hat to resign at this juncture would be an act of desertion;
the Emperor could dismiss him. At the same time the Chancellor
summoned a meeting of Ministers for the afternoon, but while they were
discussing the situation a message was brought from the Emperor
telling them he did not require their advice in such a matter and that
he had made up his mind about the Chancellor. The messenger on the
same occasion expressed to Bismarck the Emperor's surprise at not
having received a formal resignation. Bismarck's reply was that it
would require some days to prepare such a document, as it was the last
official statement of a "Minister who had played a meritorious part in
the history of Prussia and Germany, and history should know why he had
been dismissed." Three days later, on March 20th, an hour or two after
the formal resignation reached the palace, the Emperor's letter
granting the Chancellor's request for his release, naming him Duke of
Lauenburg and announcing the appointment of General von Caprivi as his
successor, was put into the old Chancellor's hands.

VI.

THE COURT OF THE EMPEROR

While the ex-Chancellor is bitterly meditating on the unreliability
and ingratitude of princes, yet having in his heart, as the records
clearly show, the loyal sentiments of a Cardinal Wolsey towards his
royal master, even though that master had cast him off, we may be
allowed to pause awhile in order to give some account of the Court of
which the Emperor now became the centre and pivot.

Human imagination, in its worship of force as the source of ability to
achieve the ends of ambition and desire, very early conceived the
courts of kings as fairylands of power, wealth, luxury, and
magnificence--in a word, of happiness. The same imagination represents
the Almighty, whose true nature no one knows, as a monarch in the
bright court of heaven, and his great antagonist, Satan, who stands
for the king of evil, is enthroned by it amid the shades of hell. The
fiction that courts are a species of earthly paradise is still kept up
for the entertainment of children; while the adult, whom the annals of
all countries has made familiar with a long record of monarchs, bad as
well as good, is disposed to regard them as beneficial or otherwise to
a country according to the character and conduct of the occupant of
the throne, and to believe that they are at least as liable to produce
examples of vice and hypocrisy as of virtue and honesty.