be the interpreter of their wishes (to the Emperor
and Bismarck, presumably) and do them some service. So it
has been granted to my youth to co-operate in this work of
peace. This has given me great pleasure and happiness.

"Give my regards to Galimberti and lay my respects at the
feet of the Pope.

"Thy devoted nephew,

"WILLIAM OF PRUSSIA."

With his future subjects Prince William was brought into close
relations only in a very limited way. No one, save perhaps Bismarck,
seems to have known or suspected his true character and aims. This was
natural enough, since it is not until a man comes to occupy some
influential or prominent position that the public begins to take an
interest in him. His father would be Emperor before him, and fate
might have it that he himself would not live to come to the throne.
Royal highnesses are not uncommon in a country with such a feudal
history and so many courts as Germany. The young Prince, moreover, was
never, to use a phrase of to-day, in the limelight. He was never
involved in a notorious scandal. He had not, as his eldest son, the
present Crown Prince, has, published a book. He was more or less
absorbed in the army, the early grave of so many dawning talents. And
there was no newspaper press devoted to chronicling the doings and
sayings of the fashionable world of his time. His natural abilities
would doubtless have secured him reputation and success in any sphere
of life, but, as he himself would probably be the first to admit, much
of his fame, and even much of his merit, is due to the splendid
opportunities afforded him by his birth and position.

At the same time it is obvious that if his people at this period had
not much opportunity of studying the young Prince, he had been
studying them and their requirements as these latter appeared to him.
He had evidently thought much on Germany's conditions and prospects
before he came to the throne, and was Empire-building in imagination
long before he became Emperor. It is not hard to guess the drift of
his meditations. The success of the Empire depended on the success of
Prussia, and the success of Prussia, ringed in by possibly hostile
Powers, on union under a Prussian King whom Germans should swear
fealty to and regard as a Heaven-granted leader. From the history of
Prussia he drew the conclusion that force, physical force, well
organized and equipped, must be the basis of Germany's security