throne. Bismarck, when he created the empire in 1871, conceived its ultimate destiny as the dominating factor in Europe, and he shaped its constitution so that it should live as a development of Prussia. So the empire has continued, brutal and great; savagely indifferent to justice whenever the right has stood in its path; sublime, almost, in its conception of itself as the one world-State whose only God is its own exalted war-like dominating spirit. A truly Prussian State. Because Bismarck was himself the great personification of this political ideal, so much so that the German Empire is sufficiently summed up in the word "Bismarckian," the Kaiser, who could not exist in the shadow of any subject, however great, dismissed his great Chancellor in the year 1890, though to him he owed his own political inspiration.
To understand Pan-Germanism, it is necessary to know the conditions which gave it birth. These conditions, and certainly all the primary and fundamental conditions, are almost entirely economic. Germany has found herself within recent years the fortunate subject of a great industrial, agricultural, and commercial development. An Englishman does not require anything in the shape of statistics here to give point to this statement; we all know that for many years past this great development in Germany has been one of the best investigated and most discussed political subjects in this country. In a sense this great prosperity of modern Germany would seem, as matters stand, to be a misfortune to the empire, for the next condition to which attention is drawn by the Pan-Germanist is that the population also has increased to such an extent that the present territorial boundaries of the empire restrict it too unduly. So arises the imperative necessity that these boundaries should be extended, in order that the present great and ever-increasing population may be accommodated. Another condition, which is also incidental to the first great condition, is that Germany suffers from an absence of adequate seaports and independence on the sea. Germany sees with dislike and with envy so great a volume of German commerce going in and out of Germany through the foreign ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Antwerp. It sees also, with like feelings, that though the mercantile marine of Germany has increased to so great an extent during the last few years, yet when it traverses the seas it finds itself as though it were subject to the domination of a foreign Power. It finds, in fact, that on the seas Britain is mistress; that German commerce can proceed through the narrow seas, and even on the broad oceans of the world, only with the consent and by the generosity of Britain. Germany chafes at all this, and can
