The Caroline, Marianne, and Palau Islands, including the Marschall Islands and the islands of the Bismarck archipelago, were bought from Spain this year for twenty-five million pesetas, or about one million sterling.  The islands are valuable in German eyes, not only for their fertility and capacity for plantation development, but as affording good harbourage and coaling stations on the sea-road to China, Japan, and Central America.  By the agreement with England and America, which in this year also put an end to the thorny question of Samoan administration, Germany acquired the Samoan islands of Upolu and Sawaii in the South Sea.

The ten years we are now concerned with were perhaps the most strenuous and picturesque of the Emperor’s life hitherto.  He was now his own Chancellor, though that post was nominally occupied by General von Caprivi and Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe successively.  He was Chancellor, too, knowing that not a hundred miles off the old pilot of the ship of State was watching, keenly and not too benevolently, his every act and word.  He was conscious that the eyes of the world were fixed on him, and that every other Government was waiting with interest and curiosity to learn what sort of rival in statecraft and diplomacy it would henceforward have to reckon with.  Naturally many plans coursed through his restlessly active brain, but there were always, one may imagine, two compelling and ever-present thoughts at the back of them.  One of these was a determination to promote the moral and material prosperity of his people so as to make them a model and thoroughly modern commonwealth; the other, the resolve that as Emperor he would not allow Germany to be overlooked, to be treated as a quantite negligeable, in the discussion or decision of international affairs.

The Chancellorship of General von Caprivi, who had been successively Minister of War and Marine, lasted from March, 1890, to October, 1894.  He may have been a good commanding general, but he has left no reputation either as a man of marked character or as a statesman of exceptional ability.  Nor was either character or ability much needed.  He was, as every one knew, a man of immensely inferior ability to his great predecessor, but every one knew also that the Emperor intended to be his own Chancellor, pursue his own policy, and take responsibility for it.  Taking responsibility is, naturally, easier for a Hohenzollern monarch than for most men, since he is responsible to no one but himself.  With the appointment of Caprivi the Emperor’s “personal regiment” may be said to have begun.

During General von Caprivi’s term of office some measures of importance have to be noted, among them the Quinquennat, which replaced Bismarck’s Septennat and fixed the military budget for five years instead of seven; the reduction of the period of conscription for the infantry from three years to two; and the decision not to renew Bismarck’s reinsurance treaty with Russia.