"Chinese" Gordon carried with him wood of the real Cross, as he believed, and read his Bible day by day, up to the last, confident that he was in the charge of some unseen power for good, as against the destroying African tribes around Khartum. Henry M. Stanley's books are honeycombed with appeals to God as his guide and protector; he believed that God was with him in "Darkest Africa," would see him through at the price of how many negro murders it mattered not, warding off fever, discouragement, starvation, and standing ever on the white man's side. In America, where the "Divine-right" of kings is a subject of political ridicule, it is a fact that in the courts we raise our right hand and swear to tell the whole truth; our marriage ceremonies are consecrated; and the last word at the grave is that God is our refuge; we have our chaplains who speak of God on our battleships, and in our armies; in the Autumn the President of the United States invokes a blessing for bountiful crops, and returns the Nation's thanks to God for these favors. ¶ All this is no more illogical than that Bismarck should insist that the Hohenzollerns, his masters, obtained their right to rule as a direct dispensation from high heaven, as against the Hapsburgs, who were Prussia's rivals. Bismarck preached his theological-political dogma with intense earnestness during his long life; and at last the people must have been impressed with his arguments--or was it that he forced them to his way of thinking? CHAPTER XII By Blood and Iron 41 William I writes his abdication, and is about to quit in disgust; Bismarck says, "Tear that letter up!" ¶ Along about 1857, our poor William IV lost his mind; for four years he continued a nervous wreck; his brother, William I, was the sick man's representative as Prussian king; and in '61, when William IV died, William I became sovereign ruler of pugnacious Prussia. ¶ The common people welcomed William I with open arms, that is to say, adoring a fighting man, and long disappointed by the timidity and vacillation of kind-hearted William IV, with his church-building plans and his Jerusalem bishoprics, it seemed as though the reactionary character of Prussian political life might now come to an end. Frederick's many-sidedness was in sharp contrast to William's one-sidedness; Frederick's unfixed decision is now expressed by William's unvarying will. Where Frederick had been brilliant and imaginative, William was cold and solid. ¶ William was now over sixty, at which age men's lives, as a rule, are in eclipse. Yet this man of destiny had still in store the making of a modern Cæsar. He was to become king of kings, ruler of an empire whose individual units were commanded not by democrats trying new ambitions; but instead, many monarchs were to proclaim, "William, Emperor of United Germany!"