e in Central Europe. The Treaty of Frankfurt in May 1871, by
which the new French Republic ceded to the German Empire the two French
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, marked the opening of a new epoch in
European history, the period of the Armed Peace, which ended in 1914. It
marked also the opening of a new epoch in Germany, some features of which
we must now examine.

Sec.4. _Germany since 1870_.--German history from 1871 to 1914 falls into two
well-defined periods. During the first period, from 1871 to 1888, Germany
was ruled by her Imperial Chancellor, Prince Bismarck. But the accession of
the present Kaiser led to a change, not in the letter, but in the spirit of
the new constitution, and since 1890, when William II. "dropped the pilot"
and selected a more amenable successor, the real control of policy has lain
with the Emperor.

The relations between Prince Bismarck and the old Emperor, who was over
ninety when he died in 1888, form a touching passage in modern history.
Although his grandson has publicly claimed for him a peculiar measure of
divine inspiration, his strength lay in his implicit confidence in his
great minister. Bismarck's attitude to him, as described in his _Memoirs_,
is rather like that of an old family retainer who has earned by long and
faithful service the right to assert his views and to pit his judgment
against his master's. His one formidable antagonist was the Empress; and
long experience, he tells us, enabled him to judge whether difficulties in
persuading the old Kaiser to adopt a given line of policy were due to
his own judgment or conceived "in the interests of domestic peace." The
faithful servant had his own appropriate methods of winning his way in
either case.

But with the new Kaiser the old minister's astuteness availed nothing,
and the story of Bismarck's curt dismissal, after thirty-eight years
of continuous service, from the post which he had created for himself,
illustrates the danger of framing a constitution to meet a particular
temporary situation. Bismarck, put out of action by his own machinery,
retired growling to his country seat, and lived to see the reversal of his
foreign policy and the exposure of Germany, through the Franco-Russian
Alliance, to the one danger he always dreaded, an attack on both flanks.

Like Germany's present rulers, Bismarck was not a scrupulous man; but
unlike them he was shrewd and far-sighted, and understood the statesmen and
the peoples