“Prince Bismarck and Count Roon were therefore left together in the minority, although the former, as Minister President, still bore in the eyes of the public the responsibility for a policy which he had expressly opposed within the Cabinet. This was very little to the taste of the Imperial Chancellor, for whom it was a fresh illustration of the drawbacks of the collegial system obtaining in the Prussian Council of Ministers. “Here, therefore, he hoped to find an opportunity for intervention and reform, while taking up once more the question of reorganising the Upper House, which always occupied the first place in his thoughts. When he left Varzin he was already preceded by a swarm of rumours, all of which turned upon his relations with the Prussian Ministry and an extension of the Imperial Ministries. It almost appeared as if henceforth Prussia’s task was to be confined to her domestic affairs. Like the navy, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Communications, the army seemed fated to fall within the jurisdiction of the Imperial Chancellor, so that the head of the War Office would, as a Minister of State, occupy about the same position towards the Imperial Chancellor as General Stosch in his capacity of chief of the Admiralty, and Herr Delbrück as President of the Federal Chancellerie. The Emperor’s decrees on military matters would never again be countersigned by the Prussian Minister of War, but by the Imperial Chancellor, &c. Concurrently with these changes the Constitution would become more homogeneous, and the formation of a real Cabinet would ensue, with a chief who would be able to pursue an independent, and, indeed, a personal policy, and, through the members of the Cabinet, extend it even beyond the limits of that body.