Well, I do not know what is the use of this critique, if not to instruct me and to educate me.  But I am in my sixty-sixth year and in the twentieth of my tenure of office—­there will not be much in me to improve.  You will have to use me up as I am or push me aside.  I, on my part, have never made the attempt to educate the Honorable Mr. Richter—­I do not think I am called upon to do it; nor have I endeavored to force him from his sphere of activity—­I should not have the means of doing this, nor do I wish it.  But I believe he in his turn will lack the means of forcing me from my position.  Whether he will be able to compress me and circumscribe me, as toward the end of his speech he said was desirable, I do not know.  I am, however, truly grateful to him for the concern he expressed about my health.  Unfortunately, if I wish to do my duty, I cannot take such care of myself as Mr. Richter deems desirable—­I shall have to risk my health.

When he said that every evil troubling us, even the rate of interest and I know not what else, was based on the uncertainty of our conditions, and when he quoted the word of a colleague of a “hopeless confusion”—­well, gentlemen, then I must repeat what I have said elsewhere and in the hearing of the Honorable Mr. Richter:  Make a comparison and look about you in other countries!  If our conditions with their ordered activities and their assured future at home and abroad constitute a “hopeless confusion,” how shall we characterize the conditions of many another country?  I can see in no European country a condition of safety and an assured outlook into the future similar to that prevailing in the German empire.  I have already said on the former occasion that my position as minister of foreign affairs made it impossible for me to be specific.  But everyone who will follow my remarks with a map in his hand, and a knowledge of history during the past twenty years, will have to say that I am right.  I do not know what is the use of these exaggerations of a “hopeless confusion” and “a lack of assurance and uncertainty of the future.”  Nobody in the country believes it; and isn’t that the chief thing?  The people in the country know perfectly well how they are off, and all who do not fare as they wish are pleased to blame the government for it.  When a candidate comes up for election, and says to them:  “The government—­or to quote the previous speaker—­the chancellor is to blame for all this,” he may find many credulous people, but in the majority he will find people who will say:  “The chancellor surely has his faults and drawbacks”—­but most people will not be convinced that I am to blame for everything.  I am faring in this respect like Emperor Napoleon twelve years and more ago, who was accused, not in his own country but in Europe, as the cause of all evils, from Tartary to Spain, and he was not nearly so bad a creature as he was said to be—­may I not also claim the benefit of this doubt with Mr. Richter?  I, too, am not