“have not only had the object of making myself acquainted with foreign countries and institutions, or to create friendly relations with neighbouring monarchs, but these journeys, which have been the subject of much misunderstanding, had for me the great value that, withdrawn from the heat of party faction, I could review our domestic conditions from a distance and submit them to calm consideration.  Any one who, standing on a ship’s bridge far out at sea, with only God’s starry heaven above him, communes with himself, will not fail to appreciate the worth of such a journey.  For many of my fellow-countrymen I would wish that they might live through such an hour, in which one can make up an account as to what he has attempted and what achieved.  Then would he be cured of exaggerated self-estimation, and that we all need.”

Having discharged the duty of addressing his own subjects, the Emperor’s next care, after a stay at Kiel where a German Emperor and King now for the first time in history appeared in the uniform of an admiral, was personally to announce his accession at the courts of his fellow-European sovereigns.  We find him, accordingly, paying visits to Alexander II in St. Petersburg, to King Oscar II in Stockholm (where he received a telegram announcing the birth of his fifth son), to Christian IX in Copenhagen, to Kaiser Franz Joseph in Vienna and to King Humbert in Rome.  To both the last-mentioned he presented himself in the additional capacity of Triplice ally.

In August of the year following his accession he paid his first visit as Emperor to England.  It was a very different thing, one may imagine, from the earliest recorded visit of a German Emperor to the English Court.  That was in 1416, when the Emperor Sigismund (1411-1437) arrived there and was received by Henry V. Henry postponed the opening of Parliament specially on his account, made him a Knight of the Garter, and signed with him at Canterbury an offensive and defensive alliance against France.  How poor the German Empire and the German Emperor were at that epoch may be judged from the fact that on his way home Sigismund had to pawn the costly gifts he had received in England.

On the present occasion a grand naval review of over a hundred warships, with crews totalling 25,000 men, was held in honour of the Emperor at Osborne.  This was followed, a few days afterwards, by a parade of the troops at Aldershot under the command of General Sir Evelyn Wood.  On this occasion, after expressing his admiration for the British troops, the Emperor concluded:  “At Malplaquet and Waterloo, Prussian and British blood flowed in the prosecution of a common enterprise.”  In a little speech after the review the Emperor spoke of the English navy as “the finest in the world.”  The impression made by the Emperor on Sir Evelyn has been recorded by that general.  “The Emperor is extremely wide-awake,” he writes to a friend, “with a decided, straightforward manner.