This moment coincides with the end of the first twenty-five years of his reign, which had dowered the German people with an unexampled prosperity. The Imperial Jubilee of 1913 was an epoch-making date. Germany, in fact, was not content with celebrating that year the peaceful conquests achieved since the accession of her third Emperor; she commemorated, at the same time, the centenary of the wars of liberation, while the members of the Reichstag patriotically voted for a military law more burdensome and more crushing than any previous measure of the kind. Thus Germany associated the superb results of her national energy for the past quarter of a century, which no real menace of war had ever threatened to wreck, with the glowing memories of her emancipation from the Napoleonic yoke, and with feverish preparation for a fresh struggle, which the condition of Europe by no means appeared to warrant. This triple coincidence aroused serious misgivings in the minds of foreign observers. The patriotic memories of 1813 seemed like low rumblings of thunder, the harbingers of an approaching storm. As if the passions of his subjects were not heated enough already, the Emperor in his public speeches did not cease from fanning their flame. He must have said to himself then that the first part of his task was over, and that the second was about to begin. He had launched his people upon a career of prosperity and progress in which it could no longer cry halt, and a new war, far from checking this marvellous economic advance, would only act as a fresh stimulus. Germany, having trebled her commerce and almost doubled her population, with millions of workers who no longer left their country to seek a living elsewhere, needed new fields for expansion, and thirsted for an unquestioned supremacy in every sphere. It would be the glory of William, while still in the full vigour of his years, to realize these splendid ambitions.