THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
national ambition and a confident hope for the development of more liberal political institutions. I had found only a few old fogies in Nassau, and a banker in Frankfurt, who seemed to be in a disappointed and depressed state of mind. Bismarck laughed heartily. The disgruntled Nassauers, he said, had probably been some sort of purveyors to the late ducal court, and he would wager that the Frankfurt banker was either a member of one of the old patrician families, who thought they were the highest nobility in all the land, or a money maker complaining that Frankfurt was no longer, as it had been, the financial center of Southern Germany. Here Bismarck gave full rein to his sarcastic humor. He had spent years in Frankfurt as the representative of the defunct “Bundestag,” and had no end of funny anecdotes about the aristocratic pretensions of the patrician burghers of that ancient free city, and about their lofty wrath at the incorporation of that commonwealth in the Prussian monarchy.
Then he began to tell me about the great difficulties he had been obliged to overcome in bringing about the decisive struggle with Austria, one of the most serious of which difficulties, as he said, consisted in the scrupulous hesitancy of old King William to consent to anything that seemed to be in any sense unconstitutional or not in harmony with the strictest notion of good faith. In our conversation Bismarck constantly called the King “der alte Herr”—“the old gentleman”—or as it might also have been translated, “the old master.” One moment he would speak of the old gentleman with something like sentimental tenderness, and then again in a tone of familiar freedom which smacked of anything but reverential respect. He told me anecdotes about him which made me stare, for at the moment I could not help remembering that I was listening to the Prime Minister of the Crown to whom I was
[ 267 ]
