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Count Caprivi at the same time reduced the period of compulsory service from three years to two; but while this reform lightened the burden on the individual conscript, it meant a great increase in the number of those who passed through military training, and an enormous increase of the war strength.
The Emperor approves of the commercial treaties and seemed to have great confidence in Caprivi generally. As we came to speak of intrigues and gossip, the Emperor hinted that Bismarck was behind them. He added that people were urging him from many quarters to be reconciled with Bismarck, but it was not for him to take the first step.
The cost of living, partly as a result of the new German tariff, with maximum and minimum duties, which now replaced the Caprivi commercial treaties, was steadily rising. The Morocco episode had ended without territorial gain, if with no loss of national honour or prestige. The Poles were antagonized afresh by a stricter application of the Settlement Law for Germanizing Prussian Poland.
But the war strength was disproportionately increased by the Caprivi Army Act of 1893, which reduced the period of compulsory service from three years to two. The hardly-veiled intention of the German War Staff was to increase its war resources as rapidly as was consistent with the long-sufferance of those who served and those who paid the bill.
In the German Reichstag not long ago, in reply to a question why funds were needed for raising the salaries of the under-officers, the German Chancellor openly declared that trustworthy under- officers were necessary to contend against socialism. Caprivi only said aloud what every statesman knows and assiduously conceals from the people.
On the following day, in the Conference Hall of the General Staff, the emperor, surrounded by the military magnates of the Reichsrath, the generals of the twenty army corps specially summoned to be present, the officers of the General Staff, Chancellor von Caprivi, successor to Prince Bismarck, the King of Saxony, the grand dukes and the Duke of Connaught, addressed the marshal in the following terms: "I thank you in the name of those who have fought together with you, and whose most faithful and devoted servant you have been.
Three days later, on March 20th, an hour or two after the formal resignation reached the palace, the Emperor's letter granting the Chancellor's request for his release, naming him Duke of Lauenburg and announcing the appointment of General von Caprivi as his successor, was put into the old Chancellor's hands.
He was now his own Chancellor, though that post was nominally occupied by General von Caprivi and Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe successively. He was Chancellor, too, knowing that not a hundred miles off the old pilot of the ship of State was watching, keenly and not too benevolently, his every act and word.
With the appointment of Caprivi the Emperor's "personal regiment" may be said to have begun.
The German action was explained by the publication two months later of the edict, stigmatized by Bismarck as an "Urias Letter," in which Caprivi warned foreign Governments against attaching any importance to the utterances of the Duke of Lauenburg. The Bismarckian and anti-Bismarckian storm came up afresh in Germany.
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