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 liberation” a crowd of new journals appeared. Niebuhr started a Preussischer Correspondent; Görres—who in 1798 had founded at Coblentz Das rothe Blatt, soon suppressed by the invading French—undertook the Rheinischer Mercur (January 1814 to January 1816), which was suppressed by the Prussian government, under Von Hardenberg. This journal, during its initiatory year, had the honour of being termed by Napoleon—perhaps satirically—“the fifth power of Europe.” Wetzel, somewhat later, founded the Fränkischer Mercur, published at Bamberg, and Friedrich Seybold the Neckarzeitung. Some of these journals lasted but two or three years. Most of the survivors fell victims to that resolution of the diet (20th September 1819) which subjected the newspaper press, even of countries where the censorship had been formally abolished, to police superintendence of a very stringent kind.

The aspirations for some measure of freedom which burst forth again under the influences of 1830 led to the establishment of such papers as Siebenpfeiffer’s Westbote, Lohbauer’s Hochwächter, Wirth’s Deutsche Tribune, Eisenmann’s Baierisches Volksblatt, Der Freisinnige of Rotteck and Welcker, and many more of much freer utterance than had been heard before in Germany. This led, in the ordinary course, to new declarations in the diet against the licence and revolutionary tendencies of the press, and to “regulations” of a kind which will be sufficiently indicated by the mention of one, in virtue whereof no editor of a suppressed journal could undertake another journal, during the space of five years, within any part of Germany. It need hardly be added that few of the newspapers of 1830 saw the Christmas of 1832. Very gradually some of the older journals—and amongst the number the patriarch of all, the Frankfurter Oberpostamtszeitung—plucked up courage enough to speak out a little; and some additional newspapers were again attempted. Amongst those which acquired deserved influence were Brockhaus’s Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, the advocate of free trade and of a moderate liberalism, possessing a large circulation in northern Germany (1837); the Deutsche Zeitung, edited by Gervinus, at Heidelberg (July 1847); and the Dorfzeitung, published at Hildburghausen. The stirring events of 1848 called forth in Germany, as in so many other countries, a plentiful crop of political instructors of the people, many of whom manifestly lacked even the capacity to learn, and vanished almost as suddenly as they had appeared. But it is undeniable that a marked improvement in the ability and energy of the German political press may be dated from this period.

At the beginning of the 20th century the position and influence of the German press were passing through a period of change. The Germans had become a newspaper-reading people. Indeed, with the remarkable growth of the commercial spirit in Germany there had simultaneously been a change in the intellectual attitude and habits of the mass of the nation. The German of “the great period” of 1866 and 1870 derived his knowledge of his own and other countries to a very great extent from the more or less intelligent study of books, pamphlets and magazines. The busy German of the opening years of the 20th century had become almost as much the slave of his newspaper as the average American. Berlin in 1900 had 45 dailies, Leipzig 8, Munich 12, Hamburg 11, Stuttgart 8, Strassburg 6. In the domains both of home and of foreign politics the result was often a chaos of crude opinions and impulses, the strata of which were only differentiated by certain permanent tendencies of German political thought based upon tradition, class feeling, material interests, or distinctions of religious creed. In these circumstances it was still possible for the government, as in the days of Prince Bismarck and Dr Moritz Busch, to bring its superior knowledge to bear upon the anarchy of public sentiment through the medium of the inspired (or as it used to be called, the “reptile”) press, but this operation had now to be performed with greater delicacy and skill. The press had begun to feel its power. It was at least able to drive a bargain with those who would officially control it, and it was conscious in its relations with the authorities that the advantage no longer rested exclusively on the side of the latter. It would be instructive to compare, with

the aid of Dr Busch’s “Secret Pages” of the history of Prince Bismarck, the methods by which the first Chancellor used to create and control a movement of public opinion with the devices by which, for instance, count von Bülow and his subordinates endeavoured to manage the press of a later day. The journalists who placed themselves at the disposal of Prince Bismarck were mostly treated as his menials; as he himself said, “Decent people do not write for me.” Count von Bülow’s methods, and to a certain extent those of his predecessor, Prince Hohenlohe, moved on somewhat different lines. These methods might be characterized as the psychological treatment of the individual journalist, the endeavour to appeal to his personal vanity or to his legitimate ambition, and only in a minor degree to his fear of the dossier, the public prosecutor, and the official boycott. There was also a further development of Prince Bismarck’s system of acknowledging the existence of political and social movements the origin of which was wholly or partially independent. As in Bismarck’s time, the tendencies of these movements were carefully observed, and they were turned to account where they seemed capable of subserving the main objects of state policy. Thus at the opening of the century the pro-Boer and agrarian movements were both employed in support of German foreign and colonial policy, and of an elaborate scheme of naval construction; while the growth of the commercial spirit on the one hand and the awakening of the lower middle classes on the other, were pressed into the service of Welt-politik and of its auxiliary—a system of protective tariffs. It required no small skill to bring into line and to hold together the various classes and interests from time to time arrayed in the press in support of German foreign policy. The organs of the government in the press were the sheep-dogs which held the flock together.

The German journals of which foreigners hear most belong with few exceptions to the daily press of Berlin. There are, however, one or two provincial or non-Prussian newspapers which from time to time enjoy more careful inspiration from the government offices than any of their Berlin contemporaries. There is, for example, the Cologne Gazette (Kölnische Zeitung, 1848), of which Prince Bismarck once said that it was “worth an army corps on the Rhine.” It is difficult to trace all the channels by which information is conveyed to an organ of this kind, but there have undoubtedly been times when leading articles and entre-filets in the Rhenish organ were virtually or actually written in the German Foreign Office. Indeed, the methods of the institution which has been called the “Press Bureau,” but which in the realm of foreign policy at least represented no concrete organization, have been so numerous and varied that it would be hopeless for any one except the most practised observer to trace their manifestations. The advantage of a semi-official press, if it could be manipulated with unvarying success, is that it can easily be disavowed when the suggestions, overtures or menaces of which it has been the exponent have served their turn or have become inexpedient. Thus during the blockade of Manila in 1898 the Cologne Gazette gave all the prominence of its first column and of leaded type to an article taken from the Marine Politische Korrespondenz, which practically warned the United States of the intention of Germany to have a share in the Pacific possessions of Spain if these should eventually change hands. Some ten days later the authority of this menace was explicitly disavowed by the North German Gazette, which announced that the Marine Politische Korrespondenz had never possessed a semi-official character. The Cologne Gazette continued in the west of Germany to, serve the German government much as it did in the time of Prince Bismarck, although for prudential reasons its inspiration became on the whole more intermittent than it was in the days of the first Chancellor. The Hamburgischer Correspondent, the leading Hamburg journal, played a minor rôle of the same nature in the chief Hanseatic port, while the Hamburger Nachrichten, celebrated especially during the exile of Prince Bismarck and the closing years of his life at Friedrichsruh as the receptacle of indiscreet revelations and violent attacks upon his successors, almost lost all significance except as a local organ of violent Anglophobia. The Allgemeine Zeitung of Munich, once famous throughout Europe as the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung before its transference to the Bavarian capital, became in the hands of new proprietors practically an organ of the imperial Chancellor. In Prince Bismarck’s days the press bureau of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, and a similar organization in the Imperial Home Office, used to furnish hundreds of petty local newspapers known as Kreis-blätter with whole articles gratis, so that the policy of the government might be advocated in every nook and corner of the country. The numerous journals in which these communications used to appear simultaneously and in an identical form were the government organs to which the Radical and Socialist