8:36 marks; Saxony, 11:17; Bavaria, 16·51; Würtemberg, 16·16; Baden, 1764. The above loans increased the Imperial debt from 36,000,000l., the amount at which it stood at the beginning of the reign, to 150,000,000l., in addition to which the debts of the various German States amounted to 530,000,0001.

On August 5 the Empress Frederick died at her palace at Kronberg, and she was buried, in accordance with her wish, beside the remains of her late husband in the mausoleum of the Friedenskirche at Potsdam, on August 13, in the presence of the Emperor William, the King and Queen of England, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, the Crown Prince and Princess of Greece, the Princes of the House of Hohenzollern, the German and Prussian Ministers, the Presidents of the Reichstag and the Prussian Parliament, and the chief burgomasters of Berlin and Potsdam. There was general mourning at the event not only at the German Court, but among the German people; the late Empress, though somewhat unpopular on account of her supposed English leanings, having been very widely esteemed on account of her broad political views, and universally for her love of art and her noble character.

This

Herr von Puttkamer, the Secretary of State for AlsaceLorraine, resigned on August 6, and was succeeded by Herr von Koeller, formerly Prussian Minister of the Interior. appointment created considerable discontent in Alsace-Lorraine, where Herr von Puttkamer had become very popular by his judicious and lenient rule, while Herr von Koeller had throughout his administrative career proved himself a rigid martinet and reactionist. As head of the Administration of SchleswigHolstein he had mainly distinguished himself by his persecution of the Danes in that province.

During the months of August and September great agitation was produced in Germany by what was known as "the Krosigk Court-Martial.' Early in the year Captain von Krosigk, an officer who had made himself thoroughly disliked in his regiment by the brutality with which he treated the men under his command, was murdered. There was no direct evidence to show who the assassins were; three men were suspected of complicity in the murder, and they were tried by court-martial, but acquitted. The authorities, however, refused to accept the decision of the court-martial in the case of two of these men, non-commissioned officers Marten and Hickel, and accordingly directed that they should be tried before a superior military tribunal. It acquitted Hickel but condemned Marten, and sentenced him to death, although no new evidence had been brought against him, and the public prosecutor himself admitted that there was a doubt of his guilt, and did not press for a death sentence. The decision of the court was unanimously condemned by the German Press, notwithstanding which the military authorities not only upheld the decision as regards Marten, but demanded a third trial of the case in regard to Hickel, on the ground that

he had been improperly acquitted. A number of public meetings were held in various parts of the country to protest against the conduct of the military authorities, but without result. Ultimately the Emperor intervened; Marten and Hickel were transferred to another military district, and another trial was ordered.

A serious industrial crisis was caused throughout Germany in June by the collapse of the Saxon Credit Society for Industry and Trade, the Leipzig Bank, and the Treber Trocknung Company at Cassel, a company working a vast industrial undertaking for drying the residuum left from the conversion of malt into beer. The bank had advanced to the company about 23,000,000 marks in excess of its total resources, and being unable to recover this sum it had to suspend payment, causing widespread suffering among those who had invested their savings. in it, and producing a financial panic at Berlin and in other German towns. The director of the bank was arrested, and another of the high officials shot himself. These disasters were accompanied by a general depression in trade and industry owing to overproduction, reckless speculation, and the dishonesty of high officials. The failure of crops in Prussia added to the general distress, and the Government had to advance money for the purchase of food and provender in order to prevent a suspension of agricultural work.

The German Socialist Congress met at Lübeck on September 23, and Herr Bernstein, who during his exile in England had observed that the working classes there managed to obtain their objects by a practical policy instead of pursuing the visionary schemes of Marx and his followers, and who had since been permitted to return by Count Bülow, now strongly advocated that policy in person, as he had previously done in his writings on the subject. Herr Bebel, the veteran Socialist leader, proposed a resolution condemning Herr Bernstein's views, and after much discussion it was passed by 166 votes to 71, the minority consisting chiefly of the younger members of the Socialist organisation, who are advocates of free trade and colonial expansion.

During the latter part of the year there were several differences between the Emperor and the Municipal Council of Berlin, which is entirely composed of Socialists and Radicals. He refused to sanction the election of a Herr Kaufmann as second burgomaster of the capital, and rejected the designs submitted to him by the Council for a monumental fountain at Friedrichshain and for a tramway line across Unter den Linden, the principal street of Berlin. Herr Kaufmann was twice elected, although the Emperor persisted in his refusal to sanction his appointment on the ground that many years ago he had been deprived of his military rank as an officer of the Reserve for publicly opposing the anti-Semitic movement. The Emperor's objection to the tramway line was that it would

spoil the street and be dangerous to foot-passengers; and as regards the monumental fountain he insisted on certain alterations being made in the design, to which the Council, after some demur, agreed, at the same time protesting that the Emperor had no legal right to interfere.

În maritime affairs the carrying trade of Germany showed a considerable increase, the tonnage of the Hamburg fleet having for the first time exceeded 1,000,000 tons, or nearly 100,000 tons more than during the previous year. Freights, however, were from 30 to 40 per cent. lower, owing chiefly to the competition of the United States. The trade with Central and Southern America, China, and Japan showed a marked falling off, though exports to South Africa had increased. There was great activity in the German dockyards; besides the three Imperial dockyards at Dantzig, Kiel, and Wilhelmshafen, six private yards on the North Sea and the Baltic were secured for the service of the Navy. Five large war vessels were launched, of which four were battleships and the fifth a large cruiser, and the war fleet was further increased by a new gunboat and several torpedo destroyers.

In December considerable sensation was produced throughout Europe by the chastisement of Polish children in Prussia for refusing to learn the catechism and say their prayers in German, a language which they did not understand. The Prussian Government, alarmed at the rapid increase of the Polish population in the Polish provinces of Prussia and at the strong national feeling exhibited by the people, had determined to use all the means in its power to crush the Polish nationality and to convert the Poles in those provinces into Germans. This policy was first started by Prince Bismarck in 1886 (see ANNUAL REGISTER, 1886, pp. 343-346), but it had hitherto proved a failure, notwithstanding the large sums spent by the Government Colonisation Commission in purchasing land in Posen and settling German colonists upon it. The Polish population increased in much greater proportion than the German; although the Polish language was not allowed to be taught in the schools, Polish children learnt it at home; and the exclusion of Poles from the civil service resulted only in there being many more lawyers, medical men, and industrial employees among the Poles in Posen than among the Germans. National feeling always grows under persecution, and in Posen it was still further stimulated by the formation of a Chauvinistic German society, known as the HKT (the initials of the names of its founders, Hannemann, Keineman and Tiedemann), who used every opportunity of promoting Germanism and stifling all manifestations of Polish national life. The Government, which had at first paid little heed to the extravagant demands of this society, now openly adopted its tenets. The rooms of journalists and students were searched by the police for evidence of a Polish conspiracy against the Prussian State, and though no such

evidence could be found, there were plenty of documents which showed the attachment of the Poles to their nationality and their hopes of a better future for Poland. On the strength of these documents several editors of Polish newspapers were imprisoned, and thirteen Polish students were tried and punished with imprisonment for belonging to "secret societies at the universities or technical colleges in Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau, Greifswald, Halle, Darmstadt and Karlsruhe. These so-called secret societies were merely Burschenschaften like those formed by the German students, and they were creditably distinguished from the latter inasmuch as one of their objects was to promote temperance among the members. But they were composed of Poles, who spoke in Polish and discussed Polish history at their meetings, and this was sufficient in the eyes of the Prussian tribunals to condemn them. The flogging of the Polish children at Wreschen which followed was a further incident of the Germanising policy of the Government. The children, on being called upon to reply to questions in the catechism in the German language, refused to do so on the ground that they were "Poles, not Germans, and did not wish to learn the German religion." The children, of whom there were about twenty, were then all flogged by order of the school inspector. Their parents and friends, hearing their cries, broke into the school, but were expelled by the police, and though their only fault was the use of strong language against the school authorities for their barbarous conduct, they were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment up to a maximum of two and a half years. The principal offender, a widow with six children, protested with tears that she could not believe that the Emperor had sanctioned the introduction of religious teaching in German, and when asked by the president in what language she supposed Christ to have spoken, she replied without hesitation, "In Polish."

The sentence in this case produced extreme indignation among the Poles in Russia and Austria as well as in Germany, and the great Polish writer Sienkiewicz, the author of "Quo Vadis," issued an impassioned appeal to his countrymen to subscribe to a fund for the maintenance of the children who had thereby been deprived of their natural guardians. This appeal was generously responded to, and at the end of the year the fund amounted to a considerable sum. A debate was raised on the subject by Prince Radziwill in the German Parliament, but Count Bülow pointed out that the matter should rather be dealt with in the Prussian Parliament, in which he would declare the policy of the Government towards the Poles after the Christmas holidays.

The result of the census taken in December, 1900, was published this year. It showed that the population of the German Empire had increased during the past five years from 52,279,901 to 56,345,014, of whom 27,731,067 were males and

28,613,947 females. By far the most populous of the German States was Prussia, which in round numbers had 34,500,000 inhabitants, while Bavaria, which comes next, had 6,200,000 only. There were thirty-three towns of over 100,000 inhabitants; the largest was Berlin, with a population of 1,884,151, and the smallest Cassel, with 106,001.

Some interesting statistics were given of the consumption of alcoholic liquors in Germany at the meeting, in October, of the Society for Combating the Abuse of Spirituous Liquors, at Breslau. It was pointed out on this occasion that three milliards of marks (150,000,000l.) were annually spent in the German Empire on intoxicating liquors and only twelve milliards on food. Every German man or woman consumed on the average ten litres of pure alcohol, or thirty litres of spirits every year, or five glasses of spirits a day. In Upper Silesia when a child cried it was the custom among the working classes to place a sponge dipped in spirits in its mouth. Drinking was especially prevalent among the students, and forty-two university professors and teachers had signed an appeal to them in favour of temperance, and especially against the system of compulsion to drink and drinking contests which prevailed in the universities.

The Emperor's speeches were this year again much criticised on account of their autocratic spirit. In an address to the Alexander Guards in March he threatened, shortly after the celebration by the Social Democrats of the revolution of 1848, to employ the bayonets of the regiment to suppress any repetition of popular risings, and he was further reported to have said, with regard to the agitation against the Tariff Bill, that if the commercial treaties were not renewed he would "smash everything to bits." A storm was also raised among the Clericals by the Emperor's appointment of Dr. Spahn to a chair of history at the University of Strasburg. This appointment, following upon that of Dr. Bentzler to the See of Metz, which had been vacant for two years, was at first regarded as a concession to the Catholic population of Alsace-Lorraine, and was welcomed by the Clericals accordingly as a recognition of religious equality in the university. It afterwards appeared, however, that the new professor, though a Roman Catholic, had Protestant leanings, and had edited a Catholic manual of history in which the Emperor's ancestor, Frederick William of Brandenburg, was warmly eulogised as a supporter of the Reformation, on account of which Dr. Spahn was stigmatised by the Bishop of Rothenburg as "an open enemy of the Church." The Roman Voce della Verità described the appointment as

"scandal," and alleged that the Bishop of Strasburg had received instructions from the Vatican to forbid the Catholic students and seminarists to attend the professor's lectures. Ultimately the matter was compromised by permitting those seminarists only to attend his lectures who, after or during