he doer of the deed, the framer of the
fact that threatened the world with a new master?

This query was not started for eighteen long years; not until the
catastrophe that threatened the House of Hohenzollern with the loss of
its noblest son, served to recall to the mind of all Europe what a
thorough hero and citizen, what a perfect, undeviating German the
crown prince had always been.

The first emperor of United Germany, the agent of the illustrious
chancellor's will, had gone to his eternal rest when the German mind
began to reflect that only a dying man stood between the late ruler
and a boy emperor! But was not that dying man the creator (if creator
there had been) of the restored Teutonic state? Did not the revived
empire spring from the races in which Prussia was incarnate? was it
not in good earnest the Hohenzollern line, the descendant of the Great
Elector that answered for the regeneration? Thence the dispute between
the partisans of Bismarck and those of Frederick III. Supposing a
creation according to both Heinrich von Sybel and the chroniclers of
French vain-gloriousness, who was the creator? The answer of history
was, "No one." The German nation--or truer still, the thought of all
Germany, for long ages, was the genuine source, it was the very soul
of the entire people that from the ancient Germania of the Roman,
breathed anew in the remnants of its primeval entity and clamored for
its old integrity.

But we must not outstrip chronology; the first record of the events of
the war of 1870, and of the mighty changes brought on thereby, is that
of Sybel, not altogether wrongly entitled an "historical monument."
Professor Sybel's five volumes do, assuredly, constitute a _history
founded on documentary evidence_, if ever such a one existed, but for
that very reason they are, perhaps, somewhat wanting in actual life.
They are fashioned after the methods employed and approved of in
bygone days, and present rather the character of a register than a
record of deeds done by living men. As far as the testimony of hard,
dry acts went, it is probably impeachable; but we then come to the
question, Is documentary evidence in such a case sufficient to give
_all_ that is true? Is not truth, where human impulses and
irrationalities are concerned, derived from sources lying higher than
the regions sacred to "Blue Books"? Whereas it was to the certificates
vouchsafed by state papers, and instruments of such like order, tha