At first the larger part of German exports was cheap and nasty, with a piratical habit of sailing under false colours, and simulating well-known British and other national trade-marks. But this was a brief interlude. The sagacity, thoroughness, and enterprise of manufacturers and merchants soon guided their steps past this dangerous quicksand, and the label _made in Germany_ ceased to be a reproach.
Students and lovers of truth laboured at discovery; and hard upon their heels followed a crowd of practical inventors--the gleaners, scavengers, and rag-pickers of science. Never had the trade of any country thriven with a more wonderful rapidity. Though still of necessity a borrower by very reason of her marvellous expansion, Germany nevertheless began to make her influence felt in the financial sphere. Her own ships carried her products to the ends of the earth, and fetched home raw materials in exchange. And not only this, her merchant fleets began to enter into successful competition for the carrying trade of the world, even with the Mistress of the Seas herself.
For a score of years after the fall of Paris, Germany found but little time for dreaming. Meanwhile, by an astute if somewhat tortuous policy, and under the impenetrable shield of the finest army in Europe, Bismarck kept safe the empire which he had founded. He declined to be drawn into adventures either at home or abroad, either in the new world or the old. He opposed the colonial aspirations of a few visionaries, who began to make some noise towards the end of his long reign, and silenced them with some spacious but easy acquisitions in Africa and the East. He consolidated the Prussian autocracy, and brought its servant, the bureaucracy, to the highest pitch of efficiency. He played with the political parties in the Reichstag as if they had been a box of dominoes, combining them into what patterns he pleased. At the same time he fostered the national well-being with ceaseless vigilance, and kept down popular discontent by the boldness and thoroughness of his social legislation. But for Bismarck himself { 93} the age of adventure was past. It was enough that by the labours of an arduous lifetime, he had made of Germany a puissant state, in which all her children, even the most restless, could find full scope for their soaring ambitions.