BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

The currency of the unpolitical German stereotype did not destroy hopes for a more
democratic Germany and peaceful Europe. Goadby entertained the prospect of a stable,
progressive, enlightened and spiritually regenerated Germany within a decade, built upon the
“heroic quality” of Germany’s leaders. 57 Six years after the creation of the second German
Empire, Herbert Tuttle would voice a similar belief in the “resolutely liberal” character of the
German people, but only after denouncing Bismarck’s personal rule as a farce that revealed the
German incapacity for peaceful political progress without the din of patriotic war. Tuttle
described German conservatives as mostly “dull country squires,” liberals as sycophantic and
supporting only union and nationalism, socialists as too violently progressive and progressives as
Anglophile but obnoxious to Prussian “Philistines.” Tuttle attributed the impotence of German
parliament to the fact that, unlike republican France, the monarchist foundation of the state itself
remained questionable. 58
Opinion on Bismarck’s politics and foreign policy remained divided during the 1870s and
80s. Reporting on Bismarck’s failed efforts to undermine free parliamentary speech in 1879, the
Examiner averred that behind the chancellor’s political schemes there existed an equally
reactionary plan to return Germany to protectionism and to the police state of post-Napoleonic
times. 59 But this negative picture should be weighed against later reassessments of Bismarck’s
foreign and social policies. Refuting portrayals of Bismarck as either Machiavellian or
Napoleonic, the Fortnightly Review in 1887 praised the “arbiter of Europe” for using his powers
57 Ibid., 345-46.
58 ”Parties and Politics in Germany,” Fortnightly Review 21, no. 125 (May 1877): 678-79,
682, 684, 686-87, 691, 693.
59 “Bismarck's Third Defeat and German Prospects” (15 March 1879): 328.
208