of their respective husbands.  There is no doubt that the so celebrated Queen Louise of Prussia was the cause of Prussia’s receiving infinitely harsher treatment at the hands of Napoleon than the kingdom would otherwise have experienced; while the consort of old Emperor William, a pupil of Goethe, and famed for her culture and accomplishments, was disliked by the people, and was just as little in touch with them as her still more talented daughter-in-law, Empress Frederick.

For Empress Augusta-Victoria, however, a most profound sympathy extends throughout the length and breadth of Germany.  Every housewife, every mother, looks to her as to a model, knows that she is satisfied to excel in her purely domestic duties, and that she does, not strive to render herself superior to her sex by intellectual brilliancy and scientific attainments.  Thanks to this sympathy which she inspires, and to the fact that she is looked upon by men and women alike in her husband’s dominions as the ideal of what a German “hausfrau” should be, she has been able to exercise an influence of infinitely greater importance upon the nation at large than any other consort of a Prussian sovereign can have boasted to achieve.

It is to this estimable woman, whom some were disposed at first to denounce as narrow-minded and witless, that must be attributed the very strongly developed religious revival apparent throughout Protestant Germany since the present emperor came to the throne.  Prior to the present reign, church-going was as a rule eschewed by the male sex, women constituting the backbone of the congregation, while the clergy of the Lutheran persuasion was looked down upon, being treated by the territorial nobility much in the same way as upper servants, that is to say, on a par with the farm bailiffs, the stewards and the housekeepers In a word, religion and everything pertaining thereto was not considered fashionable.

To-day all this is changed.  Under the guidance of the empress, her husband, reared by his broad-minded mother in the ideas of Strauss and of Renan, has become a strict churchman, and court, nobility, bureaucracy and in fact the middle and lower classes too, have followed suit.  Free-thinking and neglect of religious duties are at present considered the acme of bad form in Germany.  Everybody professes the most profound interest in questions and enterprises relating to the church, and a large number of daughters of the most illustrious houses of the German nobility have conferred their hands and their hearts upon penniless Lutheran pastors, whose social status has thereby been entirely changed.  Moreover, if during the past ten years more churches have been built, particularly in Berlin, than had been the case in the entire previous half-century, this is because every one has become aware that the most facile way of winning the good graces of the empress, and the favor of her consort is by building a church, or endowing some hospital.