great cause, risking for it the existence of a whole country as well
as his own happiness, peace, and salvation, and being ready to submit
the consequences, whatever they might be, to the tribunal of eternity.
To say that a man who is willing to take such responsibilities as
these makes himself thereby an offender against morality appears to me
tantamount to condemning the Alps as obstructions to traffic. A
people, at any rate, that glories in the achievements of a Luther has
no right to cast a slur upon the motives of a Bismarck.

Whatever one may think of the worth of the cause for which Bismarck
battled all his life--the unity and greatness of Germany--it is
impossible not to admire the policy of moderation and self-restraint
pursued by him after every one of his most decisive victories. And
here again we note in him the peculiarly German military temper.
German war-songs do not glorify foreign conquest and brilliant
adventure; they glorify dogged resistance and bitter fight for house
and home, for kith and kin. The German army, composed as it is of
millions of peaceful citizens, is essentially a weapon of defense. And
it can truly be said that Bismarck, with all his natural
aggressiveness and ferocity, was in the main a defender, not a
conqueror. He defended Prussia against the intolerable arrogance and
un-German policy of Austria; he defended Germany against French
interference in the work of national consolidation; he defended the
principle of State sovereignty against the encroachments of the
Papacy; he defended the monarchy against the republicanism of the
Liberals and Socialists; and the supreme aim of his foreign policy
after the establishment of the German Empire was to guard the peace of
Europe.

The third predominant trait of Bismarck's character that stamps him as