Prince Bismarck is still very ill, and what is perhaps
one of the reasons why he does not get better, very angry with the Reichstag for its perversity in not voting the Military Bill. We have given at length elsewhere the language in which he is re- ported to have reproached the advanced Liberals who are so ill- advised as to feel bound by their previous declarations of principle, after they have been returned by the people on the strength of their professions of loyalty to himself. He must either dissolve, he says, or resign. We doubt if either course would help him. Dissolution would probably result in the return of more Ultra- montanes and more Socialists. The imprisonment of the popular Archbishop of Cologne would certainly tend towards the former result, and every month of peace without menaces from France tends towards the political liberation of a certain amount of deep industrial discontent The fate of the Army Bill pro- bably depends on Herr Luker and his followers. If they stick to it that they will not vote so great a peace army as 400,000 men, more or leas, for an indefinite series of years, without securing to the Reichstag the power to review its vote at fixed intervals of time, the Army Bill will be lost, and what effect that may have on Prince Bismarck's gout and the Emperor's bronchial tubes it is alarming to conjecture.
