as they deserve.  I must rest satisfied with assuring you of my own and the country’s ineffaceable thanks.  As a sign of this thanks I confer on you the rank of a Duke of Lauenburg.  I will also send you a life-sized picture of myself.

     “God bless you, my dear Prince, and grant you still many
     years of an old age undisturbed and blessed with the
     consciousness of duty faithfully done.

     “In this disposition I remain to you and yours in the future
     also your sincere, obliged, and grateful Emperor and King,

     “WILLIAM I.R.”

The Emperor has never, so far as is publicly known, issued, or caused to be issued, an official account of the episode and its peripeties, but the story he poured, evidently out of a full heart, into the ears of Prince Hohenlohe, then Statthalter of Alsace-Lorraine, during a midnight drive from the railway station at Hagenau to the hunting lodge at Sufflenheim, is an historical document of practically official authenticity.  It appears as follows in the Prince’s Memoirs:—­

“STRASBURG, 26 April, 1890.

“On the evening of the 23rd, nine o’clock, I drove with Thaden and Moritz to Hagenau, there to await the arrival of the Emperor.  We spent the evening with circle-officer Klemm.  I went to bed at eleven o’clock in the guest-room, and slept until half-past twelve.  Moritz and Thaden drove to the station with a view to changing their clothes in the train.  At one o’clock I was again at the station, when the Emperor punctually arrived.  I presented the gentlemen to him, and turned over General Hahnke to Baron Charpentier and Lieutenant Cramer, for them to conduct him to the hunting ground.  Our journey lasted about an hour, during which the Emperor related without a pause the whole story of his quarrel with Bismarck.  According to this the coolness had already begun in December.  The Emperor then demanded that something should be done about the Working Class Question.  The Chancellor was against doing anything.  The Emperor held the view that if the Government did not take the initiative, the Reichstag, i.e. the Socialists, Centre and Progressives, would take the matter in hand, and then the Government would lag behind.  The Chancellor wanted to lay the anti-Socialist Bill with the expulsion paragraph again before the Reichstag, dissolving the chamber if it did not accept the Bill, and then, if it came to disturbances, to take energetic measures.  The Emperor objected, saying that if his grandfather, after a long and glorious reign, were forced to repress disturbances no one would think ill of him.  It was different in his case, who had as yet accomplished nothing.  People would reproach him with beginning his reign by shooting down his subjects.  He was ready to act, but he wished to do it with a good conscience after endeavouring to redress the well-founded grievances of the workmen, or at least after doing everything