“Two things struck me in these last three days:  one that no one has any time and every one is in a greater hurry than before; and secondly, that individualities have expanded.  Every individual is conscious of himself, while before, under the predominating influence of Prince Bismarck, individualities shrank and were kept down.  Now they are all swollen like sponges placed in water.  That has its advantages, but also its dangers.  The single-minded will is lacking.”

The period between the great Chancellor’s fall and his death nine years later was marked by so many incidents as to make it almost as mouvemente as the period of the fall itself.  He retired to Friedrichsruh, all the more immediately as the new Chancellor, General von Caprivi, showed such indecent haste in taking possession of the official residence that a portion of Bismarck’s furniture was broken and rendered useless.  That Bismarck retired with the angry feelings of a Coriolanus in his heart, or, as Anglo-Saxon slang would have it, of a “bear with a sore head,” became evident only a few weeks later.  He was visited by the inevitable interviewer, and chose the Hamburg News as the medium of communicating to the world his opinion of the new regime and the men who were conducting it; and made use of that paper with such instant vigour and acerbity that little more than two months from his retirement elapsed before the new Chancellor thought it advisable to issue instructions to Germany’s diplomatic representatives warning them carefully to distinguish between the “present sentiments and views of the Duke of Lauenburg and those of the erstwhile Prince Bismarck,” and to pay no serious attention to the former.  Bismarck replied in the Hamburg News that he would not allow his mouth to be closed, and set about proving that he meant what he said.  Nothing the men of the “new course” could do met with his approval.  The first thing he fell foul of was the Anglo-German agreement of July 1, 1890, which gave Germany Heligoland in exchange for Zanzibar, deploring the badness of the bargain for Germany, and evidently not foreseeing the importance that island’s position, commanding the approaches to the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, was afterwards to possess.  Besides the friendliness with England, the detachment of Germany from Russia in favour of Austria, also a feature of the “new course,” did not please him as tending to drive Russia into the arms of France.

His prescience, however, in this respect was demonstrated when a year later the Czar saluted a French squadron in the harbour of Cronstadt to the strains of the “Marseillaise” and signed a secret agreement that was alluded to four years later by the French Premier, M. Ribot, in the French Chamber of Deputies, who spoke of Russia as “our ally,” and was publicly announced in 1897, on the occasion of President Felix Faure’s visit to St. Petersburg, by the Czar’s now famous employment of the words “deux nations amies et alliees.”