In the restless course of his travels during these first six months William had made numerous speeches, almost every one of which contained a sentence or two of enough significance to be reprinted everywhere. As a rule his utterances at foreign Courts were polite and amiable to a fault, while his speeches at home, made among cheering after-dinner audiences in various parts of Germany, were characterized by much violent extravagance of language. The most intemperate of these harangues were reserved for his State visits to the provincial divisions of Prussia. At the beginning of last year, on the occasion of a visit of this nature to Königsberg, capital of East Prussia, he was led by his enthusiasm into so fervid a strain of eloquence, and flourished the metaphorical sword so recklessly, that one of the Russian papers ironically congratulated the world upon the fact that Prussia only had thirteen provinces, and that the Kaiser had now exhausted the rhetorical possibilities of eleven of them.
The earliest and most interesting of these speeches was delivered at Frankfurt-am-Oder just two months after his accession. He referred of his own volition to the undoubtedly foolish talk that had been heard during his father’s brief reign, of Frederic’s alleged idea of giving back Alsace-Lorraine, an imputation which William characterized as shameful to his father’s memory.
“There is upon this point but one mind,” he went on amid loud hurrahs, “namely, that our eighteen army corps, and our 42,000,000 people should be left upon the field rather than that we should permit a solitary stone of what we have gained to be taken from us.”
Equally characteristic, and perhaps even more important as a clue to the manner in which the young Kaiser’s conceptions of his position shaped themselves, was his celebrated rebuke to the Burgomaster and municipal authorities of Berlin, which has for its date, October 28 1888. That we may the better comprehend this, it will be well to glance for a moment at the remarkable development of the new Berlin.
Twenty years ago--that is to say, when the Empire was founded--Berlin was of course much the largest city within the new German boundaries, but it was scarcely a capital in the sense that Paris, Vienna, or London is. Frankfurt-am-Main was the great banking centre of Germany; Hamburg was its commercial metropolis; Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and even smaller towns were more esteemed as places of fashionable residence and resort. Berlin was big and powerful, and rich in manufactures, no doubt, but nobody thought of it as beautiful or attractive, and nobody wanted to live there who could maintain himself in pleasanter surroundings.