in his "Gedanke und Erinnerungen," compares her submission to Austria
to the patience of the French noble-man he heard of when minister in
Paris, whose conduct in condoning twenty-four acts of flagrant
infidelity on the part of his wife was regarded by the French as an
act of great forbearance and magnanimity. Prince William, the
Emperor's grandfather, afterwards William I, first German Emperor, was
on the throne, acting as Prince Regent for his brother, Frederick
William IV, incapacitated from ruling by an affection of the brain.
The head of the Prussian Ministry, Manteuffel, had been dismissed, and
a "new era," with ministers of more liberal tendencies, among them von
Bethmann Hollweg, an ancestor of the present Chancellor, had begun.
General von Roon was Minister of War and Marine, offices at that time
united in one department. The Italian War had roused Germany anew to a
desire for union, and a great "national society" was founded at
Frankfurt, with the Liberal leader, Rudolf von Bennigsen, at its head.
Public attention was occupied with the subject of reorganizing the
army and increasing it from 150,000 to 210,000 men. Parliament was on
the eve of a bitter constitutional quarrel with Bismarck, who became
Prussian Prime Minister (Minister President) in 1862, about the grant
of the necessary army funds. Most of the great intellects of
Germany--Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher--had
long passed away. Heinrich Heine died in Paris in 1856. Frederick
Nietzsche was a youth, Richard Wagner's "Tannhäuser" had just been
greeted, in the presence of the composer, with a storm of hisses in
the Opera house at Paris. The social condition of Germany may be
partially realized if one remembers that the death-rate was over 28
per _mille_, as compared with 17 per _mille_ to-day; that only a start
had been made with railway construction; that the country, with its
not very generous soil, depended wholly upon agriculture; that
savings-bank deposits were not one-twelfth of what they are now; that