It was in this year, when the Austro-German war was going on, that King Edward established special telegraphic communication between Marlborough House and the seat of war. Like his lamented mother, he is a shrewd observer of foreign politics, and now that he is called upon to reign, he will be, as she was, the greatest help to the Foreign Minister of the day. He has since kept up in every important war the practice of securing the earliest possible telegraphic information, notably in the Franco-Prussian, the Russo-Turkish, and the Greco-Turkish wars, but most of all in the Boer war. In the summer of 1866 the King laid the foundation-stone of the new building of the British and Foreign Bible Society, when he was received by the venerable Earl of Shaftesbury, President of the Society, the Lord Mayor, the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of Winchester. In his speech the King recalled the fact that only sixty-three years previously Mr. Wilberforce had met with a few friends in a small room in a dingy counting-house and had established the Bible Society, while in the interval the Society had already spent six millions of money in the furtherance of its objects, and that it had contributed to the translation of the Bible into two hundred and eighty different languages and dialects. The King further said:-- “I have an hereditary claim to be here on this occasion. My grandfather, the Duke of Kent, warmly advocated the claims of the Society, and it is gratifying to me to reflect that the two modern versions of the Scriptures more widely circulated than any others--the German and English--were both in their origin connected with my family. The translation of Martin Luther was executed under the protection of the Elector of Saxony, the collateral ancestor of my lamented father; whilst that of William Tyndale--the foundation of the present Authorised English Version--was introduced with the sanction of the Royal predecessor of my mother, the Queen who first desired that ‘the Bible shall have free course through all Christendom, but especially in my own realm.’ It is my hope and trust that, under the Divine guidance, the wider diffusion and a deeper study of the Scriptures will, in this as in every age, be at once the surest guarantee of the progress and liberty of mind, and the means of multiplying in the present form the consolations of our holy religion.”