manners of Pomerania. He often rode over to take part in Shakespeare
evenings, and amused them by accounts of his visit to England[3]. He was
present occasionally at the religious meetings at Triglaff, and though
he never quite adopted all the customs of the set the influence on him
of these older men was for the next ten years to govern all his
political action. That he was not altogether at one with them we can
understand, when we are told that at Herr von Thadden's house it would
never have occurred to anyone even to think of smoking. Bismarck was
then, as in later life, a constant smoker.

The men who met in these family parties in distant Pomerania were in a
few years to change the whole of European history. Here Bismarck for the
first time saw Albrecht von Roon, a cousin of the Blankenburgs, then a
rising young officer in the artillery; they often went out shooting
together. The Belows, Blankenburgs, and Kleists were to be the founders
and leaders of the Prussian Conservative party, which was Bismarck's
only support in his great struggle with the Parliament; and here, too,
came the men who were afterwards to be editors and writers of the _Kreuz
Zeitung_.

The religious convictions which Bismarck learnt from them were to be
lasting, and they profoundly influenced his character. He had probably
received little religious training from his mother, who belonged to the
rationalistic school of thought. It was by them that his monarchical
feeling was strengthened. It is not at first apparent what necessary
connection there is between monarchical government and Christian faith.
For Bismarck they were ever inseparably bound together; nothing but
religious belief would have reconciled him to a form of government so
repugnant to natural human reason. "If I were not a Christian, I would
be a Republican," he said many years later; in Christianity he found the