cepted the offer, and another interview took place the next day, at which Mr. Villard produced the answers to his telegraphic inquiries confirming his views. The Chancellor then told him that he would remain passive and thanked him warmly for his courtesy. As Mr. Villard was still on the Continent at the time of the election, he telegraphed its result to the Chancellor, who was then on a visit to the King of Italy at Monza, and who, in acknowledgment of his despatch, said that he had proved to be a true prophet.
Mr. Villard had not made the personal acquaintance of Caprivi's predecessor, Prince Bismarck, during his two years residence at Berlin in 1884–6. Although as willing as any German to render grateful homage to him as the creator of national unity, and to recognize the power of his giant mind, he still held to the unfavorable opinion of Bismarck's personal character, and his political methods before the Franco-German war, to which he had given expression in an article in the North American Review in 1869, then under the editorship of James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. His prejudices against the Chancellor had been strengthened, too, by the latter's return in 1879 to a reactionary policy in the internal affairs of Germany, and especially by his openly proclaimed purpose of abandoning the revenue tariff for a protective one.
Early in the summer of 1890, a few months after the acceptance of Bismarck's resignation, while discussing that great event one day with the late Ludwig Bamberger, the well-known liberal leader in the Reichstag and the principal advocate of the gold standard in Germany, Mr. Villard mentioned incidentally that he had never met the Prince. "What," exclaimed Bamberger, "how has that happened?" On being told that it was from want not of opportunity but of inclination, Bamberger rejoined that he had made a great mistake in avoiding an introduction, and went on to say: "You know, I fully share your views of Bismarck's character and as to the vacillations of his policy, which I am opposing strongly in the Reichstag.
