The quarrel was accentuated by a lively scene which occurred between the Emperor and the Chancellor about this period in connexion with a visit the leader of the Catholic Centre party had paid the Chancellor, and on March 17th the Emperor sent his chief Adjutant, General von Hahnke, to say he awaited the Chancellor’s resignation.  Bismarck replied that 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.