The widely circulated report that, in his extremity, the Chancellor appealed for aid to the Empress Frederic, seems to be apocryphal. It is certain, however, that he did, during the twenty-four hours in which that stolidly-waiting _aide-de-camp_ darkened his life, make strenuous efforts in other almost equally unlikely and hostile quarters to save himself. They availed nothing save to reveal in some dim fashion to his racked and despairing mind how deeply and implacably he was hated by the officials and magnates all about him. But to the general public, astonished and bewildered at this sudden necessity to imagine a Germany without Bismarck, the glamour about his name was still dazzling. When it came their turn to act, they made the fallen Chancellor’s departure from Berlin a great popular demonstration. It is well that they did so. With all his faults, Bismarck was _the_ chief German of his generation, and the spectacle of cold-blooded desertion which the official and journalistic classes of Berlin presented in their attitude toward him upon the instant of his tumble, offended human nature. Nothing could be more true than that he himself was responsible for this attitude. It was the only possible harvest to be expected from his sowing. He had done his best to make all preferment and power in Germany depend upon callous treachery and the calculation of self-interest. He had contemptuously thrust ideals and generous aspirations out of the domain of practical politics. He had systematically accustomed the German mind to the rule of force and cunning, to the savage crushing of political opponents, and the shameless use of slander and scandal as political weapons. That this official mind of his own moulding, inured to sacrificial horrors, familiar with the spectacle of statesmen destroyed and eminent politicians flung headlong from the “rock of bronze,” should have viewed his own prodigious downward crash without pity, was not at all unnatural. But for the credit of Germany with the outside world it is fortunate that the Berliners, as a whole, responded to the pathetic side of the episode. William’s emotional nature was peculiarly stirred by the separation, when it finally came. The _Reichsanzeiger_ of March 20th--two days after the final act in the comedy of the unresigned resignation--contained the imperial message granting Prince Bismarck permission to retire. The phraseology of the document was excessively eulogistic of the passing statesman, and no hint of differing opinions was allowed to appear. Bismarck was created Duke of Lauenburg, and given the rank of a Field Marshal.