The chief event, however, with which Chancellor Caprivi’s name is usually associated, is the conclusion of commercial treaties between Germany and most other continental countries.  Other countries had followed Germany’s example and adopted a protective system, and with a view to the avoidance of tariff wars, Caprivi, strongly supported, it need hardly be said, by an Emperor who had just declared that “the world at the end of the nineteenth century stands under the star of commerce, which breaks down the barriers between nations,” began a series of commercial treaty negotiations.

The first agreements were made with Germany’s allies in the Triplice, Austria and Italy.  Treaties with Switzerland and Belgium, Servia and Rumania, followed.  Russia held aloof for a time, but as a great grain-exporting country she too found it advisable to come to terms.  With France there was no need of an agreement, since she was bound by the Treaty of Frankfurt, concluded after the war of 1870, to grant Germany her minimum duties.  One of the regrettable results of the Empire’s new commercial policy was an antagonism between agriculture and industry which now declared itself and has remained active to the present day.  The political cause of Caprivi’s fall from power, if power it can be called, was the twofold hostility of the Conservative and Liberal parties in Parliament, that of the Conservatives being due to the injury supposed to be done to landlord interests by the commercial treaties, and that of the Liberals by an Education Bill, which, it was alleged, would hand the Prussian school system completely over to the Church.  Perhaps the main cause, however, was the general unpopularity he incurred by attacking, officially and through the press, his predecessor, Bismarck, the idol of the people.

It was in the Chancellorship of Prince Hohenlohe, which ended in 1900, that the most memorable events of this remarkable decade occurred; but, as was to be expected, and as the Emperor himself must have expected, the Prince, now a man of seventy-five, played a very secondary part with regard to them.  The Prince was what the Germans call a “house-friend” of the Hohenzollern family and related to it.  He was useful, his contemporaries say, as a brake on the impetuous temper of his imperial master, though he did not, we may be sure, turn him from any of the main designs he had at heart.  Prince Hohenlohe, in character, was good-nature and amiability personified.  He was beloved by all classes and parties, and no foreigner can read his Memoirs without a feeling of friendliness for a Personality so moderate and calm and simple.  A note he makes in one of his diaries amusingly illustrates the simple side of his character.  He is dining with the Emperor, when the Emperor, catching the Prince’s eye, which we may be sure was on the alert to gather up any of the royal beams that might come his way, raises his glass in sign of amity.  “I felt so overcome,” notes the Prince, “that I almost spilt the champagne.”