"One of our most memorable experiences was a day spent at Friedrichsruhe, near Hamburg, with the Dowager Princess Bismarck, half-English by origin, and a most intellectual type of woman, beloved, not to say adored, by her three sons, the eldest of whom, Bismarck III.—named Archibald after Lord Rosebery, a great friend of her father—while the second seems to have inherited much of the character of his grandfather. Pointing to the chair in which Bismark. I. used to sit, the Princess repeated much of the pessimist prophecy indulged in by the Iron Chancellor when speaking of William IL, and as repeated im the lately published third volume of his memoirs, "We came into contact With no Germans, high or low, who did not admit that in plunging Europe into war the ex-Kaiser committed a fearful blunder, due to his vanity, his megalomania, his instability, and his sentimentality. Believed by Europe to be an autocrat, they said he really was a ruler without any real will of his own, At the last moment he allowed his will, as so often before. to be over-ruled by the military caste, the General Staff, and in fact he never knew what it was fo have a will of his own.""
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.