“_This is William’s thirteenth birthday. May he grow up to be an able, honest, and upright man, a true German, prepared to continue without prejudice what has now been begun! Heaven be praised; between him and us there is a simple, hearty, and natural relationship, which we shall strive to preserve, so that he may thus always look upon us as his best and truest friends. It is really an oppressive reflection when one realizes what hopes have already been placed on the head of this child, and how great is our responsibility to the nation for his education, which family considerations and questions of rank, and the whole Court life at Berlin and other things will tend to make so much more difficult_.” The retirement of Dr. Hinzpeter from his charge was an event the significance of which recent occurrences have helped us to appreciate. When history is called upon to make her final summing up upon William’s character and career, she will allot a very prominent place to the influence of this relatively unknown man. A curious romance of time’s revenge hangs about Dr. Hinzpeter. He is a native of the Westphalian manufacturing town, Bielefeld, and was a poor young tutor at Darmstadt when he was recommended to the parents of William as one exceptionally fitted to take charge of their son. The man who gave this recommendation was the then Mr. Robert Morier, British Minister at Darmstadt. Nearly a quarter of a century later Sir Robert Morier was able to see his ancient and implacable enemy, Bismarck, tripped, thrown, and thrust out of power, and to sweeten the spectacle by reflecting that he owed this ideal vengeance to the work of the tutor he had befriended in the old Darmstadt days. It is more than probable that the idea of sending the young Prince to the Cassel gymnasium originated with Dr. Hinzpeter. At all events, we know that he held advanced and even extreme views as to the necessity of emphasizing the popular side of the Hohenzollern tradition. This Prussian family has always differed radically from its other German neighbours in professing to be solicitous for the poor people rather than for the nobility’s privileges and claims. Sometimes this has sunk to be a profession merely; more often it has been an active guiding principle. The lives of the second and third Kings of Prussia are filled with the most astonishing details of vigilant, ceaseless intermeddling in the affairs of peasant farmers, artisans, and wage-earners generally, hearing complaints, spying out injustice, and roughly seeing wrongs righted. When Prussia grew too big to be thus paternally administered by a King poking about on his rounds with a rattan and a taker of notes, the tradition still survived. We find traces of it all along down to our times in the legislation of the Diet in the direction of what is called State Socialism.