As early as August 1st, before his Third Army had even crossed the Rhine, Frederic had broached the idea of an empire, with Prussia at its head. All through the campaign which followed his head was full of it. He busied his mind with questions of titles, precedence, &c., to grow out of the new creation. One afternoon--August 11th--he strolled on the hillside with Freytag for a talk. “He had put on his general’s cloak so that it fell around his tall figure like a king’s mantle, and had thrown around his neck the gold chain of the Hohenzollern order, which he was not wont to wear in the quiet of the camp--and paced elated along the village green. Filled with the importance which the emperor idea had for him, he evidently adapted his external appearance to the conversation.” During this talk he asked what the new title of the King of Prussia should be, and the anti-imperialist Freytag suggested Duke of Germany. Then “the Crown Prince broke out with emphasis, his eyes flashing: ‘No! he must be Emperor!’” * To create this empire Frederic was quite ready to forcibly coerce the Southern German States. Bismarck and William I., whom we think of as rough, hard, arbitrary men, shrank from even considering such a course. To the enthusiastic and slightly unreal Frederic it seemed the most natural thing in the world. The account in his diary of the long interview of Nov. 16, 1870, with Bismarck makes all this curiously clear. “What about the South Germans? Would you threaten them, then?” asks the Chancellor. “Yes, indeed!” answers our ideal constitutional Frederic, with a light heart. The interview was protracted and stormy, Bismarck ending it by resort to his accustomed trick of threatening to resign, a well-worn device which twenty years later was to be used just once too often. * Freytag, p. 20. In this same diary, under date of the following March (1871), Frederic writes: “I doubt whether the necessary uprightness exists for the free development of the Empire, and think that only a new epoch, which shall one day come to terms with me, will see that.... More especially I shall be the first Prince who has to appear before his people after having honourably declared for constitutional methods without any reserve.” One feels that these two passages from his own diary--the utterances of November and the reflections of March--show distinctly why the practical rulers, soldiers, and statesmen of Prussia distrusted Frederic. They saw him more eager and strenuous about grasping the imperial dignity than any one else--willing even to break treaties and force Bavaria, Saxony, and Würtemberg into the empire at the cannon’s mouth, and then they heard him lamenting that until he came to the throne there would not be enough “uprightness” to insure The Empress Frederic “constitutional methods.” Candidly, it is impossible to wonder at their failure to reconcile the two. [Illustration: 0084]