Among practical Germans this attempt to link their new Empire with the discredited and disreputable old fabric, which had been too rotten for even the Hapsburgs to hold together, was extremely distasteful. Yet Frederic clung to this pseudo-mediævalism to the last. When he came to the throne as Kaiser his first proclamation spoke of “the re-established Empire.” And those who were in Berlin at the time know how a whole day’s delay was caused by the dissension over what title the new ruler should assume--the secret of which was that he desired to call himself Kaiser Friedrich IV, thus going back for imperial continuity to that Friedrich III who died while Martin Luther was a boy, and who is remembered only because he was the father of the great Max and was the original possessor of the Austrian under lip. Freytag indeed says that to that first proclamation Frederic did affix a signature with an IV--the assumption being that Bismarck altered it. The reader has been shown this less satisfying aspect of Frederic, as his associates saw him, because without understanding it the attitude of both his father and his son towards him would be flatly unintelligible. They did not believe that he would make a safe Emperor for Germany. The old William all the same loved his son deeply, and manifested an almost extravagant delight at the creditable way in which he carried himself through the Bohemian and French campaigns. In the succeeding years of peace it is obvious enough that the venerable Kaiser grew despondent about his son’s association with Radicals and their dreams--and it is equally clear that there were plenty of advisers at hand to confirm the old man in these gloomy doubts. Hence, though he cherished a sincere affection for “Unser Fritz” and his English wife, and would gladly have had them much about him, he could not help being of the party opposed to them--the party which lost no opportunity of exalting young William in his grandfather’s eyes as the real hope of the Hohenzollerns. Thus there was a growing, though tacit, estrangement between the father and son. When Frederic was stricken with disease, however, the kindly old father suffered keenly. There was great sweetness of nature in the tough martial frame of William I, and there is an abiding pathos in the picture we have of his last moments--the stout nonogenarian who fought death so valiantly even to his last breath that it seemed as if he could not die, rolling his white head on the pillow, and moaning piteously, “Poor Fritz! Poor Fritz!” with his rambling thoughts beyond the snow-clad Alps, where his son was also in the destroyer’s grasp. As for young William, his estrangement from his father, if less noted, had been more complete. He belonged openly to another party, and moreover smarted under the reproach of being unfilial, which the friends of his parents, largely of the writing and printing class, publicly levelled at him.