Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 February 1891 — Bismarck’s Fall and Old Age. [ARTICLE]

Bismarck’s Fall and Old Age.

Never has history furnished a better illustration of the uncertainty and instability of place and power than in the case of the great ex-Chancellor,, Prince Bismarck, of Germany. Bismarck’s fall is complete. His ruthless genius consolidated seemingly incoherent states into a great empire whose reigning monarch refused him the scant courtesy of a perfunctory message of congratulation on New Year’s Day. Bismarck’s fall is as complete and pathetic, viewed only as to himself, as was Wolsey’s. This stroke only was spared him—the hand that signed his warrant of banishment was not the king’s he served. Bismarck was the mightiest monarch in Europe. The old Kaiser who in the fullness of years went to his account master apparently of the greatest military power of Europe was Bismarck’s figurehead. It was Bismarck, not William, nor William’s great captain, Von Moltke. who, conquering at Sedan, destroyed the French Empire, and crytallized the German aspiration, long expressed, for German unity. He was in name Chancellor of the empire. In fact, he was its master spirit. Greater than Wolsey, or Ximenes, who saved Spain to Charles V., or the Cardinal of Henry VIII.’s reign, his fall is complete, humiliating, and, if it differs from Wolsey’s, it is only the difference of the customs and manners of the nineteenth from those of the sixteenth century. He has felt the “killing frost” of kingly ingratitude. He has bitterly experienced “how wretched is that poor man who hangs on princes’ favors.” And having fallen he has fallen “like Lucifer, never to hope again.” Like the English Cardinal Bismarck “trod the ways of glory and sounded all the depths and shoals of honor,” and may well exclaim with him upon the verge of the grave: Had I but served rny God with half the zeal I served my king, hj would not In mine age Have left me naked to mine enemies, Bismarck’s proud heart is broken. There is nothing for him now but death. Were he of the ecclesiastic order he might now seek his conventual brethren, the humble monks whence he sprang, saying, with the neglected and disgraced Englishman: An old man, broken with the storms of stale. Is come to lay his weary bones anion; ye; Give him a little earth for charity, Nothing is left to Bismarck but a grave. The grandson of the Emperor whom he created and ruled frowns upon him. An eager generation, impatient of the check of the elders, pushes him from his stool. Yet a little while, and the melancholy end. And if people will say, “ His faults lie gentlv on him,” well and good. That is all he can hope for now. He is as dead to the world of activities as any of the mighty who have passed from earth. “No sound can awake him to glory again.”— Chicago T ivies.