I asked how his health in general now was. “Not what it should be,” he replied. “I am weak in the legs and cannot stand for any length of time. Leyden said to me: ‘If this weakness in the legs is to be remedied, the head must do no work for three months.’ I ought to have resigned, and I had intended doing so two years ago. But what is a man to do when he cannot resist tears? Still I should have gone; but the National Liberals began their attacks, and I was obliged to remain. And then there was the outrage in addition: the old man with his bandaged arm lying there, and hardly able to say ‘Yes’ at the Council respecting the Regency--I thought to myself that it would be a sin against God if I left him. And then the National Liberals were no politicians in the autumn of 1877. Bamberger has recently declared, in an elegiac tone, that they were justified in expecting consideration, or even gratitude, from me. As if they had co-operated with me for sentimental reasons, and not because of their Nationalist principles! I am represented as having disowned them, while it was they who turned from me because I could not be as liberal as they were. If their leaders had been real politicians, they might have secured a great deal from me then, and more still in the course of time. But the maintenance of the party was of greater importance to them than the prospect of practical benefit. When Bennigsen returned from Varzin they said: ‘He cannot work _with_ this Minister, but _after_ him.’ It would be well if the fifteen or eighteen members of the party, who by rights belong to the Progressists, were to withdraw--but they remain. And now I am attacked by their newspapers, the _Kölnische_, the _National Zeitung_, the _Hannoverscher Courier_, quite in the style of the Progressist press. I am opposed in the Reichstag on all questions--obviously to prove that I require the support of these gentlemen--in connection with the tobacco monopoly, the tobacco tax as I intended it, and the Anti-Socialist laws.” I remarked that doubtless this was also, to some extent, due to their juridical turn of mind and their idea of a legal state, which, in reality, would be nothing but a state of lawyers and County Court judges, where they would rule and arrange everything according to their own theories--a state which would have no more claim to exist than a theologians’ or traders’ state. “Yes,” he replied, “that is true; but the chief cause is their enmity to me. And how ungrateful they were to the King about the Anti-Socialist laws! The old man who had boldly risked his crown for Prussia and Germany in 1866 and 1870 struck down by the hand of an assassin--and even in 1864, when a coalition of the Powers on behalf of Denmark (Schleswig-Holstein affair) was by no means impossible, they did not wish to protect him because _I_ proposed it.”