It is clear from the occurrences in Berlin in 1848 that while the Prussian idea of monarchy is deeply rooted in the German mind, the possibility of a sudden change in public sentiment and a radical alteration of the relations between Crown and people are never at any time to be wholly disregarded.  Hence it is that the Emperor and his Government are so insistent on the doctrine of Heaven-granted sovereignty, so ready to support more or less autocratic monarchies in other parts of the world, and so sensitive to popular movements like Anarchism and Nihilism in Russia, or the always-smouldering Polish agitation and the propaganda of the Social Democracy in Germany.  When King Frederick William IV said to his assembled generals at Potsdam a week after the “March Days,” “Never have I felt more free or more secure than when under the protection of my burghers,” his words were drowned in the buzz of murmurs and the angry clanking of swords.  The Emperor to-day might, or might not, endorse the words of his ancestor.  Most probably he would not; for, judging by his speeches, his care for the army, the military state with which he surrounds himself, and his habitual appearance in uniform, he, though in truth far more a civil monarch than the War Lord foreign writers delight in painting him, is evidently determined to rely only on his soldiers for every eventuality at home as well as abroad.

Perhaps the best German authorities on Bismarck’s falling-out with the young Emperor are the statements regarding it to be found in the memoranda supplied at the time by Prince Bismarck himself to Dr. Moritz Busch; the Memoirs of Prince Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, subsequently Imperial Chancellor; and the monograph on Bismarck by Dr. Hans Blum, one of the Chancellor’s confidants.  The memoranda supplied to Busch make regrettably few references to the subject, beyond giving the terms of the official resignation and some scanty addenda thereto; but enough is said generally by Busch concerning Bismarck’s conversations to show that the Chancellor was deeply mortified by his dismissal.  Bismarck indeed expressly denies this in a conversational statement quoted by an able Bismarckian writer of our own time, Dr. Paul Liman; but in view of subsequent events and statements the denial can hardly be taken as sincere.  The passage referred to is as follows:—­

“I bear no grudge against my young master, who is fiery and lively.  He wishes to make all men happy, and that is very natural at his age.  I, for my part, believe perhaps less in this possibility, and have told him so too.  It is very natural that a mentor like myself does not please him, and that he therefore rejects my advice.  An old carthorse and a young courser go ill in harness together.  Only politics are not so easy as a chemical combination:  they deal with human beings.  I wish certainly that his experiments may succeed, and am not in the least angry with him.  I stand towards him