The Emperor has always been happy in his family, happy in seeing his country prosperous, happy in the admiration and respect of the people of all nations; and if he has passed through some dark hours, he must feel happy in having nobly borne them. Want of knowledge of the trials of ordinary humanity is, of course, no matter of reproach to him; on the contrary, it is matter of congratulation; and, as several of his frankest deliverances show, he has, both as man and monarch, felt many a pang, many a regret, many a disappointment, the intensity of which cannot be gauged by those who have not felt the weight of his responsibilities.
A discharge of 101 guns in the gardens of Crown Prince Frederick's palace in Berlin on the morning of January 27, 1859, announced the birth of the future Emperor. There were no portents in that hour. Nature proceeded calmly with her ordinary tasks. Heaven gave no special sign that a new member of the Hohenzollern family had appeared on the planet Earth. Nothing, in short, occurred to strengthen the faith of those who believe in the doctrine of kingship by divine appointment.
It was a time of political and social turmoil in many countries, the groundswell, doubtless, of the revolutionary wave of 1848. The Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, and the war with China had kept England in a continual state of martial fever, and the agitation for electoral reform was beginning. Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister, with Lord Odo Russell as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Mr. Gladstone as Minister of Finance. Napoleon III was at war with Austria as the ally of Italy, where King Emmanuel II and Cavour were laying the foundations of their country's unity. Russia, after defeating Schamyl, the hero of the Caucasus, was pursuing her policy of penetration in Central Asia.
In Prussia the unrest was chiefly domestic. The country, while nominally a Great Power, was neutral during the Crimean War, and played for the moment but a small part in foreign politics. Bismarck, in his "Gedanke und Erinnerungen," compares her submission to Austria to the patience of the French noble-man he heard of when minister in Paris, whose conduct in condoning twenty-four acts of flagrant infidelity on the part of his wife was regarded by the French as an act of great forbearance and magnanimity. Prince William, the Emperor's grandfather, afterwards William I, first German Emperor, was on the throne, acting as Prince Regent for his brother, Frederick William IV, incapacitated from ruling by an affection of the brain. The head of the Prussian Ministry, Manteuffel, had been dismissed, and a "new era," with ministers of more liberal tendencies, among them von Bethmann Hollweg, an ancestor of the present Chancellor, had begun. General von Roon was Minister of War and Marine, offices at that time united in one department. The Italian War had roused Germany anew to a desire for union, and a great "national society" was founded at Frankfurt, with the Liberal leader, Rudolf von Bennigsen, at its head. Public attention was occupied with the subject of reorganizing the army and increasing it from 150,000 to 210,000 men. Parliament was on the eve of a bitter constitutional quarrel with Bismarck, who became Prussian Prime Minister (Minister President) in 1862, about the grant of the necessary army funds. Most of the great intellects of Germany--Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher--had long passed away. Heinrich Heine died in Paris in 1856. Frederick Nietzsche was a youth, Richard Wagner's "Tannhäuser" had just been greeted, in the presence of the composer, with a storm of hisses in the Opera house at Paris. The social condition of Germany may be partially realized if one remembers that the death-rate was over 28 per _mille_, as compared with 17 per _mille_ to-day; that only a start had been made with railway construction; that the country, with its not very generous soil, depended wholly upon agriculture; that savings-bank deposits were not one-twelfth of what they are now; that there were 60 training schools where there are 221 to-day, and 338 evening classes as against 4,588 in 1910; that many of the principal towns were still lighted by oil; that there was practically no navy; and that the bulk of the aristocracy lived on about the same scale as the contemporary English yeoman farmer. Berlin contained a little less than half a million inhabitants, compared with its three and a half millions of to-day, and the state of its sanitation may be imagined from the fact that open drains ran down the streets.