Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/680

CHAPTER XL THE GERMAN EMPIRE AND THE THIRD FRENCH REPUBLIC I. DEVELOPMENT OF GERMANY (1871-1914) 930. The Predominance of Prussia in the German Empire. In the North German Federation of 1866 Prussia, with the Ger- man states she had just seized, constituted nearly the whole union. After the South German states joined the federation and so formed the German Empire, Prussia still formed nearly two thirds of the whole empire, and her citizens amounted to nearly two thirds of the entire population of Germany. We may be sure that Bismarck, with his Prussian autocratic ideas and his confidence in armies and kings, would see to it that the new constitution for the empire insured the control of Germany by Prussia and the Junker class to which he himself belonged. The dominating position of Prussia and her king was so cleverly disguised that it sometimes seemed to escape the Germans themselves. 931. Powers of the Kaiser. The "presidency" of the empire was vested in the king of Prussia, but he was not, in theory, the monarch of Germany, in spite of his august title of "emperor" (Kaiser). Emperor William II, it is true, always talked as if he ruled by the grace of God, but he had no constitutional right to such a claim. He did, however, according to Prussian law, rule Prussians by "divine right," and they, as we have seen, constituted a great part of the German people. The emperor did not have a right directly to veto the measures passed by the imperial parlia- ment, but he exercised many of the powers which would fall to an absolute monarch. He appointed and dismissed the chancellor of the empire, who was, with his "all-highest" self, the chief official spokesman of Germany. What was most dangerous for the rest 522