On May 6th the new Reichstag was opened by a speech from the throne, almost exclusively reflecting the Emperor’s absorption in schemes of social reform and progress, and the new Chancellor, Caprivi, laid before Parliament a Trades Law Amendment Act, as a first attempt at embodying these schemes. After a year of deliberation this measure has just been passed, and, unless the Federal Council interposes some wholly unlooked-for obstacles, will come into effect on April 1, 1892. By this law Sunday labour is absolutely forbidden in all industries, save a selected few connected with entertainment and travelling, and the integrity of the great Church festival holidays is also secured. The Federal Council is given the power to supervise and control the maximum hours of labour in such trades as endanger the health of workmen by overwork. Both journeymen and apprentices are to be able to bring suit against their employers for wrongful dismissal. Female labour is forbidden at night, and is given at all times a maximum of eleven hours. Careful restrictions are also placed upon juvenile labour, and after April of 1894 children under the age of thirteen are not to be employed at all in factories. These reforms, which practically embody the recommendations of the Labour Conference, do little more than bring Germany abreast of England and America. A more extended programme of social reform is promised when the Reichstag meets again next November. But it is not on specific achievements that the tremendous popularity which William has won for himself during the past year is founded. We are by no means within view of the end of the game, but it is already apparent that his greatest strength lies in the certainty and sureness of touch with which he appeals to the inborn German liking for lofty and noble visions of actions. The possibility--probability if you like--that these visions will never get themselves materialized, is not so important as it seems. Socialism in Germany is far more a matter of imagination than of fact. Mr. Baring-Gould quotes an observer of the election phenomena of 1878, to show that “decorous people, dressed in an unexceptionable manner, and even to some extent wearing kid-gloves,” went to the polls as Socialists then. This has been still more true of later elections. The element of imaginative men who had themselves little or nothing to complain of, but who dreamed of a vague Social Democracy as an idealized refuge from the harsh, dry bureaucracy and brutal militarism of Bismarck’s government, played a large and larger part in each successive augmentation of the Socialists’ voting strength. For want of a better word we may say that William is a dreamer too. In place of their amorphous Utopia, he throws upon the canvas before the Socialists the splendid fantasy of a beneficent absolutism which shall be also a democracy, in which everybody shall be good to everybody else,