It is interesting here to recall that on August 31, 1870, after the battle of Beaumont, Busch obtained from Bismarck the following opinion of the then Crown Prince:
"He will be reasonable later on, and allow his Ministers to govern more, and not put himself too much forward, and in general he will get rid of many bad habits that render old gentlemen of his trade sometimes rather troublesome. [It is to be feared that this uncomplimentary allusion is to the old Emperor.] For the rest, he is unaffected and straightforward; but he does not care to work much, and is quite happy if he has plenty of money and amusements, and if the newspapers praise him."
A very superficial judgment of the Emperor Frederick, and the suggestion that he was too fond of money is particularly gratuitous. As a matter of fact, only the year before his accession, in 1887, a certain Frenchman, Ballardin by name, died, leaving the whole of his fortune, valued at several million francs, to the then Crown Prince. M. Ballardin appeared to have been so embittered by disputes with the French authorities that he determined to show his hatred and contempt for his native country by the novel method of bequeathing his property to the German Crown Prince, who, however, absolutely refused to accept even the smallest portion of the legacy. That is certainly not the action of a man who could be accused of a love of money.
It may here be stated, on this subject of money, that when the Emperor Frederick succeeded to the throne, there was in the hands of Baron Kohn, the private banker of the old Emperor William, a sum of fifty-four million marks (£2,700,000), which was bequeathed to the Emperor Frederick as a kind of family treasure, to be controlled by the head of the House of Hohenzollern for the time being. When the Emperor Frederick died, however, it was found that the great bulk of this money had been invested abroad by his orders in the name of his widow; her uncle, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and her cousin, King Leopold of Belgium, being the trustees. It is even asserted that the late Prince Stolberg resigned at the time his office of Minister of the Imperial Household in consequence of what he considered the diversion of this sum of money from the Hohenzollern family. According to another version, however, only a portion of this money became the absolute property of the Empress, the remainder being hers for life, with power of appointment among her younger children.