her the powers, who are primarily interested in
the Mediterranean and the Levante, will make their decisions and come
to terms, if they choose, or go to war with Russia about them. We are
not immediately called upon to do either. Every great power which is
trying to influence or to restrain the policies of other countries in
matters which are beyond the sphere of its interests is playing
politics beyond the bounds which God has assigned to it. Its policy is
one of force and not of vital interests. It is working for prestige.
We shall not do this. If Oriental crises happen, we shall wait before
taking our position until the powers who have greater interests at
stake than we have declared themselves. There is, therefore, no
reason, gentlemen, why you should look upon our present situation with
unusual gravity, assuming this to be the cause of our asking for the
mighty increase of our armaments which the military bill contemplates.
I should like to separate the question of reestablishing the
_Landwehr_ of the second grade, in short the big military bill and the
financial bill, from the question of our present situation. It has to
do, not with a temporary and transient arrangement, but with the
permanent invigoration of the German empire.

That no temporary arrangement is contemplated will be perfectly clear,
I believe, when I ask you to survey with me the dangers of war which
we have met in the past forty years without having become nervously
excited at any one time.

In the year 1848, when many dikes and flood gates were broken, which
until then had directed the peaceful flow of countless waters, we had
to dispose of two questions freighted with the danger of war. They
concerned Poland and Schleswig-Holstein. The first shouts after the
Martial days were: war with Russia for the rehabilitation of Poland!
Soon thereafter the danger was perilously near of being involved in a
great European war on account of Schleswig-Holstein. I need not
emphasize how the agreement of Olmuetz, in 1850, prevented a great
conflagration--a war on a gigantic scale. Then there followed two
years of greater quiet out of general ill feeling, at the time when I
first was ambassador in Frankfort. In 1853 the earliest symptoms of
the Crimean War made themselves felt. This war lasted from 1853 to
1856, and during this whole time we were near the edge of the cliff, I
will not say the abyss, whence it was intended to draw us into the
war. I remember th