In a speech from the throne to the Prussian Diet the Emperor took the Constitutional Oath:  “I swear to hold firmly and unbrokenly to the Constitution of the Kingdom and to rule in agreement with it and the laws ... so help me God!” and went on to proclaim the continuance in Prussia and the Empire of his grandfather’s and father’s policy and work.  He said at the same time, while undertaking not to make the People uneasy by trying to extend Crown rights, that he would take care that the constitutional rights of the Crown were respected and used, and that he meant to hand them over unimpaired to his successor.  He concluded by saying that he would always bear in mind the words of Frederick the Great, who described himself as the “first servant of the State.”

At Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, a few months later, he declared, when unveiling a monument to his uncle, Prince Frederick Karl, a hero of the Franco-Prussian War, that he meant never to surrender a stone of the acquisitions made in the war and

“believed he voiced the feeling of the entire army in saying that Germany, rather than do so, would suffer its eighteen army corps and its whole population of 42 millions to perish on the field of battle.”

At this period of his career the Emperor was, first and foremost, a thoroughgoing Hohenzollern.  Doubtless he is so still, if he talks less about the dynasty.  He admired Frederick the Great, then as now, and in the first place as military commander, but the ancestor with whom he even more sympathized, and sympathizes, was the Great Elector.  “The ancestor,” he said himself,

“for whom I have the most liking (Schwaermen, a hardly translatable German verb, is the word he used) and who always shone before me as an example in my youth, was the Great Elector, the man who loved his country with all his heart and strength, and unrestingly devoted himself to rescuing the Mark Brandenburg out of its deep distress and made it a strong and united whole.”

What particularly attracted the Emperor in the history of the Elector was the fact that he was the first Hohenzollern who saw the importance of promoting trade and industry, building a navy, and acquiring colonies.  As yet, however, the Emperor had only clear and fairly definite ideas about the need for a navy.  The world-policy may have been in embryo in his mind, but it was not born.

The imaginative side of the Emperor’s character at this period is well illustrated in a speech he made in 1890 to his favourite “Men of the Mark.”  He was talking of his travels, to which allusion had been made by a previous speaker.

“My travels,” said the Emperor,