ear for those who
have taken a high place in the Gymnasia (highest of the public schools);
they feed and equip themselves and are termed "volunteers." Conscription
is the rule on the coasts for service in the German Navy. For the text
of the Imperial Constitution, see Lowe, _Life of Bismarck_, vol.
ii. App. F.]

The secondary States are protected in one important respect. The last
proviso of the Imperial Constitution stipulates that any proposal to
modify it shall fail if fourteen, or more, votes are cast against it in
the Federal Council. This implies that Bavaria, Wuertemberg, and Saxony,
if they vote together, can prevent any change detrimental to their
interests. On the whole, the new system is less centralised than that of
the North German Confederation had been; and many of the Prussian
Liberals, with whom the Crown Prince of Prussia very decidedly ranged
himself on this question, complained that the government was more
federal than ever, and that far too much had been granted to the
particularist prejudices of the Southern States[77]. To all these
objections Bismarck could unanswerably reply that it was far better to
gain this great end without bitterness, even if the resulting compact
were in some respects faulty, than to force on the Southern States a
more logically perfect system that would perpetuate the sore feeling
of the past.

[Footnote 77: J.W. Headlam, _Bismarck_, p. 367.]

Such in its main outlines is the new Constitution of Germany. On the
whole, it has worked well. That it has fulfilled all the expectations
aroused in that year of triumph and jubilation will surprise no one who
knows that absolute and lasting success is attained only in Utopias,
never in practical politics. In truth, the suddenness with which German
unity was finally achieved was in itself a danger.

The English reader will perhaps find it hard to realise this until he
remembers that the whole course of recorded history shows us the Germans
politically disunited, or for the most part engaged in fratricidal
strifes. When they first came within the ken of the historians of
Ancient Rome, they were a set of warring tribes who banded together only
under the pressure of overwhelming danger; and such was to be their fate
for well-nigh two thousand years. Their union under the vigorous rule of
the great Frankish chief whom the French call Charlemagne, was at best
nominal and partial. The Holy Roman Empire, which he founded in the year
8