Life — January 26, 1899 — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Sufferer. ver more 0, dentist! N thy gas I'll take on any plea. Tho tooth forgot, Idreamed, alas! My wifo had hold of mo. M3 soon tires of mere beauty. In fact, man soon tires of mere anything. The Everyday Philosophy of Bismarck. N tho two big volumes of “ Bismarck's J Autoblography " (Harper) thero is a great deal for tho statesman, diplomatist and historian to solemnly discuss and acidly disagree about, and they will spend many ponderous pages in the diversion. But for tho averago reader there is plenty of more frivolous enjoyment to be got out of the book, by reason of the great Chancel- lor’s frank and often cynical revelations of his methods and motives, Asa character study it is far ahead of @ novel, From almost the beginning you see a great man playing a great game, with kings, quee princes, ompires, petty States, generals and kuaves for pieces, And he played it from the first with one single stake in vicw—tho national unity of all Germany. If heseemed to change his principles, or desert his friends, or act by indirection; if he hard- ened his heart and deliberately brought on @ great war by doctoring a telogram; if ho endured in silence slights from the heads of the army, and even from the King him- self, it was becauso he allowed nothing to interfere with this magnifleent achieve- ment of United Germa: That was tho mainspring of his life. The biography ~LIFE* _ reveals a fow cardinal principles upon which he always acted, Before all other qualities he put common sense. Time and again he refers to this in Lis estimate of other men, That was the highest quality which he found to praise in the Emperor himself. From it he excluded all emotion as aweakness, The fatal defect in Napo- leon IIL, was, in Bismarck’s view, that ho had more heart than head, In tho great probloms of statecraft, “ beart” is anannoy- ing and disturbing factor. . . * LLIED to it aro Women. ‘Tho tnflu- A ence of the Empress upon tho old Emperor was to Bismarck always some- thing sinister to bo overcome, The most amusing passages in tho biography aro those in which Bismarck frankly reveals how he outwitted the venerable Empress, Ho takes special delight in these, and mag- nanimously admits the adroitness with which the Empress played hor game. An English wife is even worse than @ German wife as a disturbing element in statesmanship. The Chancellor enumer- ates, with irritation, four or five English wives of great Germans who were thorns in his flesh during tho war with Franco. His special grievance against them was their efforts to have the Powers intervene to end tho Franco-Prussian war “ through influences which owed their activity not to political considerations, but to feelings which the terms humanity and civilization, imported to us from England, still rouse ia German natures.” For the use of such an argument in a great question of interna- tional politics the Chancellor expresses suprome contempt, Even in the Crimean war, he adds, they tried to get us to take up arms for the Turks “for the saving of civilization.” If the veteran statesman had lived a few months longer he would have heard tho same fine phrases used by anotber branch of the Anglo-Saxon raco to justify a war against @ weaker power. “If you want their colonies why don’t you take them?” he would havo said; “but don’t go around with a holy face, asserting that you are doing it for humanity and civilization!” . * * ISMARCK’S chapter on the aged Em- peror is tho finest thing in the book, ‘There is not atouch of obsequious eulogy in it. A man who feels himself an intellectual superior sets down his frank estimate of the venerable Master who gave him power and kept bim in it. Thero is one admir- ablo bit of philosophy in it, explaining why Bismarck never allowed the Emperor's out- breaks of petulance or anger to Irritato him, “TI thought it out for my- self inthis way,” bo says, “Any irregularities in a ruler who showed mo confldence and good-will to such a degreo as did William I, should be for mo of the nature of vis mayor, which it was not for mo to resist; I must look on it as the weather or the sea, or any natural event to which I must accommodate myself.” That was tho philosophy of tho Iron Chancellor, the strong- est man in tho world! Asmaller man would have written pages to prove that the Emperor was only great by his permission. Droch,