avoid,
that he was being misled by his Ministers, and the attitude of the
country misrepresented to him; even had they known as well as we do that
the Ministers were only carrying out the orders of the King, they could
not well have said so. Bismarck, however, did not attempt to conceal the
truth; the address, he said, touched the King; the acts complained of
were done in the name of the King; they were setting themselves against
him. The contest was, who was to rule in Prussia, the House of
Hohenzollern or the House of Parliament. He was at once accused of
disloyalty; he was, they said, protecting himself behind the person of
the sovereign, but, of course, it was impossible for him not to do so.
The whole justification for his action was that he was carrying out the
King's orders. What was at the root of the conflict but the question,
whether in the last resort the will of the King or the majority of the
House should prevail? To have adopted the English practice, to have
refrained from mentioning the King's name, would have been to adopt the
very theory of the Constitution for which the House was contending, the
English theory that the sovereign has neither the right of deciding nor
responsibility; it would have been to undermine the monarchical side of
the Constitution which Bismarck was expressly defending. The King
himself never attempted to avoid the responsibility; in a public speech
he had already said that the army organisation was his own work: "It is
my own and I am proud of it; I will hold firmly to it and carry it
through with all my energy." In his answer to the address from the
House, both on this and on later occasions, he expressly withdrew the
assumption that he was not well informed or that he did not approve of
his Ministers' action.

The address was carried by a majority of 255 to 68; the King refused to
receive it in person. The House then proceeded to throw out a Bill for
military reorganisation which was laid before them; they adopted a
resolution that they reserved for later discussion the question, for
what part of the money illegally spent in 1862 they would hold the
Ministry personally responsible. They then proceeded to the Budget of
1863, and again rejected the army estimates; they refused the money
asked for raising the salaries of the ambassadors (Bismarck himself,
while at St. Petersburg, had suffered much owing to the insufficiency of
his salary, and he wished to spare his successors a