Bismarck had made it a condition of his acceptance of office in 1862 that he would govern Prussia without a Parliament. When the fortune of war and the federation of the states enlarged the scope of his responsibilities to the limits of the new Empire, he proceeded upon the same autocratic lines. There was a greater necessity, it is true, of pretending to defer to the parliamentary idea, but he never dissembled his disgust at this necessity. He bullied the leaders of the opposition factions with such open coarseness, imputing evil and dishonest motives, introducing details of personal life which his spies had gathered, and using all the great powers at his command to insult and injure, that a large proportion of the educated and refined gentlemen of Germany, who should have been its natural political leaders, either declined to enter the Reichstag at all, or withdrew, disheartened and humiliated, after a brief term of service. All this reflected, and brought down in embodied form into our own times, the traditional attitude of the Hohenzollerns toward the poor thing called a Parliament. It was therefore very much of an anachronism to find, in the year of grace 1890, a Prussian King invoking the aid of a Parliament to help him encompass the overthrow of his Prime Minister. The situation on January 20th, briefly stated, was this: The Reichstag, consisting of 397 members, had been governed by Bismarck’s “Cartel” combination of 94 National Liberals, 78 Conservatives, and 37 Imperialists, a clear majority of 21. The efforts of the Waldersee party, however, had honeycombed this majority with disaffection, and the National Liberals had been induced to agree that they would not vote for a renewal of the clause giving the Government power to expel obnoxious citizens. On the other hand, the Conservatives promised not to vote for the renewal of the anti-Socialist law at all unless it contained the expulsion clause. Thus, of course, the measure was bound to fall between two stools. This apparent clashing of cross purposes might have been stopped in ten minutes if it had proceeded spontaneously from the two factions themselves. But everybody knew that it had been carefully arranged from above, and that the leader of each party had had an interview with the Kaiser. This affectation of irreconcilable views on the expulsion clause, therefore, deceived no one--least of all Prince Bismarck. He ostentatiously remained at Friedrichsruh until the very last day of the Reichstag; then, indeed, he arrived in Berlin, but did not deign to show himself at either the Chamber or the Schloss.