At all events they have not yet won their bet in Berlin that they would make us look ridiculous and hateful. Those very wise and well-bred people, who have been advising us to revise our national education, so as to welcome the Kaiser in 1900, have had but meagre success. As to the golden stream, which brought us the 8000 marks of the King of Prussia,[8] thank Heaven, it has not been able to drown our patriotism. Brother Frenchmen, it is still lawful for lunatics and ill-bred people like ourselves to remember Sedan, Metz, Strasburg and Paris, as well as Kronstadt and Toulon. Then let us not forget either the first rays of sunlight which reach us from Russia, or the darkness of 1870. [9] There is not a single German journalist (_and I wish to emphasise this fact most clearly_), even in the ultra-Prussian party, who would have dared to put his signature to such an article as one of our greatest newspapers has published concerning William II, whom it describes as "a humanitarian thinker, a gentle philosopher, thinking only of the happiness of the human race, of appeasing ancient hatreds and removing old grudges. How joyfully would he not have restored Metz and Strasburg had he not been prevented in performing this act by the historical necessities of his position." In proof of all which things, this article cites his telegrams of sympathy, the splendid bouquets which he has sent to our illustrious dead, his wish to pay homage to France in 1900, etc., etc. The journalist grown old in harness, who has dared to write such monstrous things as well as such nonsense, will no doubt be greatly astonished when I inform him that no foreign reporter, however inexperienced, of any nation great or small, is ignorant of the fact that William II is relentlessly determined to achieve the re-establishment of absolute autocracy as it was conceived by certain Emperors of Rome and Byzantium. His motto is _Voluntas Regis Supremo Lex_, which, on the occasion of his first visit to Muenich, he wrote there with his own Imperial hand. On the first occasion of the opening of the States of Brandenburg, he declared that he counted on their fidelity to help him to crush and destroy everything that might oppose his personal wishes. Is it necessary to say once more for the hundredth time that he never has the oath taken by his recruits without telling them that "they must ever be ready to fire on those who oppose his rule, even though they should be their own fathers, mothers and brothers"? The other day, did he not make his brother Prince Henry read a letter to the sailors of his war-ship the _Wilhelm Imperator_ (the vessel appointed to attend the Jubilee of Queen Victoria), in which letter he held up to the execration of the army and navy those "unpatriotic" Germans who refused to provide him with millions for his wild scheme of increasing the navy, that is to say, about nine-tenths of the Reichstag? There is in Germany one institution which commands