heart and strength, and unrestingly devoted himself to
rescuing the Mark Brandenburg out of its deep distress and
made it a strong and united whole."

What particularly attracted the Emperor in the history of the Elector
was the fact that he was the first Hohenzollern who saw the importance
of promoting trade and industry, building a navy, and acquiring
colonies. As yet, however, the Emperor had only clear and fairly
definite ideas about the need for a navy. The world-policy may have
been in embryo in his mind, but it was not born.

The imaginative side of the Emperor's character at this period is well
illustrated in a speech he made in 1890 to his favourite "Men of the
Mark." He was talking of his travels, to which allusion had been made
by a previous speaker.

"My travels," said the Emperor,

"have not only had the object of making myself acquainted
with foreign countries and institutions, or to create
friendly relations with neighbouring monarchs, but these
journeys, which have been the subject of much
misunderstanding, had for me the great value that, withdrawn
from the heat of party faction, I could review our domestic
conditions from a distance and submit them to calm
consideration. Any one who, standing on a ship's bridge far
out at sea, with only God's starry heaven above him,
communes with himself, will not fail to appreciate the worth
of such a journey. For many of my fellow-countrymen I would
wish that they might live through such an hour, in which one
can make up an account as to what he has attempted and what
achieved. Then would he be cured of exaggerated
self-estimation, and that we all need."

Having discharged the duty of addressing his own subjects, the
Emperor's next care, after a stay at Kiel where a German Emperor and
King now for the first time in history appeared in the uniform of an
admiral, was personally to announce his accession at the courts of his
fellow-European sovereigns. We find him, accordingly, paying visits to
Alexander II in St. Petersburg, to King Oscar II in Stockholm (where
he received a telegram announcing the birth of his fifth son), to
Christian IX in Copenhagen, to Kaiser Franz Joseph in Vienna and to
King Humbert in Rome. To both the last-mentioned he presented himself
in the additional capacity of Triplice ally.

In August of the year following his accession he paid his first visi