The Emperor had hardly returned to Germany when, on February 6th, the only attack ever made on his person occurred in Bremen.  He had been at a banquet in the town hall, and was being driven through the illuminated streets to the railway station to return to Berlin, when a half-witted locksmith’s apprentice of nineteen, Dietrich Weiland by name, flung a piece of railway iron at him with such good aim that it struck him on the face immediately under the right eye, inflicting a deep and nasty, but not dangerous wound.  The Emperor proceeded with his journey, the doctors attending to his injury in the train, and in a few weeks he was well again.  Weiland was sent to a criminal lunatic asylum.  The attempt had, apparently, nothing to do with Anarchism or Nihilism or the Social Democracy.  When the Emperor alluded to it afterwards in his speech to the Diet, he referred it to a general diminution of respect for authority.

“Respect for authority,” he said to the Diet,

“is wanting.  In this regard all classes of the population are to blame.  Particular interests are looked to, not the general well-being of the folk.  Criticism of the measures of the Government and Throne takes the coarsest and most injurious forms—­and hence the errors and demoralization of our youth.  Parliament must help here, and a change must be made, beginning with the schools.”

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,