Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/533

Rh the powerful, which permitted him to say after an achieved success to Bismarck, Roon and Moltke: “This is your work.” This made him neither a great statesman nor a great general, but it made him a successful ruler and a capable head of a government doing great deeds. However, this quality of mind and character has by no means been without example in the house of Hohenzollern, and not on this account can it be said that Kaiser Wilhelm will not have his equal on the imperial throne of Germany.

He stands alone and his position will always be unique as the link which binds together the old time and the new. His childhood saw the deepest humiliation of the fatherland. With his mother, the noble Louise, Prussia's Regina Dolorosa, he was compelled to fly from the capital conquered by Napoleon. The French Empire, which had crushed Prussia and subjugated Germany, was to him not a mere foreign state, but the product of revolutionary ideas. He, like all those around him, saw the salvation of his country only in a strong military power ever ready to oppose hostile armies, and in an unlimited royal power with which to suppress revolutionary ideas. These were the traditions of his house, these were the prevailing views of his time, the only ones with which he came in touch. Under their exclusive influence he grew up. Thus his principles and conceptions of duty formed themselves, and to those principles and conceptions of duty he has held fast all the days of his life. Like the other Princes of his house, he, as a boy, became a soldier, but more of a soldier than the others. His soldier-like zeal for service and the article of creed that the King according to his will must care for the welfare of the people, and that every subject owes obedience to the King, filled his whole horizon. As a youth he saw how the promises of representative institutions, which had been given in the year 1813 in the days of the popular insurrection