1878 — An Editor Sketches Bismarck. [ARTICLE]

An Editor Sketches Bismarck.

An American journalist, Col. Forney, who has conversed with the groat German statesman, says that Bismarck is a most fascinating person. Such is the charm of his conversation and manner that, when he chooses to unbend, few persons can resist the influence of his magnetism. The journalist thus sketches the Chancellor: In his own house he yields unresistingly to domestic influences. But he is eminently a public character. Never conspicuous in the streets, for obvious reasons, and less so now than ever, he dominates the whole empire. He hates praise? and resents censure. He is a law unto himself and others. While tho great European Congress, called by himself, sat in Berlin, he was its master and its President. He asked little for Germany, but he parceled out the spoils to others. He so became the arbiter of Europe, as he is to-day the dictator of Germany. All German parties admit that he has rendered incredible services to his country; but nobody knows it better than himself. He is a fatalist, and naturally asserts by his acts, if not by his words, his supreme infallibility. But he does not try to be cautious in his language. He is candor itself—often to the verge of insolence; and there is hardly a day that he does not speak scornfully of some of the characters in the recent European Congress, and of living and dead European statesmen. Such "a man might have figured in the feudaLera. He is the anachronism of this age of progress. Acted on the stage twenty years ago, he would have been regarded as another Charles the Bold or Duke of Alva. Asa real person, it is a simple question of time, unless he moderates his policy, whether he will fall by the bullet or the bowl. He is the man of destiny, and evidently accepts his mission and knows his danger.