What was the aristocracy of birth going to do about it?  Struggle desperately?  It took that tack at first.  Bismarck ranged himself in its support for some time.  He was himself an agrarian.  But he was not long in installing paper mills on his estates at Varzin.  It is said that the Emperor himself possesses porcelain factories.  A part of the nobility for a long time tried to adapt itself to the new method of production.  It took to it awkwardly and often ended in ruin.

Freytag has described this phenomenon at its beginnings in a romance which is a chef d’oeuvre.  A part of the nobility yielded, fell into the hands of the financiers, the money lenders, the managers of agricultural enterprises, sold their lands, and took refuge in the great civil, administrative and military posts.  The remainder resisted as well as they could.  There was antagonism between their interests and those of the capitalists, between the religious and particularist tendencies on one hand and free thought and cosmopolitanism on the other.  The agrarians demanded tariff duties on agricultural products to raise the price of their foodstuffs.  The industrials wanted a low cost of living in order to avoid the rise of wages and to compete with better advantage for foreign markets.

Bismarck was the target for vehement opposition when he inclined toward the party of the traders and the industrials in his colonial and tariff policy.  This evolution came about 1879.  For a while the great Chancellor was looked upon almost as a traitor.

Nevertheless, his view was just.  Balancing the forces on the one hand by those on the other, ceding protective duties first to one side and then to the other, offsetting the advantages which he offered to one side by the prerogatives which he accorded to the other, he finally succeeded in reconciling them.

From this reconciliation of the two dominant classes has resulted the extraordinary power of Germany.  The bourgeois parties have from time to time grumbled over the military appropriations, but they have always voted them.  And militarism, which is the support of the aristocracy, has been placed at the service of capitalistic ambition.  By the prestige of force, awakening hopes here and inspiring fears there, more than once by the help of manoeuvres of intimidation, it has become an instrument of economic conquest.

Other combinations, other reciprocal interlacings, have taken place which have given an exceptional and unique character to contemporary Germany.  It is a case of social psychology of extreme interest.  To describe it would require long detail.  The combination of the aristocratic and military tendency with the industrial and plutocratic tendency, the tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist entrepreneur, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, the love of displaying force, the tendency to prove one’s own superiority to one’s self, play a large part.