In discussing German movements, however, it is impossible, at the present time, to omit reckoning with the views of the great statesman who controls her destinies. Prince Bismarck has been variously represented as reluctantly putting himself at the head of a colonial agitation which he really deprecates, and as using it merely in order to discomfit domestic opponents, or to make foreign Governments feel his weight abroad. No doubt these last two reasons have had some effect in shaping the Chancellor’s actual policy. But Prince Bismarck appears to have needed no prompting for appreciating the necessity of colonial expansion, and to have given it his serious reflection long before the present Colonization Society met at Eisenach. In the days of the North German Confederacy, the rising Minister lent all his influence to the proposals of the firm of Godeffroys Bros. for the annexation of the Samoa group. A scheme was drawn up, dividing the land among military settlers, grants of arms were made from the Royal Arsenals, and the _Hertha_ the first continental iron-clad which steamed through the Suez Canal, was despatched to give a vigorous support. Before the last arrangements, however, were completed, the Franco-German war intervened, with the internal consolidation and the diplomatic struggles which succeeded it. But Prince Bismarck had not abandoned his early ideas; he was waiting till the time was ripe. In 1875 he made a tentative effort, without success, to wring a guarantee from the Reichstag for a new South Sea Company. Next year he was pressed to give his support to a proposed railway from Pretoria to the sea. He refused, but in private made the following significant statement to the intermediate agent:— “The colonial question is one I have studied for years. I am convinced Germany cannot go on for ever without colonies, but as yet I fail to perceive deep traces of such a movement in the country.” Those deep traces have now been revealed, and it remains to be seen whether the Iron Chancellor will not be able, in spite of the apparently insuperable objects in his way, to give practical effect to the aspirations of the German nation, and to his own earnest conviction.—_National Review._ GEORGE SAND. On the 8th June, 1876, George Sand, the great French novelist, died at her château of Nohant in Berri. The strong right hand that for forty years had been used in the service of her countrymen, sometimes to delight, sometimes to admonish, had dropped the pen in death; the noble heart that, with all its faults and all its deviations from the strict line of social conventionality, had yet ever sided with the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor, had ceased to beat, and even in the frivolous, heartless capital where she had lived, men went about knowing they had sustained an irreparable loss and that a blank had been made in their lives that would never be filled.