Since we now have made a favorable port, as I conclude from the predominant although not unanimous opinion of my countrymen, whose approval is all we have worked for, let us be satisfied, and let us keep and cherish what we have won in an Emperor and an empire as it is, and not as some individuals may wish it should be, with other institutions, and a little bit more of this or that religious or social detail that they may have at heart.  Let us be careful to keep what we have, lest we lose it because we do not know how to appreciate it.  Germany once was a powerful empire under the Carolingians, the Saxons, and the Hohenstaufens, and when she lost her place, five, yes six hundred years passed before she regained the use of her legs—­if I may say so.  Political and geological developments are equally slow.  Layers are deposited one on the other, forming new banks and new mountains.  But I should like to ask especially the young gentlemen:  Do not yield too much to the German love of criticism!  Accept what God has given us, and what we have toiled to garner, while the rest of Europe—­I cannot say attacked us, but ominously stood at attention.  It was not easy.  If we had been cited before the European Council of Elders before our French affairs were settled, we should not have fared nearly so well; and it was my task to avoid this if I possibly could.  It is natural that not everything which everybody wished could be obtained under these conditions, and I mention this only to claim the indulgence of those who are perfectly justified in expecting more, and possibly in striving for more.  But, above everything, do not be premature, and do not act in haste.  Let us cling for the present to what we have.

The men who made the biggest sacrifices that the empire might be born were undoubtedly the German princes, not excluding the King of Prussia.  My old master hesitated long before he voluntarily yielded his independence to the empire.  Let us then be thankful to the reigning houses who made sacrifices for the empire which after the full thousand years of German history must have been hard for them to make; and let us be thankful to science, and those who cultivate her, for having kept alive on their hearths the fire of German unity to the time when new fuel was added and it flamed up and provided us with satisfying light and warmth.

I would then—­and you will say I am an old, conservative man—­compress what I have to say into these words:  Let us keep above everything the things we have, before we look for new things, nor be afraid of those people who begrudge them to us.  In Germany struggles have existed always, and the party schisms of today are naught but the echoes of the old German struggle between the noble families and the trade unions in the cities, and between those who had and those who had not in the peasant wars, in the religious wars, and in the thirty years’ war.  None of these far reaching fissures, which I am tempted to call geological, can disappear at