Placed in this position, the shock of the news that his father had an incurable disease must have come upon him with peculiar force. We can only dimly imagine to ourselves the great struggles fought out in his breast between grief for the father, who had really been an ideal parent, loving, gentle, solicitous, and tenderly proud, and concern for the Empire, which might be doomed to have a wasting invalid at its head for years. On the one side was the repellent thought that this father’s death would mean his own swift advancement, for the grandfather could clearly live but little longer. On the other side, if his father’s life was prolonged, it meant the elevation to the throne of a sick man, whose fitness for the crown of this armed and beleaguered nation would at all times have been doubtful, and who, in his enfeebled state, at the mercy of the radical agitators and adventurers about him, might jeopardize the fortunes of Empire and dynasty alike. Torn between these conflicting views, it is not strange that William welcomed a middle course, suggested, I am authoritatively informed, by Frederic himself. The Crown Prince returned to Berlin from Ems thoroughly frightened. He had no doubt whatever that he was suffering from cancer and expected to die within the year. Like all men of an expansive and impressionable temperament, he was subject to fits of profound melancholia--as Freytag puts it, “fond of indulging in gloomy thoughts and pessimistic humours;” so much so that he “sometimes cherished the idea of renouncing the throne, in case of its being vacant, and leaving the government to his son.” * He had grown lethargic and dispirited through years of inaction and systematic exclusion from governmental labours and interests. He returned from Ems now, in this April of 1887, in a state of complete depression. * Freytag, p. 78, The evident affection and sympathy with which both his father and son received him, gave an added impulse to the despairing ideas which had conquered his mind since his sentence of death by cancer had been uttered. In the course of a touching interview between the three Hohenzollerns, Frederic with tears in his eyes declared that he did not desire to reign, and that if by chance he survived his father he would waive his rights of succession in favour of his elder son. This declaration was within a brief space of time repeated in the presence of Prince Bismarck, and was by him reduced to writing. The paper was deposited among the official private archives of the Crown at Berlin, and presumably is still in existence there. CHAPTER V.--THROUGH THE SHADOWS TO THE THRONE