Those of you whose memories go back to the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, will readily recall the notorious ill-feeling that existed between Wilhelm II and his mother, Victoria, the Dowager Empress Friederich. Stories have too often been told of this enmity, culminating in the virtual banishment from Berlin of the Queen Mother, for me to need do more than mention them. But what is not so generally known is the small esteem in which Victoria was held by the entire German people. During the twenty years of her married life as the wife of the then Crown Prince Friederich, she was treated by Berlin society with the most thinly-veiled hostility. Even Bismarck made no attempt to conceal his dislike for her, and accused her—to quote his own words—of having “poisoned the fountain of Hohenzollern blood at its source.” Victoria, for her part, although she seems to have had no animosity toward the German people, certainly possessed little love for her eldest son, and did her best to delay his ascension to the Imperial throne as long as she could. When in 1888 Wilhelm I was dying, she tried her utmost to secure the succession to her husband, who was then lying dangerously ill at San Remo. “Cancer,” the physicians pronounced the trouble, and even the great German specialist, Bergman, agreed with their diagnosis. There is a law that prevents any one with an incurable disease, such as cancer, from ascending the Prussian throne; but Victoria knew too well the attitude of her son, Wilhelm, toward herself, not to wish to do everything in her power to prevent him from becoming Emperor so long as she could. In her extremity she appealed to her mother, Queen Victoria of England, who sent Mackenzie, the great English surgeon, to San Remo to report on Friederich’s condition. Mackenzie opposed Bergman and said the disease was _not_ cancer; and the physicians inserted a silver tube in Friederich’s throat, and in due course he became Emperor Friederich III. But in spite of Mackenzie and the silver tube, Friederich III died after a reign of ninety-eight days—and he died of cancer. Now what was the reason for this hostility between mother and son and between Empress and subjects? There have been many answers given—Victoria’s love for England, her colossal lack of tact, her impatient unconventionality. Berlin whispered of a dinner in Holland years before, when Victoria had entertained some English people she met there—people she had never seen before—and had finished her repast by smoking a cigar. That in the days when the sight of a woman smoking horrified the German soul! And Berlin hinted at worse unconventionalities than this. As for the animosity of the Kaiser, that was attributed to the fact that he held her responsible for his withered left arm.