“From the very beginning of my career my sole guiding-star has been how to unify Germany, and, that being achieved, how to strengthen, complete, and so constitute her unification that it may be preserved enduringly and with the goodwill of all concerned in it.”—­BISMARCK:  Speech in the North German Reichstag, July 9, 1869.

On the 18th of January 1871, while the German cannon were still thundering against Paris, a ceremony of world-wide import occurred in the Palace of the Kings of France at Versailles.  King William of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor.  The scene lacked no element that could appeal to the historic imagination.  It took place in the Mirror Hall, where all that was brilliant in the life of the old French monarchy used to encircle the person of Louis XIV.  And now, long after that dynasty had passed away, and when the crown of the last of the Corsican adventurers had but recently fallen beneath the feet of the Parisians, the descendant of the Prussian Hohenzollerns celebrated the advent to the German people of that unity for which their patriots had vainly struggled for centuries.

The men who had won this long-deferred boon were of no common stamp.  King William himself, as is now shown by the publication of many of his letters to Bismarck, had played a far larger share in the making of a united Germany than was formerly believed.  His plain good sense and unswerving fortitude had many times marked out the path of safety and kept his country therein.  The policy of the Army Bill of 1860, which brought salvation to Prussia in spite of her Parliament, was wholly his.  Bismarck’s masterful grip of the helm of State in and after 1862 helped to carry out that policy, just as von Roon’s organising ability perfected the resulting military machine; but its prime author was the King, who now stood triumphant in the hall of his ancestral foes.  Beside and behind him on the dais, in front of the colours of all the German States, were the chief princes of Germany—­witnesses to the strength of the national sentiment which the wars against the First Napoleon had called forth, and the struggle with the nephew had now brought to maturity.  Among their figures one might note the stalwart form of the Crown Prince, along with other members of the House of Prussia; the Grand Duke of Baden, son-in-law of the Prussian King; the Crown Prince of Saxony, and representatives of every reigning family of Germany.  Still more remarkable were some of the men grouped before the King and princes.  There was the thin war-worn face of Moltke; there, too, the sturdy figure of Bismarck:  the latter, wrote Dr. Russell, “looking pale, but calm and self-possessed, elevated, as it were, by some internal force[72].”

[Footnote 72:  Quoted by C. Lowe, Life of Bismarck, vol. i. p. 615.]