The fact that the Crown Prince Frederic, despondent and unnerved in the presence of a mortal disease, had voluntarily pledged himself to renounce his rights of succession, was naturally not published to the world. Although it is beyond doubt that such a pledge was given, nothing more definite than a roundabout hint has to this day been printed in Germany upon the subject. There are no means of ascertaining the exact number of personages in high position to whom this intelligence was imparted at the time. As has been said, the Emperor, the Chancellor, and the young heir were parties to Frederic’s original action. Certain indications exist that for a time the secret was kept locked in the breasts of these four men. Then Frederic confessed to his wife what he had done. The strangest feature of this whole curious business is that Frederic should ever have taken this gravely important step, not only without his wife’s knowledge, but against all her interests. Her influence over him was of such commanding completeness, and his devotion to her so dominated his whole career and character, that the thing can only be explained by laying stress upon his admitted tendency to melancholia and assuming that his shaken nerves collapsed under the emotional strain of meeting his father and son with sympathetic tears in their eyes. With the moment when the wife first learned of this abdication the active drama begins. She did not for an instant dream of suffering the arrangement to be carried out--at least until every conceivable form of resistance had been exhausted. We can fancy this proud, energetic princess casting about anxiously here, there, everywhere, for means with which to fight the grimly-powerful combination against her husband’s future and her own, and can well believe that in the darkest hour of the struggle which ensued this true daughter of the Fighting Guelphs never lost heart. For friends it was hopeless to look anywhere in Germany. She had lived in Berlin and Potsdam for nearly thirty years, devoting her large talents and wide sympathies to the encouragement of literature, science, and the arts, to the inculcation of softening and merciful thoughts embodied in new hospitals, asylums, and charitable institutions, and the formation of orders of nurses; most earnestly of all, to the task of lifting the women of Germany up in the domestic and social scale, and making of them something higher than mere mothers of families and household drudges. Nobody thanked her for her pains, least of all the women she had striven to befriend. Her undoubted want of tact and reserve in commenting upon the foibles of her adopted countrymen kept her an alien in the German mind, in spite of everything she did to foster a kindlier attitude. The feelings of the country at large were passively hostile to her. The influential classes hated her vehemently.