and cherished.  To both of you I wish from my heart God’s richest blessings.  Let your home be founded on God and our Saviour.  As He is the most impressive personality which has left its illuminating traces on the earth up to the present time, which finds an echo in the hearts of mankind and impels them to imitate it, so may your career imitate His, and thus will you also fulfil the laws and follow the traditions of our House.

“May your home be a happy one and an example for the younger generation, in accordance with the fine sentence which William the Great once wrote down as his confession of faith; ’My powers belong to the world and my country.’  Accept my blessing for your lives.  I drink to the health of the young married couple.”

The record of this memorable year may be closed with mention of an institution which is not only a special care of the Emperor’s, but is also a landmark in the relation of Germany and America which may prove to be the forerunner, if it has not already done so, of similar interchange of ideas and information between nations which only require mutually to understand each other in order to be the best of friends.

The system of an annual exchange of professors between America and Germany was suggested, it is believed, to the Emperor in this year by Herr Althoff, the Prussian Minister of Education.  The Emperor took up the idea with enthusiasm, and after discussing it with Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, who was invited to Wilhelmshohe for the purpose, had it finally elaborated by the Prussian Ministry of Education which now superintends its working.

The original idea of an exchange only between Harvard and Berlin University professors was, thanks to the liberality of an American citizen, Mr. Speyer, extended almost simultaneously by the establishment of what are known as “Roosevelt” professorships.  The holders of these positions, unlike the original “exchange” professors between Harvard and Berlin only, may be chosen by the trustees of Columbia University from any American university and can exchange duties for two terms, instead of one in the place of the exchange professors, with the professors of any German University.  Harvard professors have been succesively:  Francis G. Peabody, Theodore W. Richards, William H. Scofield, William M. Davis, George F. Moore, H. Munsterberg, Theobald Smith, Charles S. Minog; and Roosevelt professors:  J.W.  Burgess, Arthur T. Hadley, Felix Adler, Benj.  Ide Wheeler, C. Alphonso Smith, Paul S. Reinsch, and William H. Sloane.

Writing to the German Ambassador in Washington, Baron Speck von Sternburg, in November, 1905, the Emperor said: