with the Prussian Chamber of Deputies over the reorganization of the
army; his previous ministers were unwilling to press the reform against
a hostile majority; and Bismarck, who was ready to assume the
responsibility, was charged with the premiership of the new cabinet.
"Under some circumstances," he said later, "death upon the scaffold is
as glorious as upon the battlefield." From 1862 to 1866 he governed
Prussia without the support of the lower chamber and without a regular
budget. He informed a committee of the Deputies that the questions of
the time were not to be settled by-debates, but by "blood and iron."

In the diplomatic field it was his effort to secure a position of
advantage for the struggle with Austria for the control of Germany,--a
struggle which, six years before, he had declared to be inevitable.
During his stay in St. Petersburg he had strengthened the friendly
feeling already subsisting between Prussia and Russia; and in 1863 he
gave the Russian government useful support in crushing a Polish
insurrection. To a remonstrance from the English ambassador, somewhat
arrogantly delivered in the name of Europe, Bismarck responded, "Who is
Europe?" While in Paris he had convinced himself that no serious
interference was to be apprehended from Napoleon. That monarch overrated
Austria; regarded Bismarck's plans, which appear to have been explained
with extraordinary frankness, as chimerical; and pronounced Bismarck
"not a serious person." Bismarck, on the other hand, privately expressed
the opinion that Napoleon was "a great unrecognized incapacity." When,
in 1863, the death of Frederick VII. of Denmark without direct heirs
raised again the ancient Schleswig-Holstein problem, Bismarck saw that
the opportunity had come for the solution of the German question.

The events of the next seven years are familiar history. In 1864 Prussia
and Austria made war on Denmark, and obtained a joint sovereignty over