ons, which only a central power could effect. In short, he
aimed to develop the material resources of the country, both to insure
financial prosperity and to remove those burdens which press heavily
on the poor.

On one point, however, his policy was inexorable; and that was to suffer
no reduction of the army, but rather to increase it to the utmost extent
that the nation could bear,--not with the view of future conquests or
military aggrandizement, as some thought, but as an imperative necessity
to guard the empire from all hostile attacks, whether from France or
Russia, or both combined. A country surrounded with enemies as Germany
is, in the centre of Europe, without the natural defences of the sea
which England enjoys, or great chains of mountains on her borders
difficult to penetrate and easy to defend, as is the case with
Switzerland, must have a superior military force to defend her, in case
of future contingencies which no human wisdom can foresee. Nor is it
such a dreadful burden to support a peace establishment of four hundred
and fifty thousand men as some think,--one soldier for every one hundred
inhabitants, trained and disciplined to be intelligent and industrious
when his short term of three years of active service shall have expired:
much easier to bear, I fancy, than the burden of supporting five paupers
or more to every hundred inhabitants, as in England and Scotland.

In 1888, Bismarck made a famous speech in the Reichstag to show the
necessity of Prussia's being armed. He had no immediate fears of Russia,
he said; he professed to believe that she would keep peace with Germany.
But he spoke of numerous distinct crises within forty years, when
Prussia was on the verge of being drawn into a general European war,
which diplomacy fortunately averted, and such as now must be warded off
by being too strong for attack. He mentioned the Crimean war in 1853,
the Italian war in 1858, the Polish rebellion in 1863, the
Schleswig-Holstein embroilment, which so nearly set all Europe by the
ears, the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, the Luxemburg dispute in 1867,
the Franco-German war of 1870, the Balkan war of 1877, the various
aspects of the Eastern Question, changes of government in France,
etc.,--each of which in its time threatened the great "coalition war,"
which Germany had thus far been kept out of, but which Bismarck wished
to provide against for the future.

"The long and the short of it is," said he, "that