Twenty-seven years ago an elderly prince of the Schleswig-Holstein family produced a temporary sensation by renouncing his ancestral rank, in order to marry a beautiful young Miss Lee, whom he had met at Paris. He was then just the age of the century--sixty-four--and the bride, who, with true American courage, states the year of her birth in the _Almanach de Gotha_, was twenty-six. Less than a year later the bridegroom, who had been given the title of Prince de Noër at the Austrian Court, died in Syria. Nine years afterwards--in 1874--his widow married Count Waldersee, and went to Berlin to live. It happened, in 1881, that young Prince William of Prussia was wedded to a Schleswig-Holstein Princess, to whom the Countess Waldersee, by her first marriage, stood in the relation of great-aunt. Young William and Waldersee were already friends. This connection between their wives led to a closer intimacy, the results of which have been tremendous in Germany. I have said that the home of the Waldersees now became the centre of the rising opposition to the Bismarcks. Count Waldersee himself represented the ancient Prussian nobles’ traditions of an absolute monarchy and a Hohenzollern’s unlimited kingly power--traditions which were all at war with this Bismarckian usurpation of authority. The Countess Waldersee, with the privilege of an American, was able to gather into association with this aristocratic conservatism many elements in German political life which, under any other roof than hers, would have been antagonistic. Here it was that the women’s conclave was formed--the young Empress Victoria and her widowed mother-in-law, the Empress Frederic, joining hands with the Countess Waldersee--with the blessing of the aged Empress Augusta, who all her life long had hated Bismarck, resting upon their work. Bismarck had been supreme for so many years, and had put so many of these feminine cabals under his feet in bygone days, that he failed to recognize the deadly peril which confronted him in this newly-unmasked battery. He proceeded to charge upon it with all his old recklessness of confidence, and with his accustomed weapons of newspaper insults, personal browbeatings and threats to resign. To his great bewilderment nothing gave way. He had come at last upon a force greater than himself. He maintained the struggle for over a year--scornfully at first, and later with a despairing tenacity as pitiful as it was undignified, until at last he was fairly cudgeled off the field.