So recently as in May of last year, two months after the retirement of Bismarck, when the regular official deputation from the new Reichstag waited upon William, he pointed out to the Radical members that the _Freisinnige_ press was criticizing the army estimates, which he and his generals had made as low as possible, and sharply warned them to see that a stop was put to such conduct on the part of their friends, the Radical editors. And only last December, in his remarkable speech to the Educational Conference, he lightly grouped journalists with the “hunger candidates” and others who formed an over-educated class “dangerous to society.” This inability to tolerate the expression of opinions different from his own is very Bismarckian. The ex-Chancellor, in fact, has for years past acted and talked upon the theory that anybody who did not agree with him must of necessity be unpatriotic, and came at last to hurl the epithet of _Reichsfeind_--enemy of the Empire--every time any one disputed him on any point whatsoever. William has roughly shorn away Bismarck’s pretence to infallibility, but about the divine nature of his own claims he has no doubt. Some of his deliverances on questions of morals and ethics, in his capacity as a sort of helmeted Northern Pope, are calculated to bring a smile to the face of the Muse of History. His celebrated harangue to the Rector of the Berlin University, Professor Gebhardt, wherein he complained that, under the lead of democratic professors, the students were filled with destructive political doctrines, and concluded by gruffly saying, “Let your students go more to churches and less to beer cellars and fencing saloons”--was put down to his youth, for it dates from the close of 1888. It is interesting to note, from William’s recent speech at Bonn, that he has decidedly altered his views on both beer-drinking and duelling among students. He began his reign, however, with ultra-puritanical notions on these as well as other subjects. Long after this early deliverance his confidence in himself, so far from suffering abatement, had so magnified itself that he called the professors of another University together and lectured them upon the bad way in which they taught history. He had discovered, he said, that there was now much fondness for treating the French Revolution as a great political movement, not without its helpful and beneficent results. This pernicious notion must no longer be encouraged in German universities, but students should be taught to regard the whole thing as one vast and unmitigated crime against God and man.