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Henceforth he became quite a different man: he no longer gave way to the people, and ceased to watch the breath of popular favour; but he changed the loose and licentious democracy, which had hitherto existed, into a stricter aristocratic, or rather monarchical, form of government.
The city claimed, moreover, the general provisions of the "Great Privilege" of the Lady Mary, the Magna Charta, which, according to the monarchical party, had been legally abrogated by Maximilian.
There was no more chance of Reform under the existing régime than of 'a thaw in Zembla, to borrow a famous simile. Cobbett was right in his assertion that the measures and manners of George IV.'s reign did more to shake the long-settled ideas of the people in favour of monarchical government than anything which had happened since the days of Cromwell.
It has always been unfortunate for the peace and happiness of mankind, under all monarchical and despotic governments, in every age of the world, that, through some depraved and unaccountable perversion of public sentiment, those who are not born to greatness have had no means of attaining to it except as heroes in war.
No doubt it was absurd enough in the Abbe Sieyes to propose that a new institution, inheriting no reverence, and made holy by no religion, should be created to fill the sort of post occupied by a constitutional king in nations of monarchical history.
Those lofty ideas of monarchical power which were very commonly adopted during that age, and to which the ambiguous nature of the English constitution gave so plausible an appearance, were firmly rivetted in Charles; and however moderate his temper, the natural and unavoidable prepossessions of self-love, joined to the late uniform precedents in favor of prerogative, had made him regard his political tenets as certain and uncontroverted.
The third predominant trait of Bismarck's character that stamps him as a soldier his unquestioning obedience to monarchical discipline is so closely bound up with the peculiarly German conceptions of the functions and the Purpose of the State, that it will be better to approach this Part of his nature from the political instead of the military side.
A war of extermination was unanimously resolved upon, and by one o'clock in the morning all shades of opinion were merged and drowned, together with every glimmer of sense, in a flaming bowl of punch. "We have had a fine Monarchical and Religious jollification," remarked an illustrious reveler in the doorway as he went.
Moreover, the great island State was passing through ministerial and financial difficulties which robbed her of all the fruits of her naval triumphs and made her diplomacy at Amiens the laughing-stock of the world. When monarchical ideas were thus discredited, it was idle to expect peace.
It had no place in the original constitution of Carthage, but, like the Spartan ephorate, it originated in an aristocratic opposition to the monarchical elements of that constitution.
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