A new Pope--the present Leo XIII--had been elected only a few months before, and with him the Regent Frederic opened a personal correspondence, with a view to compromising the unhappy religious wrangles which were doing such injury to Germany. The letters written from Berlin were models of gentle firmness and wise statesmanship, and they laid a foundation of conciliatory understanding upon which Bismarck afterward gladly reared his superstructure of partial settlement when the time came for him to need and bargain for the Clerical vote in the Reichstag. But at the time their friendly tone gave grave offence to the Prussian Protestants, and was peculiarly repugnant to the Junker court circles of Berlin. It is no pleasant task to picture to one’s self the grief and chagrin with which the Regent and his wife must have noted that their elder son ranged himself among their foes. The change which had been wrought in him during the year in the regiment and at Bonn revealed itself now in open and unmistakable fashion. Prince William ostentatiously joined himself with those who criticised the Regent. He assiduously cultivated the friendship of the men who led hostile attacks upon his parents. He had his greatest pride in being known for a staunch supporter of Bismarck, a firm believer in divine right, Protestant supremacy, and all the other catchwords of the absolutist party. The praises which these reactionary people sang in his honour mounted like the fumes of spirits to his young brain. Instinctively he began posing as the Hope of the Monarchy--as the providential young prince, handsome, wise and strong, who was in good time to ascend the throne and gloriously undo all that the weak dreamer, his father, had done toward liberalizing the institutions of Prussia and Germany. A lamentable and odious attitude this, truly! Yet, which of us was wholly wise at nineteen? And which of us, it may be added fairly, has encountered such magnificent and overpowering temptations to foolishness as these that beset young William? Remember that all his associates, alike in his daily routine with his regiment or at the University and in his larger intercourse among the aristocratic social circles of Berlin, took only one view of this subject. At their head were Bismarck, the most powerful and impressive personality in Europe, and the aged Emperor, the one furiously inveighing against the manner in which the Protestant religion and political security were being endangered, the other deploring from his sick-bed the grievous inroads which were threatened upon the personal rights and prerogatives of the Hohenzollerns. It is not strange that young William adopted the opinion of his grandfather and of Bismarck, chiming as it did with the new impulses of militarism that had risen so strongly within him, and being re-echoed, as it was, from the lips of all his friends.