as driven from office,--a
vanquished foe. He had used in vain every weapon against her that his
ingenuity could devise. He had even gone so far as to publicly charge
her with treason in betraying to the English, and through them to
the French, military secrets which had been imparted to her by her
husband, during the war of 1870. He had, in short, done everything
that lay in his power to prevent her husband from succeeding to the
crown, mainly, as he admitted, with the object of preventing her from
sharing the throne as empress; and after having grossly insulted
her in the presence of her dying, voiceless and helpless husband
by refusing to transact any state business, or to communicate any
confidential reports to the monarch as long as she was in the room,
he incited her eldest son, whose mind he had deliberately poisoned
against her, to take steps which could only intensify the sorrow of
the grief-stricken woman immediately after her so fondly loved husband
had been taken from her.

Yet she carried the day in the end, and her son is now the very first
to acknowledge his mother's cleverness and the fact that she showed
herself more than a match in statecraft for the man reputed as the
greatest statesman of the century, namely, Bismarck.

One of the cleverest of the many clever things that she did, was the
manner in which she brought about the fall of Bismarck. She was too
shrewd to dream of exercising any direct pressure on her son. It was
done indirectly, and with so much diplomacy, that William never dreamt
at the time of dismissing the iron chancellor that he was playing his
mother's game. Abstaining from any steps towards a reconciliation
with her son, she merely took advantage of the kaiser's visit to
Westphalia, to place in his path his old tutor, Professor Hintzpeter,
a pedagogue of whom William had been very fond, and whose teachings
had left a deep impression upon the mind of his imperial pupil. The
empress knew the professor's characteristics, his fads, and his views.
She likewise recognized and understood, as only a mother can do, the
complex character of her son, and she foresaw the effects that
were likely to be achieved by bringing the two men once more into
communication with each other.

Like William II., Hintzpeter is full of contrasts, for while on the
one hand he has always professed the most advanced radical and even
socialistic doctrines,--doctrines with which he impregnated the mind
of his pri