“Not only would the _gymnasia_ have to mend their methods,” he continued, both as to matter taught and the method of teaching it, but they must also reduce the time burden under which they now crush their pupils. It was cruel and inhuman to compel boys to work so hard at their books that they had no leisure for healthful recreation, and the necessary physical training and development of the body. If he himself, while at Cassel, had not had special opportunities for riding to and fro, and looking about him a little, he would never have got to know at all what the outside world was like. It was this barbarous one-sided and eternal cramming which had already made the nation suffer from a plethora of learned and so-called educated people, the number of whom was now more than the people themselves could bear, or the Empire either. So true it was what Bismarck had once said about all this “proletariat of pass-men”--this army of what were called hunger candidates, and of journalists who were also for the most part unsuccessful graduates of the _gymnasia_, was here on their hands, forming a class truly dangerous to society! The speech contained a great many practical and even technical references to bad ventilation, the curse of near-sightedness, and other details which need no mention here, but which indicated deep interest in, and a very comprehensive grasp of, the entire subject. At the close of the Conference, on December 17th, he made another address, from which we may cull a paragraph as a peroration to this whole curious imperial deliverance upon education. After an apology for having in his previous remarks neglected any reference to religion--upon which his profound belief that his duty as King was to foster religious sentiments and a Christian spirit was as clearly visible to the German people as the noonday light itself--he struck this true _fin de siécle_ note as the key to his attitude on the entire subject: