ricks and Williams
of Prussia the same precautions that were taken in England against the
Georges of Hanover. These last likewise suffered from mental
disorders. And so troubled were they by their afflictions that they
were haunted by a grave inclination to prefer their native, though
unimportant hereditary throne in the Germany of their forefathers to
the far more important kingdom conferred on them by the parliamentary
decision of England. But the English, to obviate this, showed
themselves a powerful nation and respected the dynasty. Bismarck
wished to make the king absolute in Prussia; he desired that a Caesar
should reign over Germany; and to-day the king and the Caesar are
embodied in a young man who has set aside the old Chancellor, and
believes himself to have received from heaven, together with the right
to represent God on this earth, the omnipotence and omniscience of God
himself. Can it be doubted any longer that history reveals an inherent
providential justice? To-day we see it unfold itself as if to show us
that the distant perspectives of the past live in the present and
extend throughout futurity.

II.

Bismarck was on his guard against Frederick the Good, from whom a
progressive policy was expected on account of his philosophical ideas,
and a liberal and parliamentary government on account of the domestic
influences which surrounded him. Knowing the humanitarian tendencies
which sparkled in his disappointed mind, and the ascendency exercised
over his diseased heart by the loved Empress Victoria, Bismarck
availed himself of the terrible infirmity with which implacable fate
afflicted the second Lutheran Emperor of Germany, and retained the
imperial power in his own person, as though William I. were not dead.
The enormous corpse of the latter, like that of Frederick Barbarossa,
made a subject for analogous legends by German tradition, was replaced
by another corpse, and in the decomposition consequent to his
frightful infirmity, the unfortunate Frederick III. seems to have
realized the title of a celebrated Spanish drama, "To Govern After
Death" (_Reinar Despues de Morir_). All that he could do, when already
ravaged by cancer, when the microbes of a terrible disease, like the
worms of the sepulchre, were attacking and destroying him, was to open
up a vista to timid hope, and to publish certain promises animated by
an exalted humaneness, in spite of and unknown to the Chancellor who
was not consulted i