Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 March 1881 — Flaws in Bismarck’s System. [ARTICLE]

Flaws in Bismarck’s System.

' It is no longer the fashion to praise I everything that Bismarck does. | Never has he been so audacious and I energetic as he is now, and so far as i I personal influence goes, never under I less restraint and more successful. His will has been law for nearly I twenty years. But audacity and en-1 ergy have their limitations. A states-1 I man may be allowed to have his own I way in war,diplomacy, finance,economic policy, ecclesiastical ad minis-1 tration and parliamentary govern-1

I ment, and an easy-going worldthat is too ready to worship personal success take an optimist’s view of his career I and hastily judge that all is as it should I be. But personal triumph may imply I national failure. A quarter or half a I [century hence the Chancellor’s short- I [comings in the cause of constitutional I Kvernment may be as conspicuous as I s services in the cause of national I unity. The perspective of time may I place him in an unenviable light. When the Congress of Vienna broke I

I up in 1815, Metternich’s career was a splendid success and Stein’s a wretched failure. What a pitiful figure the Austrian diplomat makes now, even I in his own Memoirs! As the treach- I erous oe of liberal ideas and popular I rights, and as the author of a constitu-1 tion by which the creative energies | of the Fatherland were paralysed for I half a century, he is recognized as the I evil genius of Germany. Outwitted! at Vienna, unappreciated at home, I 'misunderstood in Europe, after the! lapse of years Stein towers above the intriguers and tricksters of his time!

aa a far-sighted, progressive patriot. The time has already come when the practical sagacity of English speaking races can detect some of the flaws I in the Chancellor’s system of government and administration. The most conspicuous of these is his aversion to Parliamentary institutions. When the Prussian Chambers, shrinking back in horror from a fratricidal conflict, would not vote a dollar for the war with Austria, he raised the money I upon his own responsibility, and gave I the regiments marching ora era. when I he wanted a fleet, he bluntly told the I legislators that he would have it with I or without their consent. He assigned I to Parliament no higher functions!

than those of a national talking machine. He does not grudge them the harmless diversionsofa debating society, so long as they are not too inquisitive about the blue books, but the privileges of actual administration he reserves for the King’s Ministers and I the Emperor’s Chancellor. The Reichstag is a bit of mechanism which he is to manipulate at pleasure, gov- j erning with the consent of the Dep- I uties when it is convenient to do so, and without it when it is neccessary; I and political parties are forces to be pitted against one another according I to his needs and caprices. As he grows older his opposition to Parliamen.ary government as it is known in Great Britain, France, Austria, H [> W, Ita, y> Belgium and the United States. increases. After playing fast and loose with one political faction after another, he is aiming by I means of artifices borrowed from Las-1 sale, to organize a workingmen’s party, I upon whose support he may depend Ip a National crisis; and at the same time he is striving to lessen the influence of the Reichstag by proposing bienial budgets and shifting a great share of its business to an economic council under his immediate control. I Aa matters stand, the ascendency of a simple majority of the popular assem- I bly counts for less in Germany than in any other great State in Europe. The degradation of Parliamentary institutions involves naturally the loosest ideas of ministerial responsi-1 bility. A Prussian minister holds not by the will of Parliament, but by the will of the Sovereign; and the Chancellor himself is utterly irre-| sponsible, for although he has been a King’s man from first to last, he has made himself so necessary that the Emperor cannot fill his place. The office which he carved out for himself in the Imperial constitution makes him the political dictator of Germany. He is responsible only to a sovereign who cannot spare him, and he neither shares that responsi-1 bility -with his associates nor takes pains to train anyone to be his successor. He makes a ooint of snubbing any Minister who is restive under his control, and systematically suppresses the rising men. Arnim, Falk, Camphausen, and, within a month, Eulenbers, have been displaced. and there is not a Minister in the Emperor’s service who can be mentioned to-day as likely to be the Chancellor’s successor. Irresponsible as all the ministers are from the lack of Parliamentary restrictions, the Chancellor stands without a rival, and can drive his associates from office whenever he chooses to do so. Personal government cannot go much further.

Bismarck’s practice, like the constitution itself, recognises a single popular right—and that he has lately confessed was accepted unwisely as a Frankfort tradition—that of common citizenship. The constitution Mefines the.rights of princes, the privileges of estates and the relations of states under the Empire. The princes, not the German nation, gave the Emperor his title. There is no recognition in the constitution of those fundamental rights of personal liberty, assembling, petitioning trial by jury and freedom of the press, which were advocated by Stein and subsequently affirmed in the constitution of 1848. At that time every German State was promised popular representation, responsible ministers and chambers empowered to regulate taxation. In these respects the constitutions of the German States are now below the level of the Imperial charter. Universal suffrage marks the only advance that has been made under Bismarck’s leadership. Lassale argued that when the right of conr. mon citizenship was once secured, every other popular right would follow. It has not been so. Universal suffrage does not take away from the Beiehstag the reproach of being little more than a debating society. It does not render ministers responsible to the representatives of the people nor make Parliamentary Government a reality.—Jf. K Tribune.

The special correspondent who accompanied the recent excursion to Cuba reports that D. W. Roosevelt, the American consul, and Lewis Drake, a clerk in the office of Mallory’s steamship agency, tried to perpetrate a high-handed swindle upon the Americana. These officials charged the visitors $5 each for revising their passports, which had been obtained from the Spanish consul at Nassau at a cost of $4 each. The visitors paid, but reported the matter to the governor of the province, who arrested Roosevelt and Drake. Both begged for mercy, and refunded the money. John Fink has been arrested for murdering his sister, Mrs. J. R. Scott, of Ingham county, Michigan. She was found dead in her bed on the 15th, and the first supposition was that she had committed suicide, but the authorities now believe that she was murdered.