acres more had passed from German into Polish hands. He proposed, therefore, to set aside a credit of £17,500,000 for this purpose. On the 26th of February 1908 the discussion on this bill was continued, Count Arnim defending it on the ground that “conciliation had failed and other measures must now be tried!” The Poles were aiming at raising their standard of civilization and learning and thus gradually expelling the Germans, and this, together with the rapid growth of the Polish population, constituted a grave danger. These arguments were reinforced by an appeal of Prince Bülow to the traditions of Bismarck, and in spite of a strenuous and weighty opposition, the bill with certain modifications passed by 143 votes to 111 in the Upper House, and was accepted by the Lower House on the 13th of March. A bill forbidding the use of any language but German at public meetings, except by special permission of the police, had been laid before the Reichstag in 1907 by Prince Bülow at the same time as he had introduced the Expropriation Bill into the Prussian parliament. The bill, with certain drastic amendments limiting its scope, passed the House on the 8th of April by a majority of 200 to 179. This law gave increased freedom in the matter of the right of association and public meeting; but in the case of the Poles it was applied with such rigidity that, in order to evade it they held “mute” public meetings, resolutions being written up in Polish on a blackboard and passed by show of hands, without a word being said.[1]
Compared with the Polish question, that of the Danes in North Schleswig is of minor importance; they number less than 150,000, and there is not among them, as among the Poles, the constant encroachment along an extended line of Danes. frontier; there is also no religious question involved. These Danish subjects of Germany have elected one member to the Reichstag, whose duty is to demand that they should be handed over to Denmark. Up to the year 1878 they could appeal to the treaty of Prague; one clause in it determined that the inhabitants of selected districts should be allowed to vote whether they should be Danish or German. This was inserted merely to please Napoleon; after his fall there was no one to demand its execution. In 1878, when the Triple Alliance was concluded, Bismarck, in answer to the Guelphic demonstration at Copenhagen, arranged with Austria, the other party to the treaty of Prague, that the clause should lapse. Since then the Prussian government, by prohibiting the use of Danish in the schools and public offices, and by the expulsion from the country of the numerous Danish optants who had returned to Schleswig, has used the customary means for compelling all subjects of the king to become German in language and feeling.[2]
The attempt to reconcile the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine to their condition proved equally difficult. The provinces had been placed under the immediate rule of the emperor and the chancellor, who was minister for them; laws Alsace-Lorraine. were to be passed by the Reichstag. In accordance with the treaty of Frankfort, the inhabitants were permitted to choose between French and German nationality, but all who chose the former had to leave the country; before the 1st of October 1872, the final day, some 50,000 had done so. In 1874, for the first time, the provinces were enabled to elect members for the Reichstag; they used the privilege to send fifteen Elsasser, who, after delivering a formal protest against the annexation, retired from the House; they joined no party, and took little part in the proceedings except on important occasions to vote against the government. The same spirit was shown in the elections for local purposes. It seemed to be the sign of a change when a new party, the Autonomisten, arose, who demanded as a practical concession that the dictatorship of the chancellor should cease and local self-government be granted. To some extent this was done in 1879; a resident governor or Statthalter was appointed, and a local representative assembly, which was consulted as to new laws. All the efforts of Field marshal Edwin von Manteuffel, the first governor, to win the confidence of the people failed; the anti-German feeling increased; the party of protestors continued in full numbers. The next governor, Prince Hohenlohe, had to use more stringent measures, and in 1888, to prevent the agitation of French agents, an imperial decree forbade any one to cross the frontier without a passport. Since 1890 there has been, especially in the neighbourhood of Strassburg, evidence of a spread of national German feeling, probably to a great extent due to the settlement of Germans from across the Rhine.
The presence of these anti-German parties, amounting sometimes to one-tenth of the whole, in the Reichstag added greatly to the difficulty of parliamentary government. Gradually, however, as a new generation grew up their influence declined. In the Reichstag of 1907, Guelphs, Alsace-Lorrainers and Danes together could muster only five members.
The great work since 1870 has been that of building up the institutions of the empire. For the first time in the history of Germany there has been a strong administration ordering, directing and arranging the life of the whole The period 1870 to 1878. nation. The unification of Germany was not ended by the events of 1866 and 1871; it was only begun. The work has throughout been done by Prussia; it has been the extension of Prussian principles and Prussian administrative energy over the whole of Germany. It naturally falls into two periods; the first, which ends in 1878, is that in which Bismarck depended on the support of the National Liberals. They were the party of union and uniformity. The Conservatives were attached to the older local diversities, and Bismarck had therefore to turn for help to his old enemies, and for some years an alliance was maintained, always precarious but full of results.
The great achievement of the first period was legal reform. In nothing else was legislation so much needed. Forty-six districts have been enumerated, each of which enjoyed a separate legal system, and the boundaries of these Legal reform. districts seldom coincided with the frontiers of the states. Everywhere the original source of law was the old German common law, but in each district it had been wholly or partly superseded by codes, text-books and statutes to a great extent founded on the principles of the Roman civil law. Owing to the political divisions, however, this legislation, which reached back to the 14th century, had always been carried out by local authorities. There had never been any effective legislation applicable to the whole nation. There was not a state, not the smallest principality, in which some authoritative but imperfect law or code had not been published. Every free city, even an imperial village, had its own “law,” and these exist down to the present time. In Bremen the foundation of the civil code was still the statutes of 1433; in Munich, those of 1347. Most of the states by which these laws had been published had long ago ceased to exist; probably in every case their boundaries had changed, but the laws remained valid (except in those cases in which they had been expressly repealed) for the whole of the district for which they had been originally promulgated. Let us take a particular case. In 1591 a special code was published for the upper county of Katzellenbogen. More than a hundred years ago Katzellenbogen was divided between the neighbouring states. But till the end of the 19th century this code still retained its validity for those villages in Hesse, and in the Prussian province of Hesse, which in old days had been parts of Katzellenbogen. The law, however, had to be interpreted so as to take into consideration later legislation by the kingdom of Westphalia, the electorate of Hesse, and any other state (and they are several) in which for a short time some of these villages might have been incorporated.
In addition to these earlier imperfect laws, three great codes have been published, by which a complete system was applied to a large district: the Prussian Code of 1794, the Austrian Code of 1811 and the Code Napoléon, which applied to all Germany left of the Rhine; for neither Prussia, nor Bavaria, nor Hesse had ever ventured to interfere with the French law. In Prussia therefore the older provinces came under the Prussian
