[76] The three years are shortened to one year for those who have taken a high place in the Gymnasia (highest of the public schools); they feed and equip themselves and are termed "volunteers." Conscription is the rule on the coasts for service in the German Navy. For the text of the Imperial Constitution, see Lowe, Life of Bismarck, vol. ii. App. F.
[77] J.W. Headlam, Bismarck, p. 367.
[78] Busch, Our Chancellor, vol i. p. 139, where he quotes a conversation of Bismarck of Nov. 1883. On the Roman Catholic policy in Posen, see ibid. pp. 143-145.
[79] Lowe, Life of Bismarck, vol. ii. p. 336, note.
[80] Busch, Our Chancellor, vol. i. p. 122, quotes speeches of his hero to prove that Bismarck himself disliked this Civil Marriage Law. "From the political point of view I have convinced myself that the State . . . is constrained by the dictates of self-defence to enact this law in order to avert from a portion of His Majesty's subjects the evils with which they are menaced by the Bishops' rebellion against the laws and the State" (Speech of Jan. 17, 1873). In 1849 he had opposed civil marriage.
[81] For that treaty, and Austria's desire in 1862 to enter the German Zollverein, see The Diplomatic Reminiscences of Lord A. Loftus, vol. ii. pp. 250-251.
[82] Bismarck: Some Secret Pages of his History, by M. Busch, vol. iii. p. 161 (English edition).
[83] German State Paper of June 28, 1884, quoted by Dawson, Bismarck and State Socialism, App. B.
[84] In a recent work, England and the English (London, 1904), Dr. Carl Peters says: "Considering that wages in England average 20 per cent higher in England than in Germany, that the week has only 54 working hours, and that all articles of food are cheaper, the fundamental conditions of prosperous home-life are all round more favourable in England than in Germany. And yet he [the British working-man] does not derive greater comfort from them, for the simple reason that a German labourer's wife is more economical and more industrious than the English wife."
[85] For the account given above, as also that of the Old Age Insurance Law, I am indebted to Mr. Dawson's excellent little work, Bismarck and State Socialism (Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1890). See also the Appendix to The German Empire of To-day, by "Veritas" (1902).