e
tragic nature of the fall, for it was a struggle between a strong
personality and the unknown, but irresistible, laws of fate.

The historic quarrel between the Emperor and his Chancellor was not
merely the inevitable clash between two dispositions fundamentally
different, but between--to adapt the expression of a modern poet--"an
age that was dying and one that was coming to birth." Old Prussia was
giving place to New Germany. The atmosphere of war had changed to an
atmosphere of peace. The standards of education and comfort were
rising fast. The old German idealism was being pushed aside by
materialism and commercialism, and the thoughts of the nation were
turning from problems of philosophy and art to problems of practical
science and experiment. Thought was to be followed by action. Mankind,
after conversing with the ancients for centuries, now began to
converse with one another. The desire for national expansion, if it
could not be gratified by conquest, was to be satisfied by the spread
of German influence, power, activity, and enterprise in all parts of
the world. Such a collision of the ages is tragedy on the largest
scale, for nothing can be more tragic--more inevitable or
inexorable--than the march of Progress.

The natures of the two men were, in important respects, fundamentally
different. Bismarck's nature was prosaic, primitive, unscrupulous,
domineering: a type which in an English schoolboy would be described
as a bully, with the modification that while the bully in an English
school is always depicted as a coward at heart (a supposition,
however, by no means always borne out in after-life), Bismarck had the
courage of a bull-dog. Moreover, Bismarck was a Conservative, a
statesman of expediency. The Emperor is a man of principle; and as
expediency, in a world of change, is a note of Conservatism, so, in
the same world, is principle the _leit-motiv_ of Liberalism. To call
the Emperor a man of principle may appear to be at variance with
general opinion as founded on exceptional occurrences, but these do
not supply sufficient material for a fair judgment, and there are many
acts of his reign which show him to be Liberal in disposition.

Not, it need hardly be said, Liberal in the English political sense.
Liberalism in England--the two-party country--usually means a strong
desire to vote against a Conservative on the assumption that the
Conservative is nearly always completely wrong and never completely