All these larger administrative municipal details, and the Third Republic itself, date from 1870, the most important year in the history of France, and it may be thought that no record, however brief, of the machinery of government, of the characteristics, the aspirations, and tendencies of this modern society, would be approximately correct without some allusion to its recent origin, to those tremendous political events which so transformed it, and which still remain for it an endless and hopelessly bitter source of speculation, of discussion, and of fierce recrimination. In this overthrow of a nation, it is the great figure of the Chancellor of the German Empire that fills the scene, moving apparently at his will kings, emperors, and ambassadors, and influencing, even at this late day, every measure of the government of the capital and the nation by an enduring Consternation,--by a fear that does but increase from year to year. The incompetence of the Emperor, the folly of the Empress, probably but served to aid or to accelerate the ruin which Bismarck thought necessary to secure his great building,--the Confederation of the North German states had been consolidated by the defeat of Austria at Sadowa, but France, he was convinced, would never consent to the re-establishment of the German Empire. Even the vanquished admit that he did not want war for the sake of war; but, by his own admission, in 1892, he was willing to secure this necessary result by any trick, even that of the forger. [Illustration: PRIVATE OF THE LINE ACTING AS POSTMAN DURING AN EPIDEMIC OF INFLUENZA. After a photograph.]