Committee. The bill, as thus amended, was then passed by the House.
At the meeting of the Prussian Chamber in January, which was in other respects without any noteworthy incident, Baron von Hammerstein, the Minister of Agriculture, made some interesting remarks on the question of sugar bounties. He said that the German sugar trade was in great danger from the competition of the United States. From Cuba also much sugar would be exported during the next few years, and the danger of Cuban competition was now much greater than formerly, inasmuch as the active and intelligent American capitalists had taken the matter in hand. The danger arising from the production of beet sugar in America was continually increasing. It was true that the German export of sugar to America was 2,400,000 doppelcentner less than to England, but it nevertheless constituted a large fraction of the production. The only remedial measure would be to increase consumption at home. Indeed, it had been found that the use of sugar in the Army had increased the marching power of the soldier. Sugar had also proved of good effect in fattening pigs.
Professor Delbrück, who had been prosecuted at the end of the previous year for some articles strongly condemning the conduct of the Prussian Government in expelling Austrian and Danish subjects employed as labourers in Silesia and North Schleswig (Annual Register, 1898, p. 253), was condemned in March to be censured and to pay a fine of 500 marks. University professors in Germany are members of the Civil Service, and the ground on which the above sentence was inflicted was that criticism by civil servants of the acts of Government is subversive of discipline. Such condemnations were in Germany increasingly frequent. In 1898 there were 246 convictions for lèse-majesté, and the punishments inflicted amounted to a total of eighty-three years' imprisonment, in addition to various terms of confinement in a fortress. The offence of lèse-majesté is extremely elastic, and it is very doubtful whether any of the 246 cases referred to above would include any offence known to the English law. Another class of prosecutions also undesirably frequent consists in the prosecutions for Beamtenbeleidigung, or contempt of officials, a special category of crime embracing such offences as unjustifiable criticism of the conduct of a higher official or lack of becoming deference to a policeman or a telegraph clerk.
The only son of the Duke of Coburg having died in February, the right of succession devolved upon the duke's next brother, the Duke of Connaught. The latter, by a statement read in the Landtag of Gotha in April, expressed his readiness to fulfil the duties thereby devolving upon him and his house; but in June acts of renunciation of the succession were made both by the duke and his son, Prince Arthur, and the Landtag accordingly adopted (July 3) a bill whereby the Duke of Albany
