To his people he promised that he would be a
"just and mild prince, observant of piety and religion, a protector of peace, a promoter of the country's prosperity, a helper to the poor and needy, a faithful guardian of the right."
To the Parliament a week later he announced that he meant to walk in the footsteps of his grandfather, particularly in regard to the working classes, to acquire the confidence of the federated princes, the affection of the people, and the friendly recognition of foreign countries. He said that in his opinion the
"most important duties of the German Emperor lay in the domain of the military and political security of the nation externally, and internally in the supervision of the carrying out of imperial laws."
The highest of these laws, he explained, was the Imperial Constitution and "to preserve and protect the Constitution, and in especial the rights it gives to the legislative bodies, to every German, but also to the Emperor and the federated states," he considered "among the most honourable duties of the Emperor."
While the order of these addresses is different to what it would be in England, it entirely accords with the spirit of the Prussian monarchy and the political system of the German people. Settled in the heart of Europe, the nation rests on the army, and it is hardly too much to say that, from the Emperor's point of view, possibly also from the popular German point of view, the interests of the army must be considered before the interests of the rest of the population. An English monarch, who issued his first address to the British navy, would be as justified in doing so by the real necessities of Great Britain as a German Emperor who first addresses the German army is justified by the real necessities of Germany; for the British navy is as vital to the British as the German army is to the German nation. In England, however, the monarch's respect for the people and Parliament takes precedence of his respect for the army, not vice versa as in Germany.
In a speech from the throne to the Prussian Diet the Emperor took the Constitutional Oath: "I swear to hold firmly and unbrokenly to the Constitution of the Kingdom and to rule in agreement with it and the laws … so help me God!" and went on to proclaim the continuance in Prussia and the Empire of his grandfather's and father's policy and work. He said at the same time, while undertaking not to make the People uneasy by trying to extend Crown rights, that he would take care that the constitutional rights of the Crown were respected and used, and that he meant to hand them over unimpaired to his successor. He concluded by saying that he would always bear in mind the words of Frederick the Great, who described himself as the "first servant of the State."
At Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, a few months later, he declared, when unveiling a monument to his uncle, Prince Frederick Karl, a hero of the Franco-Prussian War, that he meant never to surrender a stone of the acquisitions made in the war and
"believed he voiced the feeling of the entire army in saying that Germany, rather than do so, would suffer its eighteen army corps and its whole population of 42 millions to perish on the field of battle."
At this period of his career the Emperor was, first and foremost, a thoroughgoing Hohenzollern. Doubtless he is so still, if he talks less about the dynasty. He admired Frederick the Great, then as now, and in the first place as military commander, but the ancestor with whom he even more sympathized, and sympathizes, was the Great Elector. "The ancestor," he said himself,