The Reichstag at Berlin is by no means powerful in the sense that Parliament is in London or Congress in Washington. It is a convention of spectacled professors, country nobles, and professional men desirous of advertisement or the pretence of employment, with a sprinkling of smart financiers and professional politicians who have personal ends to serve. They play at legislation--some seriously, others not--but as a rule what they do and say makes next to no difference whatever. They have not even the power of initiating legislation. That function belongs to the Bundes-rath or Federal Council, which means the Prussian Ministry, which in turn meant Bismarck. His historic conception of law-making was to combine by bribes and threats a sufficient number of the fragmentary parties to constitute a majority, and to use this to pass his measures as far as it would go. Then he would swing around, create a different majority out of other groups, and carry forward another line of legislation. In turn he had been at the head of every important political faction and the enemy of each, and if he was unable to get his way through one combination always managed sooner or later to obtain it by a new shaking-up of the dice. Parliamentary institutions were not always at this low estate in Prussia. Three hundred years ago the Brandenburg Diet was a strong and influential body, which stoutly held the purse-strings and gave the law to sovereigns. The Hohenzollerns broke it down, first by establishing and fostering _Stände_, or small local diets, to dispute its power and jurisdiction, and then, in 1652, by the Great Elector boldly putting his mailed heel on it as a nuisance. It still lingered on in a formal, colourless, ineffective fashion until in the time of Frederic William I, when it was contemptuously kicked out of sight. That stalwart despot explained this parting kick by saying: “I am establishing the King’s sovereignty like a rock of bronze;” and, whatever its composition, there the rock stood indubitably in all men’s sight for much more than a century, with neither parliaments to shake its foundations nor powerful ministers to crumble away its sides.