up as many as 155 National Liberals, and they, with the other groups just named, gave the Government a force of 240 votes—­a good working majority as long as Bismarck’s aims were of a moderately Liberal character.  This, however, was not always the case even in 1874-79, when he needed their alliance.  His demand for a permanently large military establishment alienated his allies in 1874, and they found it hard to satisfy the requirements of his exacting and rigorous nature.

The harshness of the “May Laws” also caused endless friction.  Out of some 10,000 Roman Catholic priests in Prussia (to which kingdom alone the severest of these laws applied) only about thirty bowed the knee to the State.  In 800 parishes the strife went so far that all religious services came to an end.  In the year 1875, fines amounting to 28,000 marks (L2800) were imposed, and 103 clerics or their supporters were expelled from the Empire[80].  Clearly this state of things could not continue without grave danger to the Empire; for the Church held on her way with her usual doggedness, strengthened by the “protesting” deputies from the Reichsland on the south-west, from Hanover (where the Guelph feeling was still uppermost), as well as those from Polish Posen and Danish Schleswig.  Bismarck and the anti-clerical majority of the Reichstag scorned any thoughts of surrender.  Yet, slowly but surely, events at the Vatican and in Germany alike made for compromise.  In February 1878, Pope Pius IX. passed away.  That unfortunate pontiff had never ceased to work against the interests of Prussia and Germany, while his encyclicals since 1873 mingled threats of defiance of the May Laws with insults against Prince Bismarck.  His successor, Leo XIII. (1878-1903), showed rather more disposition to come to a compromise, and that, too, at a time when Bismarck’s new commercial policy made the support of the Clerical Centre in the Reichstag peculiarly acceptable.

[Footnote 80:  Busch, Our Chancellor, vol. i. p. 122, quotes speeches of his hero to prove that Bismarck himself disliked this Civil Marriage Law.  “From the political point of view I have convinced myself that the State . . . is constrained by the dictates of self-defence to enact this law in order to avert from a portion of His Majesty’s subjects the evils with which they are menaced by the Bishops’ rebellion against the laws and the State” (Speech of Jan. 17, 1873).  In 1849 he had opposed civil marriage.]

Bismarck’s resolve to give up the system of Free Trade, or rather of light customs dues, adopted by Prussia and the German Zollverein in 1865, is so momentous a fact in the economic history of the modern world, that we must here give a few facts which will enable the reader to understand the conditions attending German commerce up to the years 1878-79, when the great change came.  The old order of things in Prussia, as in all German States, was strongly protective—­in fact, to such an extent as often to prevent the passing