These and similar objections to democracy Bismarck urged with a sarcasm and directness hitherto unknown in German politics. When half the world was repeating the words “Liberalism,” “Constitution,” “Equality,”--as if the words themselves possessed magic to regenerate society,--he insisted that firm nations must be based upon facts, not phrases. He had the twofold advantage of invariably separating the actual from the apparent, and of being opposed by the most incompetent Liberals in Europe. However noble the ideals of the German reformers, the men themselves were singularly incapable of dealing with realities. Nor should this surprise us; for they had but recently broken away from the machine we have described, and as they had not yet a new machine to work in, they whirled to and fro in vehement confusion, the very rigidity of their previous restraint increasing their dogmatism and their discord. The revolution of 1848 soon put them to the ordeal. The German Liberals aimed at national unity under a constitution. Like their brothers in Austria and Italy, they enjoyed a temporary triumph; but they could not construct. Their Parliament became a cave of the winds. Their schemes clashed. By the beginning of 1850 the old order was restored. During this stormy crisis, Bismarck, as deputy in two successive Diets, had resolutely withstood the popular tide. He regarded the revolutionists as men in whom the qualities of knave, fool, and maniac alternately ruled; the revolution itself, he said, had no other motive than “a lust of theft.” One of its leaders he dismissed as a “phrase-watering-pot.” The right of assemblages he ridiculed as furnishing democracy with bellows; a free press he stigmatized as a blood-poisoner. When the imperial crown was offered to the King of Prussia, Bismarck argued against accepting it; he would not see his King degraded to the level of a mere “paper president.”