This Prussian family has always differed radically from its other German neighbours in professing to be solicitous for the poor people rather than for the nobility’s privileges and claims. Sometimes this has sunk to be a profession merely; more often it has been an active guiding principle. The lives of the second and third Kings of Prussia are filled with the most astonishing details of vigilant, ceaseless intermeddling in the affairs of peasant farmers, artisans, and wage-earners generally, hearing complaints, spying out injustice, and roughly seeing wrongs righted. When Prussia grew too big to be thus paternally administered by a King poking about on his rounds with a rattan and a taker of notes, the tradition still survived. We find traces of it all along down to our times in the legislation of the Diet in the direction of what is called State Socialism.
Dr. Hinzpeter felt the full inspiration of this tradition. He longed to make it more a reality in the mind of his princely pupil than it had ever been before. Thus it was that the lad was sent to Cassel, to sit on hard benches with the sons of simple citizens, and to get to know what the life of the people was like. Years afterwards this inspiration was to bear fruit.
But in 1877 the work of creating an ideally democratic and popular Hohenzollern was abruptly interrupted. Dr. Hinzpeter went back to Bielefeld, and young William entered the University of Bonn. The soft-faced, gentle-minded boy, still full of his mother’s milk, his young mind sweetened and strengthened by the dreams of clemency, compassion, and earnest searchings after duty which he had imbibed from his teacher, suddenly found himself transplanted in new ground. The atmosphere was absolutely novel. Instead of being a boy among boys, he all at once found himself a prince amongst aristocratic toadies. In place of Hinzpeter, he had a military aide given him for principal companion, friend, and guide.
These next few years at the Rhenish university did not, we see now, wholly efface what Dr. Hinz-peter had done. But they obscured and buried his work, and reared upon it a superstructure of another sort—a different kind of William, redolent of royal pretensions and youthful self-conceit, delighting in the rattle and clank of spurs and swords and dreaming of battlefields.
Poor Hinzpeter, in his Bielefeld retreat, could have had but small satisfaction in learning of the growth of the new William. The parents at Potsdam, too, who had built such loving hopes upon the tender and gracious promise of boyhood—they could not have been happy either.
CHAPTER III.—UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN
The act of matriculation at Bonn meant to young William many things apart from the beginning of a university career. In fact, it was almost a sign of his emancipation from academic studies. He was a student among students in only a formal sense. The theory of a complete civic education was respected by his attendance at certain lectures, and by his perfunctory compliance with sundry university regulations. But, in reality, he now belonged to the army. He had attained his majority, like other Prussian princes, at the age of eighteen, and thereupon had been given his Second Lieutenant’s commission in the First Foot Regiment of the Guards, where his father had been trained before him. The routine of his military service, and the exigencies of the martial education which now supplanted all else, kept him much more in Berlin than at Bonn.
Both at the Prussian capital and Rhenish university town he now wore his uniform, his sword, and his epaulets, and, chin well in air, sniffed his fill of the incense burned before him by the young men of the army. The glitter and colour of the parade ground, the peremptory discipline, the sense of power given by these superb wheeling lines and walls of bayonets and exact geometrical movements as of some mighty machine, fascinated his imagination. He threw himself into military work with feverish eagerness. Pacific Cassel, with its gymnasium and the kindly figure of the tutor, Hinzpeter, faded away into a remote memory of childhood.