William II believes that the victories of 1870 were due to Prussia
alone, and that it was she who made the Empire; and this explains why
he takes such complete possession of the Empire, and makes the
celebrations of these victories so personal a matter. The people of
Bavaria, Wuertemberg and Saxony are herein exposed to humiliation of a
kind which they decline to accept. There is no doubt that all Germans
hate us with an equal hatred, and all have united with the same
enthusiasm to crush our unfortunate France; nevertheless, we may derive
some profit from the antipathy inspired in them by Prussia's grasping
claims to glory and authority.

September 1, 1896. [4]

Do you remember, my faithful friends, and you, my earliest readers,
what were the sentiments of hatred, love and fidelity, that inspired
the letters which I addressed to you nearly eighteen years ago--the
violence of my hatred for the most tyrannical, and at the same time,
the most dangerously vindictive, of European statesmen, viz. Von
Bismarck?

Have you not often smiled, when I then denied the strength of the
Colossus and asserted his fragility, when I used to say: "He must not
die with a halo of glory; let him witness rather the bankruptcy of his
moral estate and give proof of the pettiness of his character and
evidence of his unbridled lust for power. Let the effrontery of his
lies return to him in bitterness?" And together, you and I, we have
now seen Prince Bismarck, not hurled down, but slowly crumbling to
ruin; there has been nothing great about his fall, neither the shout
that he gave, nor his way of falling, nor the words which he said when
he picked himself up.

And at the same time when I showed you, in the far distant future, this
idol of blood-thirstiness broken, I preached to you the love of Russia.
I saw her freeing herself from German influence and drawing closer to
us. Hardly had the Emperor Alexander III come to the throne, than I
said to you: "He will be a popular Emperor, and the more he loves his
own people the more he will love ours." For a long time you thought
that my hatred of Prince Bismarck was blind, but from the outset you
regarded my love of Russia as enlightened. How many strengthening and
encouraging letters have I not received from you?

And now, Nicholas II, son of Alexander III, the well-beloved Emperor,
who represents in his own person the highest expression of great, holy
and mystical Russia, is coming to P