an families, who thought they were the highest nobility
in all the land, or a money-maker complaining that Frankfort was no
longer, as it had been, the financial center of southern Germany. Here
Bismarck gave full reign to his sarcastic humor. He had spent years in
Frankfort as the representative of the defunct "Bundestag," and had no
end of funny anecdotes about the aristocratic pretensions of the
patrician burghers of that ancient free city, and about their lofty
wrath at the incorporation of that commonwealth in the Prussian
monarchy.

_Forcing the War with Austria_

Then he began to tell me about the great difficulties he had been
obliged to overcome in bringing about the decisive struggle with
Austria. One of the most serious of these difficulties, as he said,
consisted in the scrupulous hesitancy of old King William to consent
to anything that seemed to be in any sense unconstitutional or not in
harmony with the strictest notion of good faith. In our conversation
Bismarck constantly called the king "der alte Herr"--"the old
gentleman," or, as it might also have been translated, "the old
master." One moment he would speak of the old gentleman with something
like sentimental tenderness, and then again in a tone of familiar
freedom which smacked of anything but reverential respect. He told me
anecdotes about him which made me stare, for at the moment I could not
help remembering that I was listening to the prime minister of the
crown, to whom I was an entire stranger and who knew nothing of my
discretion or sense of responsibility.

[Illustration: KAISER WILHELM I

FROM THE PAINTING BY GUSTAV RICHTER
_Photographed by the Berlin Photographic Co._]

As if we had been confidential chums all our lives, he gave me, with
apparently the completest abandon and exuberant vivacity, inside views
of the famous "conflict" period between the crown and the Prussian
parliament, when, seeing the war with Austria inevitably coming, he
had, without legislative authorization, spent millions upon millions
of the public funds upon the army in preparation for the great
crisis; how the liberal majority of the chambers, and an indignant
public opinion which did not recognize the great object of national
unification in view, had fiercely risen up against that arbitrary
stretch of power; how the king himself had recoiled from such a breach
of the constitution; how the king had apprehended a new revolution
which might cost each of them