No. 135.
Mr. Bancroft to Mr. Fish.
Berlin, December 4, 1871. (Received Dec. 26.)
Sir: The session of the German Parliament was terminated on Saturday evening. The bill which with logical impartiality applied the principle of equality to all places and all persons in regard to public utterances on political subjects, obtained on the second reading a majority of seventy-one, and a still larger majority on the final vote.
In the course of the debate on the second reading, Mr. Von Lutz, the most important member of the present ministry of Bavaria, gave an account of an official interview which he had two years ago with the Roman Catholic bishop of Passau. In the course of it he remarked:
The bishop at that time made to me a thorough political exposition, in which he explained that, do what one would, the church strives for supremacy in the state. It had up to this time made the experiment with all forms of government, and had never yet attained its end. Out of absolutism in the present times, nothing more was to be made. Constitutionalism had not proved itself a suitable means for establishing the dominion of the church. Now the church was striving for other means. It would next connect itself with the democracy and the masses, in order to obtain the proposed end.
This anecdote is the more remarkable, as Mr. Von Lutz is himself a Catholic, though opposed to clerical dominion in temporal things.
It is well understood in Germany that during our civil war the sympathies of the ultramontane Catholics were strongly enlisted for the southern insurgents.
The house by a majority of sixteen on the second reading of the bill, by a larger majority on the third reading, made provision for an active army of a little more than 450,000 men for three years to come. The house, in which the liberal party had a majority, yielded this point to the government, as the best mode of commanding peace. It is the general wish to prevent war by being prepared for it.
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I am, &c,