no more enjoyment out of it in the future, and may in the mean while lose it entirely-or die, and thus fail to enjoy it at all.

It is a curious fact in this connection, to which I have before called attention in this "Review," that the rate of interest has never permanently fallen much below the limit at which a young man would no longer be able to gain an interest equal to his capital during his probable life. Thirty or forty years ahead is about as far as the average man appears to look when he considers whether he shall enjoy his earnings now or save them for the future.

A general conclusion from this view of things is that the immediate cause of the increase of capital is the interest which may be gained upon it. Lessening this interest by a tax, we lessen the motive to accumulate in a far greater ratio than we would lessen the disposition to produce by levying a corresponding tax on production. The reason is that, to the individual, accumulation is less necessary than production.

Therefore, looking at the matter in the broadest light, the result is that a tax on accumulated property may be considered as paid by the owner, or by the public who get the benefit of the capital, according to our point of comparison. The capitalist may not be directly able to charge a higher rate of interest, and thus, considering only the immediate effects of the tax, he may have to pay the whole of it himself. But the result of this will be that the increase of capital will be discouraged; a scarcity will then result which will raise the rate of interest; and it may happen that the scarcity will continue until this rate is increased by the whole amount of the tax. It is of course impossible to lay down any exact law of the subject, like that which governs production. The very fact that the increase of capital is very slow and includes the work of a whole generation in its scope, renders our conclusions a little indefinite. But I think there can be no reasonable doubt that taxes on accumulated property do in the main act in this way. And, a point especially to be borne in mind is, that in our reasoning we have supposed the tax to be levied on capital universally, without any exception whatever. Of course, a tax levied specially upon capital employed in certain designated ways might be wholly or partially transferred to the consumers of the product in the same way as a tax on production.

SIMON NEWCOMB.

PRINCE BISMARCK, AS A FRIEND OF AMERICA

AND AS A STATESMAN.

PART II.

PRINCE BISMARCK passes for a man of inflexible character, selfassured, without ever a doubt or scruple concerning either his aims or his results. Many suppose that he must look back upon his deeds and creations as on the seventh day God the Father contemplated the world he had made. This I will not dispute. But he has also hours of weakness, moments of apparent or real dissatisfaction with his own performances or with his fortune-sad, or rather depressed moods, which take the form of despondency. The strong Prince Bismarck is then transformed into a wearied Prince Hamlet. Anon he strongly reminds us, in certain respects, of Achilles sulking in his tent before Ilion, or of the exclamation of the preacher, Solomon: "I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun." It may be that these moods are the expression of a mystic process in his soul, of a sentiment akin to that of the philosopher who said, "The more I know, the better do I see how little I know"; but, possibly, too, they are simply the result of physical causes, overexcitement, exhaustion, disturbance of the nervous system.

One evening at Varzin, after contemplating for a while the darkening horizon, he complained to us that he had derived little pleasure or satisfaction from his political labors, which had won for him no friends, which had brought happiness to no one, either to himself, to his family, or to others. We expressed dissent, but he went on to say that "on the contrary, they had made many unhappy. But for me three great wars would not have occurred, eighty thousand men would not have fallen in battle, and parents, brothers,

sisters, widows, would not have mourned." "Nor sweethearts," some one added. "Nor sweethearts," he repeated, in monotone. "That, however, I have settled with God. Still I have reaped little or no happiness from all that I have done; but, on the contrary, much vexation, anxiety, weariness, and ill usage." He continued for a time in the same strain. The rest of us were silent, and I was surprised. Subsequently I learned that of late years he has repeatedly expressed himself to the same effect.

In his correspondence, too, we find evidences of this Hamlet mood, and at a rather early period of his life. When, in 1859, Austria was defeated in the war with France and Italy, and Prussia was preparing to help her, Bismarck, who rightly thought that no good would come of it, but who, at that time holding a subordinate position, was unable to revoke a step that afterward was rendered unnecessary by the Peace of Villafranca, wrote as follows: "God's will be done! but the whole thing is simply a question of time. Nations and individuals, folly and wisdom, war and peace, come and go like the waves, but the sea remains. Truly, there is in this world nothing but hypocrisy and jugglery; and whether it is a fever or a bullet that does away this mask of flesh, off it must come, sooner or later, and then an Austrian and a Prussian will be so much alike, provided they are of the same stature, that it will not be easy to distinguish them. Even fools and wise men, when reduced to skeletons, are very much alike. This consideration, it is true, does away with special patriotism, but even now we should be driven to despair were our happiness to depend on that."

We find in these utterances much that points toward a characteristic trait, which forms the groundwork of the whole nature and action of our hero, and on which I propose to throw a little light. In him, the sense of the vanity of all human and earthly things is associated with the belief that beyond them or within them is a Something higher, a firm, everlasting stay and comfort for toiling, fighting, suffering man; above the incessant changes of terrestrial things, a divine loadstar that never quits its place, whose light is unalterable; on this he must keep his eyes ever fixed if he would at all times find the right way to that which will afford peace and safety to himself and to those for whom he labors, and fights, and suffers. In other words, Bismarck is a God-fearing man who seeks his strength in religion, who bases his political action upon religion, and who lives in the conviction that death is only the passage into another life, for which the present should be a preparation.

On his first appearance upon the stage of politics he expressed this conviction in the most definite terms. On June 15, 1847, he made a speech in the Landtag, in which, among other things, he said: "I am of the opinion that the idea of the Christian state is as old as the ci-devant Holy Roman Empire, as old as any European state; that it is the very soil in which those states struck root; and that the state which would have its permanence insured, which would even justify its own existence, must rest on the basis of religion. To me, the words 'by the grace of God,' which Christian potentates put after their names, are no empty sound; but, therein, I see the acknowledgment that princes desire to wield the scepter which God has intrusted to them in accordance with his will. But I can only recognize as God's will what is revealed in the Christian gospels; and I hold that I am justified in calling that a Christian state which sets itself the task of realizing the teaching of Christianity. If a religious basis is recognized for the state at all, that basis, in my opinion, can only be Christianity. Take away from under the state this religious basis, and you have only a casual aggregate of rights, a sort of bulwark against the war of all against all-an idea entertained by the older philosophy. But then its legislation will not refresh itself at the primal fount of everlasting truth, but will conform itself to the vague and fluctuating notions of humanity that happen to be current at the time in the minds of rulers. In such a state I do not see how communistic ideas about the immorality of property, and the high ethical value of theft as an attempt at restoring man's original rights, can be denied the opportunity of asserting themselves whenever they feel in themselves the power to do so. Such ideas are esteemed rational by those who hold them; indeed, they are regarded as the highest result of human reason. Let us not, therefore, gentlemen, derogate from Christianity in the eyes of the people by showing them that it is not essential for their law-givers;* let us not deprive them of the comforting assurance that our legislation has its source in Christianity, and that the state aims at the realization of Christian teaching, though it may not always attain that end.

Thus Bismarck held that a state without a religious basis is unthinkable, that the religious basis of European states is Christianity, and that their object is the realization of Christian sentiments and of Christian habits of living. The justness of these

* The matter under debate was the conferring of active and passive electoral rights

upon Jews.

propositions is indisputable, though the orator did not make proper application of them at the time. It did not follow from the Christian character of the modern state that people must uphold an arbitrary theologico-political system which in the reign of Frederick William IV had identified itself with the idea of a Christian state and had usurped its name. Bismarck held this erroneous opinion then, but subsequently he repudiated it together with other errors of his youth. But what gives special significance to this speech is the stress he lays upon revelation in view of the instability of earthly truth. Here we discover a marked feature of his character. Certitude is vital air for the hero, and creative action is impossible if the convictions of the worker do not rest on the firmest foundations. Luther's whole nature finds expression in the first verse of his hymn

"Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott."

There have been heroes who presumptuously or under the guidance of unconscious necessity have found in themselves the law of their conduct, and then would fain make that law the law of their nation, or, like Napoleon I, of all nations. Other heroes have taken the moral code, the conscience, of their countrymen as the rule of their own life and conduct of these is Bismarck. But God dwells in the conscience of nations. With him, Kant's "Categorical Imperative," the leader of Prussian and German politics has triumphed over all hindrances to his great reformatory work. With eyes steadily fixed on him, and through intimate communion with him, who is the source of all fidelity to duty and of all moral power, he has gone on from victory to victory.

Thoughts of like tenor with the above have been again and again expressed by the Chancellor during his maturer years, both in public and in private life. When in March, 1870, there was a debate in the North German Reichstag on the abolition of capital punishment, Bismarck spoke against a measure dictated by the humanitarianism of the day. "If," he said, "I were to represent the impression the debate has made on my mind, I should say that the opponents of capital punishment overrate the value of life in this world and ascribe too great significance to death. I can understand how the death-penalty should seem harder to one who does not believe in a continuance of the individual life after the death of the body, than to one who believes in the immortality of the soul he has received from God. But when I consider the question more