The ex-Chancellor was as little satisfied with the new tariff treaties entered into by General Caprivi with Austria, Italy, Belgium, and other countries, which the Emperor, wiser, as events have shown, than his former Minister, characterized on their passage by Parliament as the country’s “salvation” (eine rettende Tat).  The ex-Chancellor’s caustic but mistaken criticism was punished by the calculated neglect of the Berlin authorities to invite him to the ceremonies attending the celebration of the ninetieth birthday of his old comrade, General von Moltke, in October, 1890, and that of his funeral in the following April:  still more publicly punished in connexion with the marriage of his son Herbert.

The wedding of the latter to Countess Marguerite Hoyos was to take place in Vienna on June 21, 1892, and on the 18th Prince Bismarck started with his family to attend it.  The journey was a species of triumphal progress to Vienna, but it was to end in disappointment and chagrin.  As the result of representations from Germany, made doubtless with the Emperor’s assent, if not at his suggestion, Bismarck was met on his arrival with the news that the German Ambassador, Prince Reuss, and the Embassy staff had orders to absent themselves from the wedding, that the widow of the Crown Prince Rudolph, who had accepted a card of invitation to it, had suddenly left Vienna, and that the Emperor Franz Joseph would not receive him.  The German action was explained by the publication two months later of the edict, stigmatized by Bismarck as an “Urias Letter,” in which Caprivi warned foreign Governments against attaching any importance to the utterances of the Duke of Lauenburg.  The Bismarckian and anti-Bismarckian storm came up afresh in Germany.  Bismarck was reproached by the Government as “injuring monarchical feeling,” and by his enemies as a traitor to his country; while the angry statesman published a statement expressing the opinion that

“the control of private social intercourse abroad, and the influencing of dinner invitations, were not tasks for which high officers of State were selected nor public money for the payment of diplomatic representatives voted”: 

doubting, at the same time, “if the foreign archives of any other country than Germany could show a parallel to the incident.”

The storm, notwithstanding, had a good effect, for it brought out in bold relief the immense regard and respect the overwhelming majority of his countrymen entertained for the chief architect of their Empire; and when Bismarck fell ill at Kissingen in 1893 the Emperor, subordinating his political animosities to the chivalrous instincts of his nature, telegraphed his sorrow to the patient and offered to lend him one of the royal castles for the purpose of his convalescence.  Bismarck declined, but not ungratefully, and the way to a reconciliation was opened.  Next year, 1894, Bismarck suffered from influenza, and when this time