Excerpt from For Sceptre and Crown, Vol. 1 of 2: A Romance of the Present Time It is as a political sketch, and not as an ordinary novel, that it is offered to this country. Although the great events of 1870 and 1871 have almost swept from memory the history of preceding years, yet the struggle of l866 - the Seven Weeks' War - must ever be memorable; it was the prelude to the great franco-german War, and its immediate result was that immcnse increase in the power of Prussia which placed her in her present position of supreme leader in Germany. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.