Not least interesting to a biographer are those last years of Bismarck’s life, between March, 1890, and his death, on July 30, 1898, which he passed in eclipse. To be dismissed by a young sovereign who, but for him, might have been merely a petty German prince,--to be told that he, the master throne-maker, was unnecessary to the callow apprentice,--galled the Titan’s heart. Eight years he was destined to endure this mortification; and although his countrymen everywhere hailed him as their hero, the fact of dismissal gave him no repose. Europe has seen no similar spectacle since she bound Napoleon, Prometheus-like, on St. Helena. But Napoleon, chafing his life away there, had at least the satisfaction of reflecting that it took all Europe, allied with Russia’s blizzards and Spain’s heats, to conquer him. Bismarck, storming in his exile from power, felt now scorn, now hate, for the “young fellow” (as he called him) who had turned him out. Here, if ever, Nemesis showed her work. Bismarck’s whole energy had been bent for fifty years on fortifying the autocracy of the Prussian monarchs; and now a young autocrat run from this mould bade him go--and he went. We may believe that it did not solace Bismarck to find that the “young fellow” could get on without him; or to see that in England Gladstone, six years his elder, led his nation till long past eighty; Gladstone,--whom he had so often jeered at as an empty rhetorician,--England, which he despised as the home of representative government. Could it be that constitutionalism was kinder than despotism to master statesmen? A great man we may surely pronounce him, long to be the wonder of a world in which greatness of any kind is rare. If you ask, “How does he stand beside Washington and Lincoln?” it must be admitted that his methods would have made them blush, but that his patriotism was not less enduring than theirs. With the materials at hand he fashioned an empire; it is futile to speculate whether another, by using different tools, could have achieved the same result. Bismarck knew that though his countrymen might talk eloquently about liberty, they loved to be governed; he knew that their genius was mechanical, and he triumphed by directing them along the line of their genius. He would have failed had he appealed to the love of liberty, by appealing to which Cavour freed Italy; or to the love of glory, by appealing to which Napoleon was able to convert half of Europe into a French province. Bismarck knew that his Prussians must be roused in a different way.