The inspiring source of these reforms is Dr. Miquel, whose rise to imperial favour during the labour crisis has been noted, and who succeeded von Scholz as Minister of Finance in June of 1890. He furnishes still another illustration of the debt which German public life owes to the absorption, two centuries ago, of that leaven of Huguenot blood to which reference has heretofore been made--and which has long played in Prussia as disproportionately important a part as the remaining Protestant strain has in the politics of France. Herr Miquel looks like a Frenchman, and his manner, at once polished, genial, and grave, is that of a statesman reared on the Seine rather than the Vecht. In one sense he is scarcely a new man, since he sat in the Prussian Parliament before the days of the Empire, and was years ago regarded as dividing with Bennigsen the leadership of the National Liberal party. He is in his sixty-third year, and might long since have been a Minister had he not felt it incompatible with his self-respect to take a portfolio under Bismarck’s whimsical and arrogant mastership. In this present period of uncertainty in German politics, filled as it is with warring rumours of impending reconciliations and hints of even more deeply embittered quarrels, prophecy is forbidden, but no one on either side attempts a forecast of the future which does not assign to Miquel a predominant part. His administrative abilities are of a very high order, and he combines with them much breadth of vision and great personal authority. The reliance placed upon him by the Emperor has been a subject of comment, almost from the first meeting of the two men, and German public opinion gives him no rival in influence over the imperial mind. It was at the dinner-table of this Minister last February that William is said to have replied to a long argument by Baron Kardorff in favour of bimetallism: “Personally I am a gold man, and for the rest I leave everything to Miquel.”