precautions.

On those German States which stood in the way of Prussia's territorial
development and had shown marked hostility, Bismarck bore hard. The
Kingdom of Hanover, Electoral Hesse (Hesse-Cassel), the Duchy of Nassau,
and the Free City of Frankfurt were annexed outright, Prussia thereby
gaining direct contact with her Westphalian and Rhenish Provinces. The
absorption of Frankfurt-on-the-Main, and the formation of a new league,
the North German Confederation, swept away all the old federal
machinery, and marked out Berlin, not Vienna or Frankfurt, as the future
governing centre of the Fatherland. It was doubtless a perception of the
vast gains to the national cause which prompted the Prussian Parliament
to pass a Bill of Indemnity exonerating the King's Ministers for the
illegal acts committed by them during the "Conflict Time"
(1861-66)--acts which saved Prussia in spite of her Parliament.

Constitutional freedom likewise benefited largely by the results of the
war. The new North German Confederation was based avowedly on manhood
suffrage, not because either King William or Bismarck loved democracy,
but because after lately pledging themselves to it as the groundwork of
reform of the old Confederation, they could not draw back in the hour of
triumph. As Bismarck afterwards confessed to his Secretary, Dr. Busch,
"I accepted universal suffrage, but with reluctance, as a Frankfurt
tradition" (_i.e._ of the democratic Parliament of Frankfurt in
1848)[6]. All the lands, therefore, between the Niemen and the Main were
bound together in a Confederation based on constitutional principles,
though the governing powers of the King and his Ministers continued to
be far larger than is the case in Great Britain. To this matter we shall
recur when we treat of the German Empire, formed by the union of the
North and South German Confederations of 1866.