I assume on the strength of my purely technical-diplomatic judgment, which is based on my experience, that these are the intentions of Russia and that she has no wish to comply with the somewhat uncouth threats and boastings of the newspapers.  And, if this is so, then there is surely no reason why we should look more gloomily into the future now than we have done at any time during the past forty years.  The Oriental crisis is undoubtedly the most likely to occur, and in this our interests are only secondary.  When it happens, we are in a position to watch whether the powers, who are primarily interested in the Mediterranean and the Levante, will make their decisions and come to terms, if they choose, or go to war with Russia about them.  We are not immediately called upon to do either.  Every great power which is trying to influence or to restrain the policies of other countries in matters which are beyond the sphere of its interests is playing politics beyond the bounds which God has assigned to it.  Its policy is one of force and not of vital interests.  It is working for prestige.  We shall not do this.  If Oriental crises happen, we shall wait before taking our position until the powers who have greater interests at stake than we have declared themselves.  There is, therefore, no reason, gentlemen, why you should look upon our present situation with unusual gravity, assuming this to be the cause of our asking for the mighty increase of our armaments which the military bill contemplates.  I should like to separate the question of reestablishing the Landwehr of the second grade, in short the big military bill and the financial bill, from the question of our present situation.  It has to do, not with a temporary and transient arrangement, but with the permanent invigoration of the German empire.

That no temporary arrangement is contemplated will be perfectly clear, I believe, when I ask you to survey with me the dangers of war which we have met in the past forty years without having become nervously excited at any one time.

In the year 1848, when many dikes and flood gates were broken, which until then had directed the peaceful flow of countless waters, we had to dispose of two questions freighted with the danger of war.  They concerned Poland and Schleswig-Holstein.  The first shouts after the Martial days were:  war with Russia for the rehabilitation of Poland!  Soon thereafter the danger was perilously near of being involved in a great European war on account of Schleswig-Holstein.  I need not emphasize how the agreement of Olmuetz, in 1850, prevented a great conflagration—­a war on a gigantic scale.  Then there followed two years of greater quiet out of general ill feeling, at the time when I first was ambassador in Frankfort.  In 1853 the earliest symptoms of the Crimean War made themselves felt.  This war lasted from 1853 to 1856, and during this whole time we were near the edge of the cliff, I will not say the abyss, whence it