When the North German Diet at Berlin had given its consent to the new constitution, congratulatory address was despatched to the Prussian monarch at Versailles. Thirty members of the Diet, with the president Simson at their head, announced to the aged hero-king the nation's wish that he should accept the new dignity. He replied to the deputation in solemn audience that he accepted the imperial dignity which the German nation and its princes had offered him. On the 1st of January, 1871, the new constitution was to come into operation. The solemn assumption of the imperial office did not take place, however, until the 18th of January, the day on which, one hundred and seventy years before, the new emperor's ancestor, Frederick I., had placed the Prussian crown on his head at Königsberg, and thus laid the basis of the growing greatness of his house. It was an ever-memorable coincidence, that in the superb-mirrored hall of the Versailles palace, where, since the days of Richelieu, so many plans had been concerted for the humiliation of Germany, King William should now proclaim himself German Emperor. After the reading of the imperial proclamation to the German people by Count Bismarck, the Grand Duke led a cheer, in which the whole assembly joined amid the singing of national hymns. Thus the important event had taken place which again summoned the German Empire to life, and made over the imperial crown with renewed splendor to another royal house. Barbarossa's old legend, that the dominion of the empire was, after long tribulation, to pass from the Hohenstaufen to the Hohenzollern, was now fulfilled; the dream long aspired after by German youth had now become a reality and a living fact. The tidings of the conclusion of peace with France, whose preliminaries were completed at Frankfurt on the 10th of May, 1871, filled all Germany with joy, and peace festivals on the most splendid scale extended from end to end of the new empire, in all parts of which an earnest spirit of patriotism was shown, while Germans from all regions of the world sent home expressions of warm sympathy with the new national organization of their fatherland. [=A Decade of Remarkable Changes=]