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Updated: May 19, 2025
If Austria would not offer the Duchies to Prussia, neither would the Diet; the majority remained loyal to Augustenburg. The people of the Duchies were equally determined in their opposition to the scheme; attempts were made by Bismarck's friends and agents to get up a petition to incorporate them with Prussia, but they always failed.
It had welded them together in a compact Empire which no power in Europe could disrupt, and as such a union was the aim of Bismarck's life, he surely had a right to feel jubilant.
He asked, however, that Austria lose only Venetia, but it was precisely Bismarck's will that had, and not without difficulty, persuaded King William that he must not, by territorial demands, compromise the alliance which he afterwards realized. On July 26th the peace preliminaries of Nikolsburg were signed.
It would be dramatic to state that the circumjacent territories trembled, but it is exact to affirm that there was a war scare at once, one which by no means diminished when a little later he showed Bismarck the door. As already noted, the refounding of the empire was Bismarck's work. To achieve his purpose he had to again quote Colonel Malleson defied parliaments and people.
Whether one agrees with it or not, no one can deny with any sincerity that it was inspired by the interests of the country, as the monarch saw them. Rebuking Bismarck's unfair attitude towards Rumania in a question concerning German investors, Prince Carol writes to his father in 1875: 'I have to put Rumania's interests above those of Germany.
To the inhabitants of these provinces Bismarck's constant appeal to the old Prussian traditions and to the achievements of the Prussian nobility could have little meaning. What did the citizens of Cologne and Aachen care about the Seven Years' War? If their ancestors took part in the war, it would be as enemies of the Kings of Prussia.
Let Germany deal with her traditional enemy in her own way. And as for France, let France believe what is, without doubt, the truth that she has nothing whatever to fear from Germany. I will not speak of the past, but the greatest thinkers in Germany to-day regret nothing so much in the history of her splendid rise as that unfortunate campaign of Bismarck's.
There was a link in Moritz Blankenburg, who was a "Dutz" friend of Bismarck's and Roon's cousin. We can understand how untenable Roon's position was when we find the Minister of War choosing as his political confidants two of the leaders of the party opposed to the Ministry to which he belonged. Ever since Roon had entered the Government there had been indeed a perpetual crisis.
And wherever we look in Bismarck's speeches, the same complaint is found which had been the eternal lamentation of Goethe the lament over the lack of faith and will of the Germans. "How will it be this time? Will it be as after the Seven Years' War, after the War of Liberation, after 1870? Will it be again all in vain?
Whether Bismarck's diplomacy was less honourable than that of the adversaries with whom he had to deal is a question to which different answers may be given.
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