Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/308

 and American institutions as affording no adequate theatre and no adequate rewards for great actors.

Yet multitudes of sober-suited American equalitarians read his duke-thronged novels and followed his parliamentary opposition to "democracy," as they had previously followed Frederick the Great and Napoleon, as they were soon to follow Bismarck, as they were later to follow William II—with fascinated interest and secret iniquitous adoration. When in his old age he came home from the Congress of Berlin, flushed with his great diplomatic victory, having manifestly maneuvred the spoils of the Russo-Turkish War from the very paws of the Russian Bear, even Lowell's old contempt for "Dizzy" struggled vainly against his new admiration. "I think," he said, "if Beaconsfield weren't a Jew, people would think him rather fine." Bismarck, who had studied with the keen, hard eye of a Real-Politiker all the celebrated contestants at that famous jousting, remarked without qualification: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann. . . ." (the old Jew, he is the man that understands the realities in the situation and deals with them effectively).

Bismarck frankly admired, most of us furtively admire, men who get what they go after, whatever it is. Though the better part of mankind respects principles, the greater part of mankind responds, in spite of principles, with the deep ungovernable applause of its primitive nature to exhibitions of successful power. Something within us instinctively