It was natural enough that a few days after, addressing the Alexander Regiment of Guards, who were taking up quarters in a new barracks near the palace in Berlin, he should tell them the barracks were like a citadel to the palace, and that, as a sort of imperial bodyguard, the regiment "must be ready, day and night as once before"--he was referring to the "March Days"--"to meet any attack by the citizens on the Emperor." At Bonn in April the Emperor attended the matriculation (immatriculation, the Germans call it) of his eldest son, the Crown Prince, at the university. He was in civil dress, one of the rare public occasions during the reign when he has not been in uniform, but this did not prevent him delivering a martial address to the Borussians. "I hope and expect from the younger generation," he said to the students, "that they will put me in a position to maintain our German Fatherland in its close and strong boundaries and in the congeries of German races--doing to no one favour and to no one harm. If, however, anyone should touch us too nearly, then I will call upon you and I expect you won't leave your Emperor sitting." A great shout of "Bravo!" went up when the Emperor ceased, and the students doubtless all thought what a fine thing it would be if he would only lead them straightway against those cheeky Englanders. At the end of June, on board the Hamburg-American pleasure-steamer _Princess Victoria Luise_, the Emperor pronounced the famous sentence--"Our future lies on the water." The year before he had said something like it, and it is worth quoting as the Emperor's first explicit allusion to Weltpolitik. "Strongly," he exclaimed, "dashes the beat of ocean at the doors of our people and compels it to preservation of its place in the world, in a word, to Weltpolitik. The ocean is indispensable for Germany's greatness. The ocean testifies that on it and far beyond it no important decision will be taken without Germany and the German Emperor." His words on the present occasion were: "My entire task for the future will be to see that the undertakings of which the foundations have been laid may develop quietly and surely. We have, though as yet without the fleet as it should be, achieved our place in the sun. It will now be my task to hold this place unquestioned, so that its rays may act favourably on trade and industry and agriculture at home inside, and on our sail-sports on the coast--for our future lies on the water. The more Germans go on the sea--whether travelling or in the service of the State--the better. When the German has once learned to look abroad and afar he will lose that 'hang' towards the petty, the trivial, which now so often seizes him in daily life." And he closed: "We must now go out in search of new spots where we can drive in nails on which to hang our armour."