ggles with the Catholics told upon his health and spirits,
and he was obliged to seek long periods of rest and recreation on his
estates,--sometimes, under great embarrassments and irritations,
threatening to resign, to which his imperial master, grateful and
dependent, would never under any circumstances consent. But the
prince-president of the ministers and chancellor of the empire was
loaded down with duties--in his cabinet, in his office, and in the
parliament--most onerous to bear, and which no other man in Germany was
equal to. His burdens at times were intolerable: his labors were
prodigious, and the opposition he met with was extremely irritating to a
man accustomed to have his own way in everything.

Another thing gave him great solicitude, taxed to the utmost his fertile
brain; and that was the rising and wide-spreading doctrines of
Socialism,--which was to Germany what Nihilism is to Russia and
Fenianism was to Ireland; based on discontent, unbelief, and desperate
schemes of unpractical reform, leading to the assassination even of
emperors themselves. How to deal with this terrible foe to all
governments, all laws, and all institutions was a most perplexing
question. At first he was inclined to the most rigorous measures, to a
war of utter extermination; but how could he deal with enemies he could
neither see nor find, omnipresent and invisible, and unscrupulous as
satanic furies,--fanatics whom no reasoning could touch and no laws
control, whether human or divine? As experience and thought enlarged his
mental vision, he came to the conclusion that the real source and spring
of that secret and organized hostility which he deplored, but was unable
to reach and to punish, were evils in government and evils in the
structure of society,--aggravating inequality, grinding poverty,
ignorance, and the hard struggle for life. Accordingly, he devoted his
energies to improve the general condition of the people, and make the
struggle for life easier. In his desire to equalize burdens he resorted
to indirect rather than direct taxation,--to high tariffs and protective
duties to develop German industry; throwing to the winds his earlier
beliefs in the theories of the Manchester school of political economy,
and all speculative ideas as to the blessings of free-trade for the
universe in general. He bought for the government the various Prussian
railroads, in order to have uniformity of rates and remove vexatious
discriminati