The dictator was the Iron Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, who was called in for the purpose in 1862 and who for the next twenty-eight years dominated Prussia, Germany, his king, and European politics. The aims of this great hulk of a man, blunt to the point of rudeness, Prussian to the marrow, were cynically explicit. “The great problems of our times will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions,” he scoffingly told the Prussian Landtag, “but by iron and blood.” It took Bismarck six years and three wars to reach his goal.
Under Wilhelm 1
