by them than previously, which naturally served to embitter
him more than ever before.

Emperor Frederick's reign lasted not quite one hundred days, and
throughout that period a conflict may be said to have raged around the
bedside of the dying man. Both he and his wife, aware how brief his
tenure of the throne was destined to be, were bent on inaugurating
some of those liberal reforms and popular measures which had been the
dream of their entire married life, and which they wished to see put
in force, as a lasting memorial of that monarch who figures in German
history to-day as "Frederick the Noble."

Prince Bismarck, and all the leading statesmen of Prussia, it must be
admitted, ranged themselves against the imperial couple in the matter.
They expressed profound pity for the dying emperor, but they denounced
the empress with the utmost virulence for taking advantage, as they
described it, of his condition to endow Germany with some of the most
pernicious features of English political life, which, while all very
well for Britons, were destined to prove disastrous in the extreme if
applied to Prussia. The fiercer the opposition, the more resolute did
both the emperor and empress become in their determination to attain
their aim, before death once more rendered the throne vacant; and
the position of William, who was now crown prince, became even more
difficult than it had hitherto been. His political sympathies were, it
is impossible to deny, with Prince Bismarck and his followers, and he
could not with his training and with the influences by which he had
been surrounded, ever since he had left school, but disapprove of
the measures which his father and mother wished to adopt. This very
naturally added to their distrust of him, and while they lavished
every token of affection upon their other children, he was treated by
them more as a political adversary and a personal foe than as a friend
or a son.

At length the end came. The pitiful sufferings of "Unser Fritz,"
uncomplainingly and patiently borne, were brought to a close by a
death which in his case must have been a longed-for release; and
within an hour afterwards, William, the present emperor, had
startled his subjects and the entire civilized world, by taking an
extraordinary step, which for a long time afterwards served as a theme
for the denunciation of unfilial character hurled against him both
in Germany and abroad; this step being the giving of an order to