To the Diet of 1847 the mad squire came, and during several sittings he held his peace. At last, however, when a Liberal deputy declared that Prussia had risen in arms in 1813, in the hope of getting a constitution quite as much as of expelling the French, the blond Brandenburger got leave to speak. In a voice which seemed incongruously small for his stature, but which carried far and produced the effect of being the utterance of an inflexible will, he deprecated the assertions just made, and declared that the desire to shake off foreign tyranny was a sufficient motive for the uprising in 1813. These words set the House in confusion. Liberal deputies hissed and shouted so that Bismarck could not go on; but, nothing daunted, he took a newspaper out of his pocket and read it, there in the tribune, till order was restored. Then, having added that whoever deemed that motive inadequate held Prussia’s honor cheap, he strode haughtily to his seat, amid renewed jeers and clamor. Such was Bismarck’s parliamentary baptism of fire. Before the session adjourned, the deputies had come to know him well. They discovered that the mad squire, the blunt “captain of the dikes,” was doubly redoubtable; he had strong opinions, and utter fearlessness in proclaiming them. His political creed was short,--it comprised but two clauses: “I believe in the supremacy of Prussia, and in absolute monarchy.” More royalist than the King, he opposed every concession which might diminish by a hair’s breadth the royal prerogative. Constitutional government, popular representation, whatever Liberals had been struggling and dying for since 1789, he detested. Democracy, and especially German democracy, he scoffed at. For sixty years reformers had been railing at the absurdities of the Old Régime; they had denounced the injustice of the privileged classes; they had made odious the tyranny of paternalism. Bismarck entered the lists as the champion of “divine right,” and first proved his strength by exposing the defects of democracy.