icited in order to exterminate liberalism. He persistently
gave it to thwart Austria and to preserve Prussia (then in no brilliant
military condition) from having to bear the brunt of Muscovite wrath,
which he cunningly judged to be of more lasting importance in the coming
struggles than the friendship of Western Europe. At a time when European
politicians considered that he was the mouthpiece of schemers for a
Russo-French alliance in his repeated and successful endeavors to gain
Napoleon's good-will, he was adroitly sounding the French emperor's mind
and character. He soon convinced himself that it was shallow and
fantastic, and he built upon this conviction one of the most hazardous
designs which ever originated in a brain observant of realities--that
identical design which eventually led Prussia, some years later, first
to Schleswig and then to Sadowa, with the "arbiter of Europe," as
Napoleon was then called, stolidly looking on! And what is one to say of
the four years of parliamentary conflicts (1862 to 1866), during which
no one doubted but that his object in life and his _raison d'etre_
consisted in a reinstatement of the Prussian king on the absolute throne
of his ancestors--a reaction from all that was progressive to the
grossest abuses of despotism? All this time he was fighting a desperate
battle against backstairs influences, which with true instinct were
deprecating and counteracting his schemes of aggrandizement and national
reorganization. It is clear, on looking back to that period which has
left such indelible marks on the judgment of many well-meaning liberals,
that his exaggerated tone of aggressive defence in the Prussian Landtag,
the furious onslaught of his harangues, were intended to silence the
tongues at court which denounced him as a demagogue and a radical.
Paradoxical as it may sound, one may safely assert that nothing more
effectually helped King William in his later foreign policy, than the
opinion pervading all Europe in 1864 and 1866, that, having lost all
hold upon the minds of his people, weakened and crippled in every sense
of the word by Bismarckian folly, his Majesty could never strike a blow.

There was peace and concord in Germany between 1866 and 1877. Without
becoming a liberal, and while opposing every attempt to outstep certain
limits, Bismarck created and rather enjoyed an alliance with the
majority formed in his favor by the national liberals and a moderate
section of the co