If only he had always remained on the neutral ground that lies between politics and the army! His want of tact and good feeling in this respect is shown by the way in which he tried to baulk the efforts of the Imperial Government in the settlement of the Brunswick succession. The oath of loyalty to the Emperor tendered by Duke Ernest of Cumberland, heir to the Duchy and son-in-law to His Majesty, on entering the army, did not seem to the Crown Prince (or, for the matter of that, to a good many typical Prussians) sufficient reason for admitting his brother-in-law to the last Guelph inheritance, to which he was the legitimate successor. The Crown Prince held that Duke Ernest should further be required to make a formal renunciation of his claims to the Hanoverian throne. The Emperor proved more shrewd and more politic, and the young ducal couple was enabled to enter Brunswick amid general acclamation. A section of the German Press, disgusted at the Crown Prince’s perpetual meddling with affairs that did not concern him, drily reminded him that he had no special status under the Prussian or Imperial constitution, and that he could only claim the right, enjoyed by every citizen, of stating his opinion as a mere private individual. This endless hunting after personal popularity led to family scenes which the palace walls in Berlin and Potsdam, impenetrable though they are as a rule, could not altogether keep secret from an inquisitive public. The banishment of the Crown Prince to Danzig was solely due to his intemperate language in speech and writing. The Emperor sent him, for his sins, to a remote corner of Prussia, under the pretext of making him learn his duties as a regimental commander. After a time it became evident that in his distant fortress he was more embarrassing and less easy to watch than in Berlin. He was therefore recalled and put upon the General Staff, nominally that he might be initiated into the mysteries of Prussian strategy and tactics, really that he might remain under his father’s eye. In point of fact, we must not make too much of his escapades, which are traditional among heirs to the Hohenzollern throne. Frederick the Great, famous before his accession for his quarrels with his brutal sire, was not the first Prussian heir-apparent who rebelled against paternal authority. Later on, in the last century, the Emperor William I., when he was next in the line of succession to his brother, Frederick William IV., held, during the latter’s reign, a little princely Court that was a hotbed of criticism and opposition. And the present Emperor? Who will believe that in his passionate self-assertiveness he would not have caused just as much vexation and embarrassment to his father, if the Emperor Frederick had reigned for more than a few months?