"I hope, President, that you do not confound our plan, dictated, I may say, by the purest patriotism, with the enterprises so much in favour nowaday, which mostly have no other source than the vulgarest greed of gain." "My dear Count! how can you suppose that I could even dream of such a thing!" exclaimed the President. The Count bowed. "Thank you," said he, "for I confess that nothing would hurt my feelings more. I have always considered it as a political necessity, and a proof of his eminently statesmanlike capacity, that Prince Bismarck has made use of certain means for carrying out his great ideas, which he certainly would have preferred not using, if only to avoid too close contact with persons, all intercourse with whom must have been formerly thoroughly distasteful to him. I consider it also as a necessary consequence of this misfortune, that in order to reward these persons he has inaugurated, has been obliged to inaugurate, the new era of speculators, and of immoderate greed of gain, with those fatal milliards. Meanwhile----" "Excuse my interrupting you," said the General; "I consider these compacts of the Prince's with those persons, parties, strata of population, classes of society--call them what you will--as you do, Count Golm, most certainly a misfortune, but by no means a necessary one. On the contrary; the _rocher de bronze_, upon which the Prussian kingdom is established, formed as it was of a loyal aristocracy, a zealous body of officials, a faithful army--all these were strong enough to support the German Empire, if it must needs be German rather than Prussian, or indeed an empire at all." "Yes, General, it had need to be, and to be German," said Reinhold. The General shot a dark look at the young man from under his bushy eyebrows; but he had listened before with satisfaction to his explanations, and felt that he must let him speak now, when he disagreed with him. "Why do you think so?" asked he.