These things grouped themselves together in the public mind just as similar arguments did in England in the days of the Armada. To be a Catholic grew to seem synonymous with being a sympathizer with Austria and France. It is an old law of human action that if you persistently impute certain views to a man, and persecute him on account of them, the effect is to reconcile his mind to those views. The melancholy history of theologico-political quarrels is peculiarly filled with examples of this. The Catholics of Germany were in the main as loyal to the idea of imperial unity as their Protestant neighbours, and they had shed their blood quite as freely to establish it as a fact. Their bishops and priests had over and over again testified by deeds their independence of Rome in matters which affected them as Germans. But when they found Bismarck ceaselessly insisting that they were hostile to Prussia, it was natural enough that they should discover that they did dislike his kind of a Prussia, and that some of the least cautious among them should say so. Prussia’s answer--coming with the promptness of deliberate preparation--was the _Kulturkampf_, Into the miserable chaos which followed we need not go. Bishops were exiled or imprisoned; schools were broken up and Catholic professors chased from the universities; a thousand parishes were bereft of their priests; the whole empire was filled with angry suspicions, recriminations, and violence, hot-tempered roughness on one side, grim obstinacy of hate on the other--to the joy of all Germany’s enemies outside and the confusion of all her friends. Despotism begets lawlessness, and Bismarck and old William, busy with their priest hunt, suddenly discovered that out of this disorder had somehow sprouted a strange new thing called Socialism. They halted briefly to stamp this evil growth out--and lo! from an upper window of the beer house on Unter den Linden, called the Three Ravens, the Socialist Nobiling fired two charges of buckshot into the head and shoulders of the aged Emperor, riddling his helmet like a sieve and laying him on a sick bed for the ensuing six months. As a consequence, the Crown Prince Frederic was installed as Regent from June till December of 1878, and from this period dates young William’s public attitude of antagonism to the policy of his parents. For the present we need examine this only in its outer and political phases. It is too much, perhaps, to say that heretofore there had been no divisions inside the Hohenzollern family. The Crown Prince and his English wife had been in tacit opposition to the Kaiser-Chancellor _régime_ for many years. But this opposition took on palpable form and substance during the Regency of 1878.