Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/261

 this is not done, the constitution will be broken." Well, gentlemen, why not wait and see whether this will happen, and whether those entitled to complain will take this, course, and, if they do, whether His Majesty the Emperor will not be ready to say after all: "All right, I shall try to find a chancellor who is willing to submit the resolve."

I shall, of course, not enter here upon a discussion of the reasons which determined me in this concrete case. They were reasons not found in shut-in offices, but in God's open country, and they induced me to deem the enactment of this law undesirable. I did not possess the certainty that a majority of this house would have seen the impossibility of carrying out the law, but I did not wish to expose the country to the danger—it was a danger according to my way of thinking—of getting this law. The only moment when I could guard against this danger was when the law was to be submitted in the name of the emperor. The constitutional remedy against such a use of an opportunity is a change of chancellors. I can see no other remedy.

Mentioning the Reichstag brings me to my cooperation with it. Mr. Richter's ideal is, it seems to me, a bashful, cautious chancellor who throws out careful feelers whether ho may offend here, if he does this, or offend there—one who does not wait for a final vote of the Reichstag, but rushes home excitedly, as I have often seen my colleagues do, exclaiming: "Oh God, the law is lost, this man and that man are opposed to it"—and three weeks later the law has passed in spite of them. I cannot enter upon such a policy of conjecture and proof by inference of what may be determined in the Reichstag when the tendency of those who talk the loudest, but who are not always the most influential, happens to be against a bill; and if Mr. Richter should succeed in procuring such a timid chancellor anxiously listening for every hint, my advice to you, gentlemen, is to tolerate him in this position as briefly as possible. For if a leading minister—and such he is in the empire—has no opinion of his own, and must hear from others what he should