During seven years Bismarck held this outpost, winning no outward victory, but storing a vast amount of knowledge about all the states of the Confederation, their rulers and public men, which was subsequently invaluable to him. His dispatches to the Prussian Secretary of State, his reports to the King, form a body of diplomatic correspondence unmatched in fulness, vigor, directness, and insight. With him, there was no ambiguity, no diplomatic circumlocution, no German prolixity. He sketched in indelible outlines the portraits, corporal or mental, of his colleagues. He criticised the policy of Prussia with a brusqueness which must have startled his superior. He reviewed at longer range the political tendencies of Europe. Officially, he kept strictly within the limits of his instructions; but his own personality represented more than he could yet officially declare,--Prussia’s ambition to become the leader of Germany. In all his dispatches, and in all places where caution did not prescribe silence, he reiterated his Cato warning, “Austria must be ousted from Germany.” Do not suppose, however, that Bismarck’s political greatness was then discerned. Probably, had you inquired of Germans forty years ago, “Who among you is the coming statesman?” not one would have replied, “Bismarck.” At the opera, we cannot mistake the hero, because the moonlight obligingly follows him over the stage; in real life, the hero passes for the most part unrecognized, until his appointed hour; but the historian’s duty is to show how the heroic qualities were indubitably latent in him long before the world perceived them. In 1859 Bismarck was appointed ambassador at St. Petersburg, where he stayed three years, when he was transferred to Paris. This completed his apprenticeship, for in September, 1862, he was recalled to Berlin to be minister-president. His promotion had long been mooted. The new King William--a practical, rigid monarch, with no Liberal visions, no desire to please everybody--had been for eighteen months in conflict with his Parliament. He had determined to reorganize the Prussian army; the Liberals insisted that, as Parliament was expected to vote appropriations, it should know how they were spent. William at last turned to Bismarck to help him subjugate the unruly deputies, and Bismarck, with a true vassal’s loyalty, declared his readiness to serve as “lid to the saucepan.” Very soon the Liberals began to compare him with Strafford, and the King with Charles I, but neither of them quailed. “Death on the scaffold, under certain circumstances, is as honorable,” Bismarck said, “as death on the battlefield. I can imagine worse modes of death than the axe.” Hitherto he had strenuously maintained the first article of his creed,--“I believe in the supremacy of Prussia;” henceforth he upheld with equal vigor the second,--“I believe in the autocracy of the King.”