“learn from the Queen?  They must learn that the principal task of the German woman does not lie in attending public meetings and belonging to societies, in the attainment of supposed rights in which women can emulate men, but in the quiet work of the home and in the family.”

The Emperor’s reference to his divine appointment did not pass without a good deal of popular criticism in Germany, but nearly all Germans were at one with the Emperor in his view of the proper sphere for womanly activities.

The Emperor’s domestic life for the last two or three years, including the early months of the present year, have passed without special cause of interest or excitement, if we except the visit he and the Empress made to London in May, 1911, to be present at the unveiling of Queen Victoria’s statue, and the announcement he was able to make a few months ago that his only daughter, Princess Victoria Louise, had become engaged to Prince Ernest August, Duke of Cumberland, the still persisting claimant to the Kingdom of Hannover, absorbed by Prussia in 1866.  The visit to London lasted only five days and produced no incident particularly worthy of record.  The engagement of Princess Victoria Louise, while generally believed to be a love-match, possesses also political significance for Germany, not indeed as putting an end to the claim of the Duke of Cumberland, but as practically effecting a reconciliation between the Hohenzollerns and Guelphs.  The young Duke of Brunswick had already implicitly renounced his claim to Hannover by entering the German army and taking the oath of allegiance to the Emperor as War Lord, so that, when his father dies, the Guelph claim to Hannover will die with him.

It is difficult to determine whether the Government’s abandonment of its design to amend the Prussian franchise system in 1910, its submissive attitude towards the Pope’s Borromeo Encyclical in 1911, the rapid rise in food prices which marked both years, or finally, the Emperor’s failure to secure a slice of Morocco for Germany had most antagonizing effect on German popular feeling; but whatever the cause, the general elections of January, 1912, proved a tremendous Socialist victory, which must have been, and still remains, gall and wormwood to the Emperor.  Notwithstanding official efforts, over one-third of the votes polled at the first ballots went for Social Democratic candidates.  The number of seats thus obtained was 64, and this number, after the second ballots, rose to 110, thus making the Socialist party numerically the strongest in the Reichstag.  Up to the present, however, Herr Bebel and his cohorts appear to be happy in possessing power rather than in using it.