I have ventured upon this extended extract from a book eight years old because the prophecy seems a remarkable one--far nearer what we see now to be the truth than any of the later predictions have turned out to be. “Paul Vasili” continues his sketch with some paragraphs about the Prince’s vast penchant for lower-class dissipated females, concluding with the warning that if ever he comes under the influence of a’ really able woman “it will be necessary to follow his actions with great caution.” All this may be unhesitatingly put down to the French writer’s imagination. There is no city where more frankness about talking scandal exists than in Berlin, yet I have sought in vain to find any justification for this view of the Kaiser’s character, either past or present. The impression brought from many talks with people who know him and his life intimately is that this special accusation is less true of him than of almost any other prince of his generation. William’s boyhood was marked by one innovation in the family traditions of a Hohenzollern’s training, the importance of which it is not easy to exaggerate. His father had been the first of these royal heirs to be sent to a university. He in his turn was the first to go to a public school. It is a solemn and portentous sort of thing--this training of a Hohenzollern. The progress of the family has been one long, sustained object lesson to the world on the value of education. No doubt it is in great part due to the influence of this standing example that Prussia leads the van of civilization in its proportion of scholars and teachers, and has made its name a synonym for all that is thorough and exhaustive in educational systems and theories. The dawn of this notion of a specially Spartan and severe practical schooling for his heir, in the primitive and curiously-limited brain of the first King Frederic William, really marked an era in the world’s conception of what education meant. We have all read, with swift-chasing mirth, wonder, incredulity and wrath, the stories of the way in which this luckless heir, afterward to be Frederic the Great, got his education stamped, beaten, burned, frozen, almost strangled into him. The account reads like a nightmare of lunatic savagery--yet in it were the germs of a lofty idea. From the brutal cudgeling, cursing, and manacling of Frederic’s experience grew the tradition of a unique kind of training for a Hohenzollern prince. The very violence and wild barbarity of his treatment fixed the attention of the family upon the theory of education--with very notable results.