Like Frederick the Severe, this Bismarck is very human indeed, and has his crying weaknesses, and his enemies, God knows, tried for forty years to get rid of him by intrigue, often by assassination; yet until his great duty is done he must hold firmly to his place, must do the work which brings him no peace, or rest, only trouble year after year. * * * * * ¶ Throughout the amazing story, no matter which way we travel, we always return to a profound sense of this giant's will and his massive knowledge of human life, expressed in his ability to force the shrewdest men in Europe to do his bidding. His sense of power is so supreme that sometimes it really seems that, as Bismarck himself often sets forth, his authority fell from heaven. Here, there is a direct harking back to the ancient days in the Alt Mark, to the Circle of Stendal with its little town of Bismarck, on the Biese, where stands the ancient masonry dating from 1203, and known as the "Bismarck Louse." ¶ The strange legend of the Bismarck Louse tells worlds of the ancient Bismarck power, in those far-off times, helps us in the year 1915 to grasp certain obscure phases of the Bismarck racial strength, inherited by Otto von Bismarck. ¶ This medieval Bismarck Tower received its name from a gigantic louse which inhabited this place, and had to be fed and appeased; therefore, every day the superstitious peasants of the district brought huge quantities of meat and drink, for the monster's food. It is needless to add that these visits were encouraged by the Bismarck lord of the soil, in Alt Mark;--and here you see already the cunning in managing human nature so characteristic of the Bismarck genius. ¶ The purely social application of this gossip may, however, be eyed with suspicion, as a French canard. It was so easy for "Figaro" to libel the Bismarck of 1871, whereupon the whole French press followed and barked at the Iron Chancellor's heels. He was caricatured, spit at, reviled, depicted as the beast-man in Europe. ¶ For one thing, Bismarck knew France was the richest nation in Europe, also that she had ambition for the left bank of the Rhine; and to General Sheridan, who chanced to be at Sedan and Gravelotte on official business, Bismarck said, "The only way to keep France from waging war in the near future is to empty her pockets." ¶ French newspaper editors lashed themselves into insanity trying to invent new names for the man who had brought the downfall of the Empire, at Sedan; the man who at Versailles was arranging the hardest terms of peace ever conceived by a diplomatic Shylock, bent on having his pound of flesh.