forlorn, widowed Queen Regent of Spain, making so desperate a
struggle to save the kingdom for her young son; if so, he but
shared a feeling common to a very large part of humanity, for
certainly there have been few more pathetic situations; but that
he really cared anything for the success of Spain is exceedingly
doubtful. The Hohenzollern common sense in him must have been for
years vexed at the folly and fatuity of Spanish policy. He
probably inherits the feeling of his father, who, when visiting
the late Spanish monarch some years before his death, showed a
most kindly personal feeling toward Spain and its ruler, and an
intense interest in various phases of art developed in the
Spanish peninsula; but, in his diary, let fall remarks which show
his feeling toward the whole existing Spanish system. One of
these I recall especially. Passing a noted Spanish town, he
remarks: "Here are ten churches, twenty monasteries, and not a
single school." No Hohenzollern is likely to waste much sympathy
on a nation which brings on its fate by preferring monasticism to
education; and never during the Spanish War did he or his
government, to my knowledge, show the slightest leaning toward
our enemies. Certain it is that when sundry hysterical publicists
and meddlesome statesmen of the Continent proposed measures
against what they thought the dangerous encroachments of our
Republic, he quietly, but resolutely and effectually, put his
foot upon them.

Another complaint sometimes heard in America really amounts to
this: that the Emperor is pushing German interests in all parts
of the world, and is not giving himself much trouble about the
interests of other countries. There is truth in this, but the
complainants evidently never stop to consider that every thinking