CHAPTER VI.
THE GERMAN EMPIRE "From the very beginning of my career my sole guiding-star has been how to unify Germany, and, that being achieved, how to strengthen, complete, and so constitute her unification that it may be preserved enduringly and with the goodwill of all concerned in it."-- BISMARCK: Speech in the North German Reichstag, July 9, 1869.
On the 18th of January 1871, while the German cannon were still thundering against Paris, a ceremony of world-wide import occurred in the Palace of the Kings of France at Versailles.

King William of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor.

The scene lacked no element that could appeal to the historic imagination.

It took place in the Mirror Hall, where all that was brilliant in the life of the old French monarchy used to encircle the person of Louis XIV.

And now, long after that dynasty had passed away, and when the crown of the last of the Corsican adventurers had but recently fallen beneath the feet of the Parisians, the descendant of the Prussian Hohenzollerns celebrated the advent to the German people of that unity for which their patriots had vainly struggled for centuries.
The men who had won this long-deferred boon were of no common stamp.
King William himself, as is now shown by the publication of many of his letters to Bismarck, had played a far larger share in the making of a united Germany than was formerly believed.