INTRODUCTORY

William the Second, German Emperor and King of Prussia, Burgrave of Nuernberg, Margrave of Brandenburg, Landgrave of Hessen and Thuringia, Prince of Orange, Knight of the Garter and Field-Marshal of Great Britain, etc., was born in Berlin on January 27, 1859, and ascended the throne on June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, fifty-four years old in the present year of his Jubilee, 1913, and his reign happily yet unfinished has extended over a quarter of a century.

The Englishman who would understand the Emperor and his time must imagine a country with a monarchy, a government, and a people in short, a political system almost entirely different from his own. In Germany, paradoxical though it may sound to English ears, there is neither a government nor a people. The word “government” occurs only once in the Imperial Constitution, the Magna Charta of modern Germans, which in 1870 settled the relations between the Emperor and what the Englishman calls the “people,” and then only in an unimportant context joined to the word “federal.”

In Germany, instead of “the people” the Englishman speaks of when he talks politics, and the democratic orator, Mr. Bryan, in America is fond of calling the “peopul,” there is a “folk,” who neither claim to be, nor apparently wish to be, a “people” in the English sense. The German folk have their traditions as the English people have traditions, and their place in the political system as the English people have; but both traditions and place are wholly different from those of the English people; indeed, it may be said are just the reverse of them.

The German Emperor believes, and assumes his people to believe, that the Hollenzollern monarch is specially chosen by Heaven to guide and govern a folk entrusted to him as the talent was entrusted to the steward in Scripture. Until 1848, a little over sixty years ago, the Emperor (at that time only King of Prussia) was an absolute, or almost absolute, monarch, supported by soldiers and police, and his wishes were practically law to the folk. In that year, however, owing to the influence of the French Revolution, the King by the gift of a Constitution, abandoned part of his powers, but not any governing powers, to the folk in the form of a parliament, with permission to make laws for itself, though not for him. To pass them, that is; for they were not to carry the laws into execution that was a matter the King kept, as the Emperor does still, in his own hands.

The business of making laws being, as experience shows, provocative of discussion, discussion of argument, and argument of controversy, there now arose a dozen or more parties in the Parliament, each with its own set of controversial opinions, and these the parties applied to the novel and interesting occupation of law-making.

However, it did not matter much to the King, so long as the folk did not ask for further, or worse still, as occurred in England, for all his powers; and accordingly the parties continued their discussions, as they do to-day, sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting their own or the King’s suggestions about law-making. Generally speaking, the relation is not unlike that established by the dame who said to her husband, “When we are of the same opinion, you are right, but when we are of different opinions, I am right.” If the Parliament does not agree with the Emperor, the Emperor dissolves it.

These parties, from the situation of their seats in a parliament of 397 deputies, became known as the parties of the Right, or Conservative parties, and the parties of the Left, or Liberal parties. Between them sat the members of the Centre, who, as representing the Catholic populations of Germany roughly, twenty-two millions out of sixty-six became a powerful and unchanging phalanx of a hundred deputies, which had interests and tactics of its own independently of Right or Left.

By and by, one of the parties of the Left, representing the classes who work with their hands as distinguished from the classes who work with their heads, thought they would like to live under a political system of their own making and began to show a strong desire to take all power from the King and from the Parliament too. They agitated and organized, and organized and agitated, until at length, having settled on what was found to be an attractive theory, they made a wholly separate party, almost a people and parliament of their own. This is known as the Social Democracy, with, at present, no deputies.

Such, in a comparatively few sentences, is the political state of things in Germany. It might indeed be expressed in still fewer words, as follows: Heaven gave the royal house of Hohenzollern, as a present, a folk. The Hohenzollerns gave the folk, as a present, a parliament, a power to make laws without the power of executing them. The Social Democrats broke off from the folk and took an anti-Hohenzollern and anti-popular attitude, and the folk in their Parliament divided into parties to pass the time, and of course make laws.

This may seem to be treating an important subject with levity. It is intended merely as a statement of the facts. The system in Germany works well, to an Englishman indeed surprisingly so. In England there is no Heaven-appointed king; all the powers of the King, both that of making laws and of administering them, have long ago been taken by the people from the King and entrusted by them to a parliament, the majority of whom, called the Government, represent the majority of the electing voters. In the case of Germany the folk have surrendered some of what an Englishman would term their “liberties,” for example, the right to govern, to the King, to be used for the common good; whereas in the case of England, the people do not think it needful to surrender any of their liberties, least of all the government of their country, in order to attain the same end.

Thus, while the German Emperor and the German folk have the same aims as the English King and the English people, the common weal and the fair fame of their respective countries, the two monarchs and the two peoples have agreed on almost contrary ways of trying to secure them.

The political system of Germany has had to be sketched introductorily as for the Englishman, a necessary preliminary to an understanding of the German Emperor’s character and policy. One of the most important results of the character and policy is the state of Anglo-German relations; and the writer is convinced that if the character and policy were better and more generally known there would be no estrangement between the two countries, but, much more probably, mutual respect and mutual good-will.

With the growth of this knowledge, the writer is tempted to believe, would cease a delusion that appears to exist in the minds, or rather the imaginations, of two great peoples, the delusion that the highest national interests of both are fundamentally irreconcilable, and that the policies of their Governments are fundamentally opposed.

It seems indeed as though neither in England nor in Germany has the least attention been paid to the astonishing growth of commerce between the countries or to the repeated declarations made through a long series of years by the respective Governments on their countries’ behalf. The growth in commerce needs no statistics to prove it, for it is a matter of everyday observation and comment. The English Government declares it a vital necessity for an insular Power like Great Britain, with colonies and duties appertaining to their possession in all, and the most distant, parts of the world, to have a navy twice as powerful as that of any other possibly hostile Power. The ordinary German immediately cries out that England is planning to attack him, to annihilate his fleet, destroy his commerce, and diminish his prestige among the nations. The German Government repeatedly declares that the German fleet is intended for defence not aggression, that Germany does not aim at the seizure of other people’s property, but at protecting her growing commerce, at standing by her subjects in all parts of the world if subjected to injury or insult, and at increasing her prestige, and with it her power for good, in the family of nations. The ordinary Englishman immediately cries out that Germany is seeking to dispute his maritime supremacy, to rob him of his colonies, and to appropriate his trade. Is it not conceivable that both Governments are telling the truth, and that their designs are no more and no less than the Governments represent them to be? The necessity for Great Britain possessing an all-powerful fleet that will keep her in touch with her colonies if she is not to lose them altogether, is self-evident, and understood by even the most Chauvinistic German. The necessity for Germany’s possessing a fleet strong enough to make her rights respected is as self-evident. Moreover, if Germany’s fleet is a luxury, as Mr. Winston Churchill says it is, she deserves and can afford it. As a nation she has prospered and grown great, not by a policy of war and conquest, but by hard work, thrift, self-denial, fidelity to international engagements, well-planned instruction, and first-rate organization. Why should she not, if she thinks it advisable and is willing to spend the money on it, supply herself with an arm of defence in proportion to her size, her prosperity, and her desert? It may be that, as Mr. Norman Angell holds, the entire policy of great armaments is based on economic error; but unless and until it is clear that the German navy is intended for aggression, its growth may be viewed by the rest of the world with equanimity, and by the Englishman, as a connoisseur in such matters, with admiration as well. A man may buy a motor-car which his friends and neighbours think must be costly and pretentious beyond his means; but that is his business; and if the man finds that, owing to good management and industry and skill, his business is growing and that a motor-car is, though in some not absolutely clear and definite way, of advantage to him in business and satisfying to his legitimate pride why on earth should he not buy or build it?

The truth is that if our ordinary Englishman and German were to sit down together, and with the help of books, maps, and newspapers, carefully and without prejudice, consider the annals of their respective countries for the last sixteen years with a view to establishing the causes of their delusion, they could hardly fail to confess that it was due to neither believing a word the other said; to each crediting the other with motives which, as individuals and men of honesty and integrity in the private relations of life, each would indignantly repudiate; to each assuming the other to be in the condition of barbarism mankind began to emerge from nineteen hundred years ago; to both supposing that Christianity has had so little influence on the world that peoples are still compelled to live and go about their daily work armed to the teeth lest they may be bludgeoned and robbed by their neighbours; that the hundreds of treaties solemnly signed by contracting nations are mere pieces of waste paper only testifying to the profundity and extent of human hypocrisy; that churches and cathedrals have been built, universities, colleges, and schools founded, only to fill the empty air with noise; that the printing presses of all countries have been occupied turning out myriads of books and papers which have had no effect on the reason or conscience of mankind; that nations learn nothing from experience; and to each supposing that he and his fellow-countrymen alone are the monopolists of wisdom, honour, truth, justice, charity in short, of all the attributes and blessings of civilization. Is it not time to discard such error, or must the nations always suspect each other? To finish with our introduction, and notwithstanding that qui s’excuse s’accuse, the biographer may be permitted to say a few words on his own behalf. Inasmuch as the subject of his biography is still, as has been said, happily alive, and is, moreover, in the prime of his maturity, his life cannot be reviewed as a whole nor the ultimate consequences of his character and policy be foretold. The biographer of the living cannot write with the detachment permissible to the historian of the dead. No private correspondence of the Emperor’s is available to throw light on his more intimate personal disposition and relationships. There have been many rumours of war since his accession, but no European war of great importance; and if a few minor campaigns in tropical countries be excepted, Germany for over forty years, thanks largely to the Emperor, has enjoyed the advantages of peace.

From the pictorial and sensational point of view continuous peace is a drawback for the biographer no less than for the historian. What would history be without war? almost inconceivable; since wars, not peace, are the principal materials with which it deals and supply it with most of its vitality and interest must it also be admitted, its charm? For what are Hannibal or Napoleon or Frederick the Great remembered? for their wars, and little else. Shakespeare has it that

“Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues
We write in water.”

Who, asks Heine, can name the artist who designed the cathedral of Cologne? In this regard the biographer of an emperor is almost as dependent as the historian.

The biography of an emperor, again, must be to a large extent, the history of his reign, and in no case is this more true than in that of Emperor William. But he has been closely identified with every event of general importance to the world since he mounted the throne, and the world’s attention has been fastened without intermission on his words and conduct. The rise of the modern German Empire is the salient fact of the world’s history for the last half-century, and accordingly only from this broader point of view will the Emperor’s future biographer, or the historian of the future, be able to do him or his Empire justice.

Lastly, another difficulty, if one may call it so, experienced equally by the biographer and the historian, is the fact that the life of the Emperor has been blameless from the moral standpoint. On two or three occasions early in the reign accounts were published of scandals at the Court. They may not have been wholly baseless, but none of them directly involved the Emperor, or even raised a doubt as to his respectability or reputation. Take from history or from biography for that matter the vices of those it treats of, and one-third, perhaps one-half, of its “human interest” disappears.

In the circumstances, therefore, all the writer need add is that he has done the best he could. He has ignored, certainly, at two or three stages of his narration, the demands of strict chronological succession; but if so, it has been to describe some of the more important events of the reign in their totality. He has also felt it necessary, as writing for English readers of a country not their own, to combine a portion of history with his biography. If, at the same time, he has ventured to infuse into both biography and history a slight admixture of philosophy, he can only hope that the fusion will not prove altogether disagreeable.