1838
(JS) He wrote to his father that he was trying to evade military service by claiming injury (which the official edition of his papers omitted).
A freak accident at Huskar Colliery near Barnsley. The investigation shocked the reading public and made public working practices including children as young as 5 working in mines. The Earl of Shaftesbury led a Royal Commission. Led to Coal Mines Act 1842 and Factories Act 1844.
Working Men's Charter written — 'The Chartists' movement. They were not Jacobins or socialists, they wanted democratic votes and a secret ballot. In the 1840s, Peelite reforms and the Anti-Corn Law League (which had middle class support) sucked support from Chartists.
1838-9 Bismarck discharged his military obligation with a single year of officer training.
(JS) He visited his mother in Berlin who was terminally ill and begged her to help him find a better position. She wrote to his father who made plans to hand over estates to him and withdraw to Schönhausen. 18 July Otto's father wrote to Otto's older brother, Bernhard: 'While Otto was here he really opened his heart to his mother. He not only told her how he loathed the whole business of public administration, that it was robbing him of all taste for life, and if he were to suffer almost his whole life long he might in the end become district president with an income of two thousand [taler] but could never hope to be happy. He besought his mother most urgently to give him another position. He offered, if we were to build another sugar factory, to go to Magdeburg and study the manufacturing process in practical terms and then run the factory in Kniephof... I have decided to bequeath the estates there [Kniephof] to you both as your property and derive my own livelihood from Schönhausen alone.'
1838 Wrote his father that he was studying agriculture and included a copy of a letter he'd written to his cousin, Caroline von Bismarck, and later sent another copy to his fiancée. A passage has become one of the most quoted he ever wrote: 'The activity of the individual civil servant among us is very rarely independent, even that of the highest, and for the rest their activity confines itself to pushing the administrative machinery along the tracks already laid down. The Prussian civil servant resembles a player in an orchestra. He may be the first violin or play the triangle; without oversight or influence on the whole he must play his part, as it is set down, whether he think it good or bad. I, however, want to make my own music in my own way or none at all... My pride bids me command rather than obey.' Statesmen are moved not by patriotism but by 'pride, the desire to command, to become admired and renowned. I confess I am not free from these passions.' He wrote of the advantages of states with 'free constitutions' where people like Peel and O'Connell could rise. 'In order to take part in public life, one must be a salaried and dependent servant of the state, one must belong completely to the bureaucratic caste.' And he wrote that the prospect of an outstanding public role 'attracts me with a force that rules out all deliberation, as light attracts mosquitoes.' (KL: In 1835-6 he fell in love with this second cousin, Caroline, but she was already engaged.) Cf. letter from Keyserling, 25/2/55: 'Do you not remember what in probably lucid moments you prophesied to me then [university]: a constitution must come, that's the way to outward honours, at the same time one must be inwardly devout?'.