nine o'clock." Now is the time to fight and
to stand together. This is just as it is in military matters--and I
am glad to see among you many who have experience in such things.
Before joining an attack in war we do not ask: Shall we follow our
progressive or our reactionary neighbor? We advance when the drum
beats the signal, and so we should in national affairs forget all
party differences, and form a solid phalanx hurling all our spears,
reactionary, progressive, and despotic alike, against the enemy.

If we agree on this--and the dangers of the future are compelling us
to do so--we shall win our women and children for the same strict
sense of nationality. And if our women are with us, and our youths, we
are saved for all time. This is one of our present tasks, to give a
national education to our children. I am confident that the German
women possess all the necessary qualifications for this task. I shall
ask you, therefore, to join me in a toast: The German Women in the
Grandduchy of Posen! And may the German idea take an ever firmer hold
in your country!

LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR AND THE EMPIRE!

April 1,1895

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND VON MACH, PH.D.

[The eightieth birthday of Prince Bismarck was celebrated as a
national holiday everywhere in Germany. Not less than 5,250 youths
from the universities and academies visited Friedrichsruh on April 1
to bear witness, before the "old man" of Germany, to their love for
the emperor and the empire. After receiving a delegation from the
faculties of all the universities, Bismarck addressed the students as
follows:]

Gentlemen! I have just heard from the lips of your teachers, the
leaders of higher education, an appreciation of my past, which means
much to me. From your greeting, I infer a promise for the future, and
this means even more for a man of my years than his love of
approbation. You will be able, at least many of you, to live according
to the sentiments which your presence here today reveals, and to do so
to the middle of the next century, while I have long been condemned to
inactivity and belong to the days that are past. I find consolation in
this observation, for the German is not so constituted that he could
entirely dismiss in his old age what in his youth inspired him. Forty
and sixty years hence you will not hold exactly the same views as
today, but the seed planted in your young hearts by the reign of
Emperor William I. will bear fruit, and, even when