This is especially true of the young Kaiser’s first important step in the field of international politics. He had been on the throne for less than four weeks when he started off to pay a State visit to the Czar of Russia. He had not been invited, and it was apparent enough in Russian Court circles that his hasty and impulsive descent upon their summer leisure was as unwelcome as it was surprising. He himself appears to have been swayed both by memories of his grandfather’s injunction to friendliness toward Russia, and by Bismarck’s desire to make a demonstration of unfriendliness to England. This note of anti-English prejudice is dominant throughout all that immediately followed. During Frederic’s brief tenure of power, in April of 1888, Queen Victoria had made a journey to Berlin, and had spent several days in the company of her dying son-in-law and afflicted daughter at the palace of Charlottenburg. Her coming was not at all grateful to the Junker class, and it was rendered highly unpopular among Berliners generally by a curiously tactless performance on the part of the Empress Frederic. To properly receive her royal mother it was necessary to refurnish and decorate a suite of rooms in the Charlottenburg Schloss, and orders were sent to London for all this new furniture, and for English workmen to make the needed alterations. As may be imagined, this slight upon the tradesmen and artizans of Berlin was deeply resented, and there was considerable ground for nervousness lest the Queen should have some manifestation of this dislike thrust upon her notice during her stay. Fortunately, this did not happen, but Prince William behaved so coldly toward his grandmother that her Majesty could have had no doubt as to the attitude of his friends. Later on, after Frederic’s death? came confused stories about the arbitrary and unjust way in which his widow had been treated, both personally and as regarded her property rights. These matters are all settled now, and were the subject of great exaggeration even then, but they created so much bad blood at the time that the Prince of Wales in the following autumn left Vienna upon a hastily improvised and wholly fictitious hunting tour, rather than remain and meet his nephew, Kaiser William, who was coming that way.