NEWS OF THE WEEK.
A CONSTITUTIONAL crisis of great importance has • Suddenly arisen in Germany. At-5.30 in the afternoon of Thursday the Re. iChstag was dissolved by a, decree which the Emperor had signed that morning at Biickeburg. The Reichs- tag had a period of a year and a half still to run. The ground on which the Emperor has appealed to the people is the deter- rilination of the majority of their present representatives (a majority made up of the Clerical Centre, the Poles, the Hanoverian Guelphs, and the Socialist's) to reduce the forces employed in South-West Africa to two thousand five hundred men in the course of the next financial year. Though the majority against the Government was not large, only five in one division and ten in another, the hostile vote—it took the form of the rejection of the South-West African Supple- mentary Estimates of 21,461,000—involved a peremptory refusal to do what the Government declared was absolutely necessary if the .Colonial Empire was to be maintained unim- paired. Prince Billow in an excitable speech declared that it was completely untrue to say that " he was only carrying out instructions from the, highest quarters." "That is an im- pudent falsehood.' No one is driving me. No one is pushing me. I need no directions to make me recognise the national necessities which are now at stake."
