Dr. Gustav von Gossler had held the portfolio for ten years, and was so entrenched in the liking of the great body of professors and teachers that he assumed his position to be perfectly secure. When, in the summer of 1889, the young Emperor despatched to him a long memorandum on the reforms necessary in the higher schools of Prussia, he received it submissively, even sympathetically, put it in a pigeon-hole, and went on in the same old dry-as-dust classical rut. William said nothing more, but eighteen months later, when he summoned the Educational Conference, he simultaneously published the text of the memorandum of the previous year. Even then Gossler seems to have suspected no danger, and made an official speech at the opening of the session full of amiable and confident commonplaces. On the following New Year’s Day, however—January 1st, of the present year—a peremptory warning came to him in the form of a gift from the palace. It was a handsomely framed photograph of William II, and above the dashing signature were written the significant words, “Sic volo, sic jubeo.” It is not strange that shortly thereafter the retirement of von Gossler was announced.
His successor, Count Zedlitz-Trutschler, although beginning his career in the army, long ago revealed abilities which suggested his being drafted off into civil work. He has sat in the Reichstag as a Free Conservative, has been Governor of Silesia, and is both an excellent speaker and a man of great tact and resource. Among the reforms which he has already seen his way to enforce is one by which the students of the gymnasia report the number of hours out of school in which they are compelled to study to keep up with their lessons—these reports serving as a basis for the monthly rearrangement of tasks in such a way as to leave enough time for recreation. The study of German and other modern tongues has also largely displaced the classical curriculum in the three lower classes of the gymnasia. Count Zedlitz is the Minister, moreover, having to deal with ecclesiastical affairs, and his sympathies are all upon the side of toleration and of a good understanding with the Vatican.
On this same New Year’s Day William sent a photograph also to the venerable Postmaster-General, Herr von Stephan, bearing a written legend not less characteristic than the other. It ran thus: “Intercommunication is the sign under which the world stands at the close of the present century. The barriers separating nations are thereby overthrown, and new relations established between them.” Upon the sentiment thus expressed much of great importance to Germany and to Europe depends.
Brief as has been the career of the present German Empire among nations, its history already covers one very remarkable and complete volte face on economic subjects, and the beginnings of what promises to be a second and almost as sweeping change. Up to 1876, with Delbrück as President of the Chancellery and Camphausen as Minister of Finance, Germany stood for as liberal a spirit of international trade relations as at least any other nation on the Continent. But in that year Bismarck, by a combination of the various Conservative factions which leaned toward high tariffs, inaugurated a Protectionist policy which forced these Ministers out and ranged the German Empire definitely on the other side of the economic wall. To the end of Bismarck’s rule, Germany steadily drifted away from Free Trade and toward the ideals of Russia, Thibet, and the Republican party in the United States. But even before Bismarck’s fall it became apparent that the young Emperor took broader views on this subject than his Chancellor, and during the past year several important steps have been taken toward bringing Germany forward once more into line with modern conceptions of emancipated trade. A liberal Treaty of Commerce has been signed with Austro-Hungary—the precursor, it is believed, of others with countries now committed to stupid and injurious tariff wars, while at home no secret is made of the ministerial intention to in time reduce duties on cereals, lumber, and other necessaries, and generally pursue a tariff reform policy. The Reichstag has during the year passed a bill which, beginning in August of 1892, spreads over five years the extinction of the sugar bounties, another great bulwark of the rich protectionist ring. An attack upon the spirit bounties is expected next, while the Upper House of the Prussian Diet has just passed the new Graded Income Tax Bill which is to pave the way to a return from tariff to direct taxation.
The inspiring source of these reforms is Dr. Miquel, whose rise to imperial favour during the labour crisis has been noted, and who succeeded von Scholz as Minister of Finance in June of 1890. He furnishes still another illustration of the debt which German public life owes to the absorption, two centuries ago, of that leaven of Huguenot blood to which reference has heretofore been made—and which has long played in Prussia as disproportionately important a part as the remaining Protestant strain has in the politics of France. Herr Miquel looks like a Frenchman, and his manner, at once polished, genial, and grave, is that of a statesman reared on the Seine rather than the Vecht.
In one sense he is scarcely a new man, since he sat in the Prussian Parliament before the days of the Empire, and was years ago regarded as dividing with Bennigsen the leadership of the National Liberal party. He is in his sixty-third year, and might long since have been a Minister had he not felt it incompatible with his self-respect to take a portfolio under Bismarck’s whimsical and arrogant mastership. In this present period of uncertainty in German politics, filled as it is with warring rumours of impending reconciliations and hints of even more deeply embittered quarrels, prophecy is forbidden, but no one on either side attempts a forecast of the future which does not assign to Miquel a predominant part.
His administrative abilities are of a very high order, and he combines with them much breadth of vision and great personal authority. The reliance placed upon him by the Emperor has been a subject of comment, almost from the first meeting of the two men, and German public opinion gives him no rival in influence over the imperial mind. It was at the dinner-table of this Minister last February that William is said to have replied to a long argument by Baron Kardorff in favour of bimetallism: “Personally I am a gold man, and for the rest I leave everything to Miquel.”
With the impending retirement of von Maybach, Minister of Public Works and Railways, von Boetticher will be the only remaining Minister of eleven who held portfolios when William I died in March, 1888. It seems probable that the present year will outlive even this exception. The change in governmental spirit and methods of which Berlin is more and more conscious, is not wholly a matter of new men. The weight of militarism is being lifted. Generals no longer play the part they did in purely civil affairs. Count Waldersee’s retirement from his great post as Chief of the General Staff is popularly ascribed to his having attempted to interfere with the amount and distribution of the military budget. Five years ago such an interference would have seemed to everybody the most natural thing in the world. The Emperor, too, grows less fond of obtruding the martial side of his training and temperament. From a beginning in which he seemed to think that Germany existed principally for the purpose of supporting an army, he has grown to see the true proportion of things and to give military matters hardly more than their legitimate share of his attention. The death of Moltke has removed the last great soldier who could speak authoritatively for the army in the Reichstag. In that sense at least he has left no heir.
In the more troubled domain of foreign affairs, the year without Bismarck has been marked by fewer visible changes. We are well along into “a year without Crispi,” also, but the Triple Alliance, if less demonstrative in its professions of mutual affection and pride than formerly, seems no whit diminished in substantial unity. At the moment, peace appears to be as secure as it has been during any year since 1880—which is another way of saying that the weight of force and determination is still on the side of the Triple Alliance.
There has been during the twelvemonth only one sensational incident to mar the polite, business-like relations which Caprivi maintains with the nations of the earth. The unfortunate incidents attending the visit in February of the Empress Frederic to Paris, are too fresh in the public memory to call for recapitulation here. It seems fair to say that it is not easy to imagine so pacific and sensible an ending to such a stormy episode having been arrived at in the days of Bismarck. The young Kaiser, whom Europe thought of as a firebrand when he ascended the throne, kept his temper, or at least prevented its making a mark upon the policy of his government, in a striking manner. He had just gone out of his way to conciliate French feeling by writing a graceful message of condolence upon the death of Meissonier. The foolish insults to his mother, with which this act of courtesy was answered by the Parisian rabble, failed to provoke any retort in kind. Indeed, when it was represented to him that the increased rigour of passport regulations in Alsace-Lorraine was being construed as a reprisal, he issued orders to modify this rigour.