Prussia, and through Prussia Germany, is in effect ruled in accordance with the wishes of the official caste:  and short of a popular rising nothing but defeat can dethrone it.  “Any one who has any familiarity at all with our officers and generals,” says an authoritative German writer, in words that we may hope will be prophetic, “knows that it would take another Sedan, inflicted on us instead of by us, before they would acquiesce in the control of the Army by the German Parliament."[1] No clearer statement could be given as to where the real power lies in Germany, and how stern will be the task of displacing it.

[Footnote 1:  Professor Delbrueck (who succeeded to the chair of history in Berlin held so long by Treitschke), in a book published early in 1914 (Government and the Popular Will, p. 136).]

The foreign policy of Prussia has reflected the same domineering spirit.  Its object has been the increase of its power and territory by conquest or cunning:  and by the successful prosecution of this policy it has extended Prussian authority and Prussian influence over a large part of Western Germany.  The best way of illustrating this will be to quote a passage from the Recollections of Prince Bismarck, who directed Prussian policy from 1862 to 1890.  In 1864 trouble arose as to the succession to the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein on the Danish border.  Prussia had no claim whatever to the Duchies; but she coveted Holstein because it would give her a Western sea-board, with the results that we all know.  Bismarck describes the arguments which he used to persuade his Royal Master to assert his claim.  “I reminded him,” he writes, “that each of his immediate predecessors had won an addition to the Monarchy”:  he then went through the history of the six previous reigns, and ended by encouraging King William to be worthy of his ancestors.  His advice, as we have seen, was successfully adopted.

[Illustration:  PRUSSIA SINCE THE ACCESSION OF FREDERICK THE GREAT]

The conquest of France in 1870, by means of the military power of Germany under Prussian leadership, made Prussia supreme in Germany, and the German army supreme 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.