THE EMPEROR TO-DAY

What strikes one most, perhaps, on looking back over the Emperor’s life and time, are two surprising inconsistencies, one relating to the Emperor himself, the other to that part of his time with which he has been most closely identified.

The first arises from the fact that a man so many-sided, so impulsive, so progressive, so modern one might almost say so American should have altered so little either in character or policy during quarter of a century. This is due to what we have called his mediaeval nature. He is to-day the same Hohenzollern he was the day he mounted the throne, observing exactly the same attitude to the world abroad and to his folk at home, tenacious of exactly the same principles, enunciating exactly the same views in politics, religion, morals, and art in everything which concerns the foundations of social life. He still believes himself, as his speeches and conduct show, the selected instrument of Heaven, and acts towards his people and addresses them accordingly. He still opposes all efforts at political change, as witness his attitude towards electoral reform, towards the Germanization of Prussian Poland, towards the Socialists, towards Liberalism in all its manifestations. He is still, as he was at the outset of his reign, the patron of classical art, classical drama, and classical music. He is still the War Lord with the spirit of a bishop and a bishop with the spirit of the War Lord. He is still the model husband and father he always has been. Most men change one way or another as time goes on. With the Emperor time for five-and-twenty years appears to have stood still.

The inconsistency relating to his time arises from the contrast between the real and the seeming character of the reign. For, strikingly and anomalously enough, while the Emperor has been steadily pursuing an economic policy, a policy of peace, his entire reign, as one turns over the pages of its history, seems to resound, during almost every hour, with martial shoutings, confused noises, the clatter of harness, the clash of swords, and the tramp of armies. From moment to moment it recalls those scenes from Shakespearean drama in which indeed no dead are actually seen upon the stage, but at intervals the air is filled with battle cries, “with excursions and alarms,” with warriors brandishing their weapons, calling for horses, hacking at imaginary foes, and defying the world in arms.

And yet in reality it has been a period of domestic peace throughout. Though there has been incessant talk of war, and at times war may have been near, it never came, unless the South West African and Boxer expeditions be so called. Commerce and trade have gone on increasing by leaps and bounds. The population has grown at the rate of nearly three-quarters of a million a year. Emperor William the First’s social policy has been closely followed. The navy has been built, the army strengthened, the Empire’s finances reorganized; in whatever direction one looks one finds a record of solid and substantial and peaceful progress and prosperity. A great deal of it is owing, admittedly, to the Germans themselves, but no small share of it is due to the “impulsive” Emperor’s consistency of character and conduct.

Probably the inconsistencies are only apparent. Germany and her Emperor have grown, not developed, if by development is meant a radical alteration in structure or mentality, and if regard is had to the real Germany and the real Emperor, not to the Germany of the tourist, and not to the Emperor of contemporary criticism. It has been seen that the Emperor’s nature and policy have not altered. The Constitution of Germany has not altered, nor her Press, nor her political parties, nor her social system, nor, indeed, any of the vital institutions of her national life. With one possible exception the navy. The navy is a new organic feature, and, like all organisms, is exerting deep and far-reaching influences. Germany, of course, is in a process of development, a state of transition. But nations are at all times in a state of transition, more or less obvious; and it will require yet a good many years to show what new forms and fruits the development now going on in Germany is to bring. The Emperor, it is safe to say, will remain the same, mediaeval in nature, modern in character, to the end of his life.

The main thing, however, to be noted both about Germany and the German Emperor is what they stand for in the movement of world-ideas at the present time. Germans cause foreigners to smile when they prophesy that their culture, their civilization, will become the culture and the civilization of the world. The sameness of ideas that prevailed in mediaeval times about life and religion about this life and the life to come was succeeded, and first in Germany, by an enormous diversity of ideas about life and religion, beginning with the Rationalism (or “enlightenment,” as the Germans call it) which set in after the Reformation and the Renaissance; and this diversity again promises let us at least hope to go back, in one of the great circles that make one think human thought, too, moves in accordance with planetary laws, to a sameness of views among the nations in regard to the real interests of society, which are peace, religious harmony through toleration, commercial harmony through international intercourse, and the mutual goodwill of governments and peoples. For all this order of ideas the Emperor, notwithstanding his mailed fist and shining armour, stands, and in this spirit both he and the German mind are working.

More than half a century has passed over the Emperor’s head; let us look a little more closely at him as the man and the monarch he is to-day. Time appears to have dealt gently with him; the heart, one hears it said, never grows bald, and in all but years the Emperor is probably as young and untiring as ever.

His personal appearance has altered little in the last decade. An observer, who had an opportunity of seeing him at close quarters in 1902, describes him, as he then appeared, as follows:

“I was standing within arm’s length of him at Cuxhaven, where we were waiting the landing of Prince Henry, his brother, on his return from America. The Deutschland had to be warped alongside the quay, and the Emperor, in the uniform of a Prussian general of infantry, meanwhile mixed with the suite and chatted, now to one, now to another, with his usual bonhomie. I was speaking to the American attache, Captain H , when the Emperor came up, and naturally I stood a little to one side.

“The thing that most struck me was the Emperor’s large grey eyes. As they looked sharply into those of Captain H or glanced in my direction, they seemed to show absolutely no feeling, no sentiment of any kind. Not that they gave the notion of hardness or falsity. They were simply like two grey mirrors on which outward things made no impression.

“Two other features did not strike me as anything out of the ordinary, but the whole face had an air of ability, cleverness, briskness, and health. The Emperor is about middle height, with the body very erect, the walk firm, and is very energetic in his gestures. I did not notice the shortness of the left arm, but that may have been because his left hand was leaning on his sword-hilt. Captain H told me he could not put on his overcoat without assistance, and that the hand is so weak he can do very little with it. There was nothing of a Hohenzollern hanging under-lip.”

The following judgment was formed a year or two ago by an American diplomatist: “I have often met him,” the diplomatist said,

“and only speak of the impression he made on me. I would describe him as intelligent rather than intellectual. He appreciates men of learning and of philosophic mind, and while not learned and philosophic himself, enjoys seeing the learned and philosophic at work, and gladly recognizes their merit when their labours are thorough and well done. His mind is marvellously quick, but it does not dwell on anything for long at a time. It takes in everything presented to it in, so to speak, a hop, skip, and jump.

“In company he is never at rest, and surprises one by his lively play of features and the entirely natural and unaffected expression of his thoughts. He is sitting at a lecture, perhaps, when a notion occurs to him, and forthwith indicates it by a humorous grimace or wink to some one sitting far away from him. He is always saying unexpected things. On the whole, he is a right good fellow, and I can imagine that, though he can come down hard on one with a heavy hand and stern look, he does not do so by the instinct of a despot, but acting under a sense of duty.”

Another diplomatist has remarked the Emperor’s habit in conversation of tapping the person he is talking to on the shoulder and of scrutinizing him all over “ears, nose, clothes, until it makes one feel quite uncomfortable.”

The next sketch of him is as he may be seen any day during the yachting week in June at Kiel:

“The Emperor is in the smoking-room of the Yacht Club, dressed in a blue lounge suit with a white peaked cap. He is sitting carelessly on the side of a table, dangling his legs and discussing with fellow-members and foreign yachtsmen the experience of the day, now speaking English, now French, now German. He seems quite in his element as sportsman, and puts every one at ease round him. His expression is animated and his voice hearty, if a little strident to foreign ears. His right hand and arm are in ceaseless movement, emphasizing and enforcing everything he says. He asks many questions and often invites opinion, and when it differs from his own, as sometimes happens, he takes it quite good-humouredly.”

To-day the Emperor is outwardly much the same as he has just been described. He is perhaps slightly more inclined to stoutness. His features, though they speak of cleverness and manliness, are forgotten as one looks into the keen and quickly moving grey eyes with their peculiar dash of yellow. He is well set up, as is proper for a soldier ever actively engaged in military duties, and his stride continues firm and elastic. He is still constantly in the saddle. His hair, still abundant, is yet beginning to show the first touches of the coming frost of age, and the reddish brown moustache, once famous for its haughtily upturned ends, has taken, either naturally or by the aid of Herr Haby, the Court barber, who attends him daily, a nearly level form.

In public, whether mounted or on foot, he preserves the somewhat stern air he evidently thinks appropriate to his high station, but more frequently than formerly the features relax into a pleasant smile. The colour of the face is healthy, tending to rosiness, and the general impression given is that of a clever man, conscious, yet not overconscious, of his dignity. The shortness of the left arm, a defect from birth, is hardly noticeable.

The extirpation of a polypus from the Emperor’s throat in 1903, which must have been one of the severest trials of his life when the history of his father’s mortal illness is remembered, might lead one to suppose that his vocal organs would always suffer from the effects of the operation. It has fortunately turned out otherwise. His voice was originally strong by nature, and remains so. It never seems tired, even when, as it often does, it pleases him to read aloud for his own pleasure or that of a circle of friends. It frequently occurs that he will pick up a book, one of his ancient favourites, Horace or Homer perhaps, Mr. Stewart Houston Chamberlain’s “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” a work he greatly admires or a modern publication he has read of in the papers, and read aloud from it for an hour or an hour and a half at a time. Nor is his reading aloud confined to classical or German books. He is equally disposed to choose works in English or French or Italian, and when he reads these he is fond of doing so with a particularly clear and distinct enunciation, partly as practice for himself, and partly that his hearers may understand with certainty. This is not all, for there invariably follows a discussion upon what has been read, and in it the Emperor takes a constant and often emphatic part. It has been remarked that at the close of the longest sitting of this character his voice is as strong and sonorous as at the beginning.

He is still the early riser and hard worker he has always been; still devotes the greater part of his time to the duties that fall to him as War Lord; still races about the Empire by train or motor-car, reviewing troops, laying foundation-stones, unveiling statues, dedicating churches, attending manoeuvres, encouraging yachting at Kiel by his presence during the yachting week, or hurrying off to meet the monarch of a foreign country. He still enjoys his annual trip along the shores of Norway or breaks away from the cares of State to pass a few weeks at his Corfu castle, dazzling in its marble whiteness and overlooking the Acroceraunian mountains, or to hunt or shoot at the country seat of some influential or wealthy subject. In fine, he is still engaged with all the energy of his nature, if in a somewhat less flamboyant fashion than during his earlier years, in his, as he believes, divinely appointed work of guiding Prussia’s destiny and building up the German Empire.

It is because he is an Empire-builder that his numerous journeys abroad and restlessness of movement at home have earned for him the nickname of the “travelling Kaiser.” The Germans themselves do not understand his conduct in this respect. If one urges that Hohenzollern kings, and none of them more than the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, were incessant travellers, they will reply that their kings had to be so at a time when the Empire was not yet established, when rebellious nobles had to be subdued, and when the spirit of provincialism and particularism had to be counteracted. Hence, they say, former Hohenzollerns had to exercise personal control in all parts of their dominions, see that their military dispositions were carried out, and study social and economic conditions on the spot; but nowadays, when the Empire is firmly established, when the administration is working like a clock and the post and telegraph are at command, the Emperor should stay at home and direct everything from his capital.

The Emperor himself evidently takes a different view. He does not consider the forty-year-old Empire as completed and consolidated, but regards it much as the Great Elector or Frederick the Great regarded Prussia when that kingdom was in the making. He believes in propagating the imperial idea by his personal presence in all parts of the Empire, and at the same time observing the progress that is being made there. He is, finally, a believer in getting into personal touch, as far as is possible, with foreign monarchs, foreign statesmen, and foreign peoples, for he doubtless sees that with every decade the interests of nations are becoming more closely identified.

In connexion with the subject of the Emperor’s travelling, mention may be made of the fact that many years ago he thought it necessary to explain himself publicly in reference to the idea, prevalent among his people at the time, that he was travelling too much. “On my travels,” he said,

“I design not only to make myself acquainted with foreign countries and institutions, and to foster friendly relations with neighbouring rulers, but these journeys, which have been often misinterpreted, have high value in enabling me to observe home affairs from a distance and submit them to a quiet examination.”

He expresses something in the same order of thought in a speech telling of his reflections on the high sea concerning his responsibilities as ruler:

“When one is alone on the high sea, with only God’s starry heaven above him, and holds communion with himself, one will not fail to appreciate the value of such a journey. I could wish many of my countrymen to live through hours like these, in which one can take reckoning of what he has designed and what achieved. Then one would be cured of over self-estimation and that we all need.”

When the Emperor is about to start on a journey, confidential telegrams are sent to the railway authorities concerned, and immediately a thorough inspection of the line the Emperor is about to travel over is ordered. Tunnels, bridges, points, railway crossings, are all subjected to examination, and spare engines kept in immediate readiness in case of a breakdown occurring to the imperial train. The police of the various towns through which the monarch is to pass are also communicated with and their help requisitioned in taking precautions for his safety. Like any private person, the Emperor pays his own fares, which are reckoned at the rate of an average of fifteen shillings to one pound sterling a mile. A recent journey to Switzerland cost him in fares L200. Of late years he has saved money in this respect by the more frequent use of the royal motor-cars. The royal train is put together by selecting those required from fifteen carriages which are always ready for an imperial journey. If the journey is short, a saloon carriage and refreshment car are deemed sufficient; in case of a long journey the train consists of a buffer carriage in addition, with two saloon cars for the suite and two wagons for the luggage. The train is always accompanied by a high official of the railway, who, with mechanics and spare guard, is in direct telephonic communication with the engine-driver and guard. The carriages are coloured alike, ivory-white above the window-line and lacquered blue below.

All the carriages, with the exception of the saloon dining-car, are of the corridor type. A table runs down the centre of the dining-car; the Emperor takes his seat in the centre, while the rest of the suite and guests take their places at random, save that the elder travellers are supposed to seat themselves about the Emperor. If the Emperor has guests with him they naturally have seats beside or in the near neighbourhood of their host. Breakfast is taken about half-past eight, lunch at one, and dinner at seven or eight. The Emperor is always talkative at table, and often draws into conversation the remoter members of the company, occasionally calling to them by their nickname or a pet name. He sits for an hour or two after dinner, with a glass of beer and a huge box of cigars before him, discussing the incidents of the journey or recalling his experiences at various periods of his reign.

The Emperor’s disposition of the year remains much what it was at the beginning of the reign. The chief changes in it are the omission of a yachting visit to Cowes, which he made annually from 1889 to 1895, and, since 1908, the habit of making an annual summer stay at his Corfu castle, “Achilleion,” instead of touring in the Mediterranean and visiting Italian cities. January is spent in Berlin in connexion with the New Year festivities, ambassadorial and other Court receptions, drawing-rooms, and balls, and the celebration of his birthday on the 27th. The Berlin season extends into the middle of February, so that part of that month also is spent in Berlin. During the latter half of February and in March the Emperor is usually at Potsdam, occasionally motoring to Berlin to give audience or for some special occasion. April and part of May are passed in Corfu. Towards the end of May the Emperor returns to Germany and goes to Wiesbaden for the opera and Festspiele in the royal theatre; but he must be in Berlin before May has closed, for the spring parade of the Berlin and Potsdam garrisons on the vast Tempelhofer Field. His return on horseback from this parade is always the occasion of popular enthusiasm in Berlin’s principal streets. In early June the Emperor stays at Potsdam or perhaps pays a visit to some wealthy noble, and at the end of the month the yachting week calls him to Kiel. Once that is over he proceeds on his annual tour along the coast of Norway. September sees him back in Germany for the autumn manoeuvres. October and November are devoted to shooting at Rominten or some other imperial hunting lodge, or with some large landowner or industrial magnate. The whole of December is usually spent at Potsdam, save for an annual visit to his friend Prince Fuerstenberg at Donaueschingen. Naturally he is in Potsdam for Christmas, when all the imperial family assemble to celebrate the festival in good old German style.

In music, as we know, he retains the classical tastes he has always cultivated and sometimes dictatorially recommended. Good music, he has said, is like a piece of lace, not like a display of fireworks. He still has most musical enjoyment in listening to Bach and Handel. The former he has spoken of as one of the most “modern” of composers, and will point out that his works contain melodious passages that might be the musical thought of Franz Lehar or Leo Fall. He has no great liking for the music of Richard Strauss, and his admiration of Wagner, if certain themes, that must, one feels, have been drawn from the music of the spheres, be excepted, is respectful rather than rapturous. Of Wagner’s works the “Meistersingers” is “my favourite.”

A faculty that in the Emperor has developed with the years is that of applying a sense of humour, not originally small, to the events of everyday life. He is always ready to joke with his soldiers and sailors, with artists, professors, ministers in short, with men of every class and occupation. Several stories in illustration of his humour are current, but a homely example or two may here suffice. He is sitting in semi-darkness in the parquet at the Royal Opera House. “Le Prophete” is in rehearsal, and it is the last act, in which there is a powder cask, ready to blow everything to atoms, standing outside the cathedral. Fräulein Frieda Hempel, as the heroine, appears with a lighted torch and is about to take her seat on the cask. Suddenly the imperial voice is heard from the semi-gloom: “Fräulein Hempel, it is evident you haven’t had a military training or you wouldn’t take a light so near a barrel of gunpowder.” And the prima donna has to take her place on the other side of the stage. Or he is presenting Professor Siegfried Ochs, the famous manager of the Philharmonic Concerts, with the Order of the Red Eagle, third class, and with a friendly smile gracefully excuses himself for conferring an “Order of the third class on a musician of the first class,” by pleading official rule. A third popular anecdote tells of a lady seated beside him at the dinner-table. Salad is being offered to her, but she thinks she is bound to give all her attention to the Emperor and takes no notice of it. Thereupon the Emperor: “Gnadige Frau, an Emperor can wait, but the salad cannot.” Possibly the Emperor had in mind Louis XIII, who complained that he never ate a plate of warm soup in his life, it had to pass through so many hands to reach him.

The German takes his theatre as he takes life, seriously. To cough during a performance attracts embarrassing attention, a sneeze almost amounts to misdemeanour. To the German the theatre is a part of the machinery of culture, and accordingly he is not so easily bored as the Anglo-Saxon playgoer, who demands that drama shall contain that great essential of all good drama, action. To the Anglo-Saxon, the more plentiful and rapid the action is, the better. The German, differing from most Anglo-Saxons, likes historical scenes, great processions, costume festivals, the representation of mediaeval events in which his monarchs and generals played conspicuous parts. The Emperor has the same disposition and taste.

Yet both national taste and disposition, like other of the nation’s characteristics, are slowly altering with the growth of the modern spirit, and Germans now begin to require something of a more modern kind, a more social order, something that comes home more to their business and bosoms. Greater variety in subject is asked for, more laughter and tears, more representations of scenes and life dealing with everyday doings and the fate of the people as distinguished from the doings and fate of their rulers and the upper classes. The Emperor has not followed his people in the new direction. He regards the stage as a vehicle of patriotism, an instrument of education, a guider of artistic taste, an inculcator of old-time morality. Its aim, he appears to think, is not to help to produce, primarily, the good man and good citizen, but the good man and good monarchist, and perhaps not so much primarily the good monarchist as the liege subject of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Having secured this, he looks for the elevation of the public taste along his own lines. He assumes that the public taste can be elevated from without, from above, when it can only be elevated proportionately with its progress in general education and its purification from within. Consequently he is for the “classical,” as in the other arts. But apart from its aims and uses, the theatre has always appealed to him. His fondness for it is a Hohenzollern characteristic, which has shown itself, with more or less emphasis, in monarch after monarch of the line. Nor is it surprising that monarchs should take pleasure in the stage, since the theatre is one of the places which brings them and their subjects together in the enjoyment of common emotions, and shows them, if only at second hand, the domestic lives of millions, from personal acquaintance with which their royal birth and surroundings exclude them.

The Emperor treats all artists, male and female, in the same friendly and unaffected manner. There is never the least soupçon of condescension in the one case or flirtation in the other, but in both a lively and often unexpectedly well-informed interest in the play or other artistic performance of the occasion, and in the actors’ or actresses’ personal records. The nationality of the artist has apparently nothing to do with this interest. The Emperor invites French, Italian, English, American or Scandinavian artists to the royal box after a performance as often as he invites the artists of his own country, and, once launched on a conversation, nothing gives him more pleasure than to expound his views on music, painting, or the drama, as the case may be. “Tempo rhythm colour,” he has been heard to insist on to a conductor whom in the heat of his conviction he had gradually edged into a corner and before whom he stood with gesticulating arms “All the rest is Schwindel.” At an entertainment given by Ambassador Jules Cambon at the French Embassy after the Morocco difficulty had been finally adjusted, he became so interested while talking to a group of French actors that high dignatories of the Empire, including Princes, the Imperial Chancellor and Ministers, standing in another part of the salon, grew impatient and had to detach one of their number to call the Emperor’s attention to their presence. Since then, it is whispered, it has become the special function of an adjutant, when the occasion demands it, diplomatically and gently to withdraw the imperial causeur from too absorbing conversation.

Several anecdotes are current having reference to the Emperor as sportsman. One of them, for example, mentions a loving-cup of Frederick William III’s time, kept at the hunting lodge of Letzlingen, which is filled with champagne and must be emptied at a draught by anyone visiting the lodge for the first time. This is great fun for the Emperor, who a year or two ago made a number of Berlin guests, including Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Austrian Ambassador, Szoghenyi-Marich, the Secretary for the Navy, Admiral von Tirpitz, and the Crown Prince of Greece stand before him and drain the cup. As the story goes, “the attempts of the guests to drink out of the heavy cup, which is fixed into a set of antlers in such a way as to make it difficult to drink without spilling the wine, caused great amusement.”

The principles of sport generally, it may be here interpolated, are not quite the same in Germany as in England, though no country has imitated England in regard to sport so closely and successfully as Germany. Up to a comparatively few years ago the Germans had neither inclination nor means for it, and though always enthusiastic hunters, hunting not the English fox-hunting, but hunting the boar and the bear, the wolf and the deer was almost the sole form of manly sport practised. Turnen, the most popular sort of German indoor gymnastics, only began in 1861, a couple of years after the birth of the Emperor. There are now nearly a dozen cricket clubs alone in Berlin, football clubs all over the Empire, tennis clubs in every town, rowing clubs at all the seaports and along the large rivers, nearly all following English rules and in numerous cases using English sporting terms. At the same time sport is not the religion it is in England indeed, to keep up the metaphor, hardly a living creed.

The German attitude towards sport is not altogether the same as the English attitude. In England the object of the game is that the best man shall win, that he shall not be in any way unfairly or unequally handicapped vis-a-vis his opponent, and the honour, not the intrinsic value of the prize, is the main consideration. These principles are not yet fully understood or adopted in Germany, possibly owing to the early military training of the German youth making the carrying off the prize anyhow and by any means the main object. It is Realpolitik in sport, and a Realpolitik which is not wholly unknown in England; but while the spirit of Realpolitik is still perceivable in German sport, it is equally perceivable that the standard English way of viewing sporting competition is becoming more and more approached in Germany.

The Emperor is an enthusiastic patron of sport of all healthy outdoor kinds, not as sympathizing with the English youth’s disposition to regard play as work and work as play, to give to his business any time he can spare from his sport, but because he estimates at its full value its place in the national health-budget. His personal likings are for bear-shooting, deer-stalking, and yachting, but he also wields the lawn-tennis racket and the rapier with fair skill. The names of several of his hunting lodges –­Rominten, Springe, Hubertusstock, and so on are familiar to many people in all countries. Rominten preserve is in East Prussia, and embraces about four square miles, with little lakes and some rising ground. September is the Emperor’s favourite month for visiting it. Here one year he shot a famous eight-and-twenty-ender antelope, which had come across from Russian territory. Before the present reign the deer, or pig, or other wild animal used to be beaten up to the royal sportsman of the day, but that practice has long ceased, and the Emperor has to tramp many a mile, and at times crawl on all fours for hundreds of yards, to get a shot.

We have seen that the Emperor’s position as King and Emperor renders inevitable his adoption, either of natural bent, which is extremely probable, or from a policy in harmony with the wishes of his people, of a view of the monarch’s office that to perhaps most Englishmen living under parliamentary rule must seem antiquated, not to say absurd. This attitude apart, the Emperor possesses, as it is hoped has been sufficiently shown, as modern and progressive a spirit as any of his contemporaries. His instant recognition of all useful modern appliances, particularly, of course, those of possible service in war, is a prominent feature of his mentality. He went, doubtless, too far in heralding Count Zeppelin, in 1909, as “the greatest man of the century,” but the very words he chose to use marked his appreciation of the new aeronautical science Count Zeppelin was introducing. Similarly, the moment the automobile had entered on the stage of reliability it won a place in the imperial favour, and is now his most constant means of locomotion. He has never, it is true, emulated the enterprise of his son, the Crown Prince, whom Mr. Orville Wright had as a companion for a quarter of an hour in the air at Potsdam three years ago, but his interest in the aeroplane is none the less keen because he is too conscious of his responsibilities to subject his life to unnecessary risk.

Before closing our sketch of the Emperor as a man by quoting appreciations written by two contemporary writers, one German and the other English, it may be added that there is a statesman still it is pleasant to think alive who could, an he only would, draw the Emperor’s character perfectly, both as man and monarch. Indeed, as has been seen, he has more than once sketched parts of it in Parliament, but only parts the whole character of the Emperor, on all its sides and in all its ramifications, has yet to be revealed. Here need only be quoted what Chancellor Buelow and also, by the way, Princess Buelow publicly said about the Emperor as man. The Prince’s most noteworthy statement was made in the Reichstag in 1903, when, in answer to Leader-of-the-Opposition Bebel, the Prince said, “One thing at least, the Emperor is no Philistine,” and proceeded to explain, rather negatively and disappointingly, that the Emperor possesses what the Greeks call megalopsychia a great soul. One knows but too well the English Philistine, that stolid, solid, self-sufficient bulwark of the British Constitution. The German Philistine is his twin brother, the narrow-minded, conservative burgher. Other epithets the Prince applied to the imperial character were “simple,” “natural,” “hearty,” “magnanimous,” “clear-headed,” and “straightforward”; while Princess Buelow, during a conversation her husband was having with the French journalist, M. Jules Huret, in 1907, interjected the remark that he was “a person of good birth, fils de bonne maison, the descendant of distinguished ancestors, and a modern man of great intelligence.”

But let us see how the Emperor appears to his contemporaries. Dr. Paul Liman, who has made the most serious attempt to sketch the character of the Emperor that has yet appeared in German, writes:

“We see in him a nature whose ground-tone is enthusiasm, phantasy, and a passionate impulse towards action. Filled with the highest sense of the imperial rights and duties assigned to him, convinced that these are the direct expression of a divine will, he has inwardly thrown off the bonds of modern constitutional ideas and in words recently spoken, where he claimed responsibility for fifty-eight million people, converted these ideas into a formula that, while unconstitutional, is yet moral and deeply earnest. These words were doubly valuable as giving insight into the soul of a man who can be mistaken in his conclusions and means, but not in his motives, since these are directed to the general weal. Here, too, we find the explanation of the fact that at one time he comes before us surrounded with the blue and hazy nimbus of the romantic period, and at another as the most modern prince of our time. Out of the rise in him of the consciousness of majesty there grows a greater sense of duty, and instead of keeping watch from his turret over his people he loses himself in detail. And precisely here must he fail, because modern life with its development is far too rich in complications and activities to admit of its submitting to patriarchal benevolence. And because an artistic strain and a strong fantasy simultaneously work in him, he moves joyfully beyond the limits of the actual to raise before our eyes the highly coloured dream of the picture of a time in which all men, all nations, will be friendly and reconciled an artist’s dream. Here is something characteristic, something unusual, to give particular charm to a personality which has no parallel in the history of the dynasty hitherto. There may be concealed in it the seed of illustrious deeds, but only too often disappointment and contempt lie scornfully in wait when the deed is accomplished. For the heaven we erect on earth always comes to naught, and the idealist is always vanquished in the strife with fact.”

So far, Dr. Liman. Mr. Sydney Brooks, in a sketch in Maclure’s Magazine for July, 1910, writes:

“The drawback to any and to every regime of paternal absolutism is that the human mind is limited. The Kaiser will not admit it, but his acts prove it. It is not given to one man to know more about everything than anybody else knows about anything; and the Kaiser, who is a good deal of a dilettante, and believes himself omniscient, at times speaks from a lamentable half-knowledge, and occasionally has to call in the imperial authority to back up his verdicts against the judgments of experts.

“Unquestionably his mind is of an unusual order. It is a facile, quickly moving instrument; it works in flashes; it assimilates seemingly without effort, and it is at its best under the highest pressure. The Kaiser is not to be laughed at for wanting to know all there is to be known, but he may justly be criticized for failing to distinguish between the attempt and its failure....

“Is it all charlatanerie? Is it all of a part with his speech in Russian to the regiment of which the Czar made him honorary colonel, a studied trumpery effort, designed for a momentary effect? Is the Kaiser just glitter and tinsel, impulse and rhapsody, with nothing solid beneath? Is it his supreme object to make an impression at any cost, to force, like another Nero, the popular applause by arts more becoming to a cabotin than a sovereign? Vanity, restlessness, a consuming desire for the palm without the dust an intense and theatrical egotism are these the qualities that give the clue to his character and actions?

“I do not think so altogether. The Kaiser has scattered too much. In an age of specialists on many subjects he speaks like an amateur. He is always the hero, and often the victim, of his own imagination; like a star actor, he cannot bear to be outshone; he is morbidly, almost pruriently, conscious of the effect he is producing. And on all matters of intellect and taste his influence makes for blatant mediocrity. But he is not meretricious; at bottom he is not by any means as superficial and insincere as he often seems. He is one of those men in whom an instinct becomes an immutable truth, an idea a conviction, and a suspicion a certainty, by an almost instantaneous process; and, the process completed, action follows forthwith. The Kaiser is always resolved to do the right thing; the right thing, by some quaint but invariable coincidence, is whatever he is resolved to do.”

These appreciations from afar may be as sound as they are brilliant, but they rather refer to the non-essential parts of the character of the Emperor in the first flush of imperial glory than to the essential character as it has developed with the years.

As a man he will be dealt with as monarch presently his essential character must be judged from his conduct, and conduct extending over a good many years. One might say, conduct and reputation, but that reputation is so often the result of a confused mixture of superficial observation, gossip, tittle-tattle, envy, hatred and uncharitableness, and, in the case of an Emperor, of merely picturesque and effective writing.

There is another source which would materially help us in forming a judgment, but it is wholly wanting in the case of the Emperor. No private correspondence of his is, as yet, available to the world.

Again, a man’s character is determined by his motives, if it is not the other way about; in any case, a man’s motives are for the most part inscrutable and can only be deduced from conduct, while the world usually makes the mistake of explaining conduct by attributing its own motives. Tried, then, by the standard of conduct, the only one available, the Emperor, as a man, shows us a high type of humanity. It may not, probably does not, appeal to Englishmen wholly, but there are features of it which must command, and do command, the respect of people of all nationalities. And, first of all, he is a good man; good as a Christian, good as a husband, good as a father, good as a patriot. With all the power and temptation to gratify his inclinations, he has no personal vices of the baser sort. He is moderate in the satisfaction of his appetites, whether for food or wine. He is no debauchee, no voluptuary, no gambler. He is faithful to old friends and comrades. He has high ideals, and is not ashamed of them. He is neither indolent nor fussy; neither a cynic, nor an intriguer, nor a fool; he is neither wrong-headed nor stubborn; he is honest and sincere to a degree that does him honour as a man, if it has sometimes proved perilous and blameworthy in him as a monarch. He is optimistic, and on good grounds. He is no physical or intellectual giant, but he is a man of more than average all-round intelligence and capacity. If this appreciation is correct, or even approximately correct, it is a testimonial, whatever may be its worth, to great merit.

Yet the Emperor as man has his failings and drawbacks, though they are such as time is almost sure to diminish or eradicate. Notably in his earlier years he lacked judgment, the power of balancing considerations and arriving at conclusions from them which men more gifted with poise would endorse as logical and inevitable. He does not, like spare Cassius, see quite through the deeds of men, as his friendship for Count Phili Eulenburg and the malodorous “Camarilla” go to show, and his choice of Imperial Chancellors, his grand viziers, has not in every instance been happy. He has less tact than character, as he showed once in Vienna, where he greatly pained the Foreign Minister, Count Goluchowski, one day at a club by calling to him, “Golu, Golu, come and sit beside your Kaiser.” He has the German masculine enjoyment in a kind of humour which would have delighted Fox and the three-bottle men, but would sadly shock the susceptibilities of an Oxford aesthete. He has a share of personal vanity, but it springs from the desire to look the Emperor he is, not because he supposes for a moment that he is an Adonis. He is theatrical in exactly the same spirit the desire imperially to impress his folk in the sense of the German word imponieren, a word that needs no translation. If he has lost much of Dr. Liman’s “romantik,” he still retains the “scatteredness” of Mr. Sidney Brooks, though the Emperor would rather hear it called “many-sidedness.” En resume he has the defects of his qualities, but to no man or woman’s unmerited loss or injury, and if we weigh the good qualities with the bad, we find a fine balance remaining to his credit as a man.

The fierce light which beats upon a throne, if it is apt to dazzle the bystander, helps those at a distance, especially in these days of the still fiercer light of modern publicity, to judge fairly the throne’s occupant. The character of the Emperor as monarch ought, therefore, as far as is possible in the absence of archives marked “secret and confidential” and yet lying in the ministries of all countries, to disclose itself nowadays with reasonable clearness. Yet, even still, different and conflicting opinions regarding it are to be gathered in Germany and out of it.

Indeed, his own people are among the severest critics. One of them, Professor Quidde, early in the reign, made an extraordinarily ingenious, but quite unjustifiable, comparison of him to Caligula, which, though only consisting of classical quotations and making no mention of the Emperor, was seen by everybody to refer to him and has caused discussion ever since. While many foreign critics have done the Emperor justice, others in turn have made him out to be arrogant, snobbish, bombastic, superficial, incompetent, and insincere. To writers of this class he is always the German War Lord, ready to pounce, like a highwayman or pirate, on any unprotected person or property he may come across, regardless of treaty obligations, of international disaster, or of the dictates of humanity. One day they announce he is planning the annexation of Holland in order to get a further set of naval bases, the next that he means to take Belgium to make a road for his armies into France, a third that he is about to set at naught the Monroe doctrine and with his Dreadnoughts seize Brazil. All these things are conceivable and not impossible, but they are in the very highest degree improbable, and, as yet at least, ought not to be considered seriously. To sensible and better-informed people everywhere he is a Prussian king of the best type, a sincere friend of peace, with a mania for pushing the maxim “Si vis pacem para bellum” to extremes, politically the most influential man in Europe, and, with all his faults, one of the greatest Germans of his time.

The character of the Emperor, as monarch, is reflected very largely in the character of the Germany of to-day.

Germany is optimistic, ardently desirous of peace, bent on worthily maintaining the great place she has won, and deserved to win, among the nations, and so materially prosperous as to make many Germans tremble at the thought that the prosperity may be too great to last. This, however, is not to assert that in Germany everything is couleur de rose. There are not a few things in the Empire’s social and political conditions which are antiquated or promise no good. Noxious as well as beneficial forces have been introduced into the social life of the country and are beginning to make themselves felt. German home-life is ceasing to be the admirable and exemplary thing it was before the present era of class rivalry, commercialism, the parvenu and the snob. The idealism which made the Empire a possibility is passing away. There is need, and a general demand, for franchise reform in Prussia, and a change in the spirit of Prussian bureaucratic administration would be acceptable, though it is, perhaps, hopeless to expect it. The opposition in Germany between the monarchic and the democratic principle, if not more marked than it was twenty or thirty years ago, is manifesting itself over a wider and perhaps deeper area. The relations between capital and labour are far from satisfactory adjustment. Social democracy is yearly gaining fresh adherents, and if guilty of no political violence, is yet a constant source of danger to domestic peace. The German middle class, that bourgeoisie which is the backbone and strength of the Empire, is losing its Spartan simplicity and its content with small and moderate pleasures; and the national virtues of thrift and self-denial are yielding to the temptations of wealth and luxury. Business credit is unduly stretched, speculation in land has attained disturbing proportions, and the banking world is in too many instances allied with hazardous or doubtful enterprises. Nevertheless the country as a whole is sound, intellectually, morally, and financially.

It would be difficult to mention any of the greater tasks of imperial administration to which the Emperor does not continue to devote personal attention. He is the life and soul of the army and navy, though it should not be forgotten that as regards the latter he has in Admiral Tirpitz an executive talent worthy of his own directive. His interest in the mercantile marine remains what it was when in 1887, as Prince William, he drew up an expert opinion which decided the Hamburg-Amerika Company to build their fast ocean-going steamers at home instead of abroad, and by the success of the experiment commenced the modern development of Germany’s shipbuilding industry. Indeed, his attention to the Hamburg line, familiarly known as the “Hapag” line, from the initial letters of its legal title, “Hamburg-Amerika Packetfahrt-Aktien Gesellschaft,” and to the Norddeutsche line from Bremen, has given rise to the unfounded belief that he is heavily interested in their financial success. Herr Albert Ballin, the Director of the Hamburg line, though a Jew, is among his intimates and advisers, and the Emperor is said to have caused umbrage more than once to Court officials and the aristocracy by giving directors of both lines precedence at his table. Without the Emperor’s personal support it is probable that neither the firm of Krupp at Essen nor the splendid shipbuilding yards at Hamburg, Bremen, Stettin and elsewhere would continue to progress as they are doing. He neglects no opportunity of stimulating Germany’s internal and external trade. He is at all times ready to encourage the introduction of useful achievements of modern science and invention. And lastly, by tactful treatment of other German rulers, and a wise policy of non-interference with their States, he is promoting a feeling of federal solidarity.

The Emperor’s conception of his relations to the people remains to-day what he was brought up in and what it was when he mounted the throne. In England, America, and France the people are the real rulers, and their monarch or president is their highest official servant and representative. The idea is not perhaps constitutionally expressed, but it is universally and deeply felt in the countries named. In Germany the opposite theory obtains for how long it must be left to the future to say. In Germany the Emperor is the real ruler, the genuine monarch, and the people are his subjects, the country his country. Hence, while an English king in an official document or public statement would not think of putting himself first and the people or country second, the German Emperor’s official statements and speeches constantly repeat such expressions as “I and my people,” “I and the army,” “my capital,” “me and the Fatherland,” and a score more; so that Anglo-Saxons and other foreigners acquire the impression that the word “my” is no figure of rhetoric or pride, but a simple claim of ownership or possession. And the official relation between monarch and people is reflected in the people’s ordinary life. To the foreigner it continually appears that the public are the servants of the official, not the contrary, whether officialism takes the shape of a post-office clerk, a tramcar conductor, a shop salesman, a policeman, or a waiter. All these functionaries are the possessors of an authority which the citizen is expected to, and usually does, obey. The explanation of such a state of things is a little abstruse, but an attempt may be made at giving it.

The period immediately preceding the reign of Frederick the Great was a period of absolute monarchy in Germany, a system introduced from France, where Louis XIV had proclaimed the doctrine L’etat, c’est moi, according to which the lives and property of the subject belonged to the Prince, whose will was to be obeyed without question or demur. There were now four hundred courts in Germany in imitation of the Court of Versailles, and the smaller the principality the greater the absolutism. Absolutism, however, required an army to support it; hence the establishment of standing and mercenary armies and the disuse of arms by the citizen. The result, to quote Professor Ernst Richard’s work on “German Civilization,” was that

“the pride of the burgher and the peasant was broken. A submissive servility hopelessly pervaded the masses, and even the best had lost all social and national feeling, all sense of being part of a greater body.... The luxurious life and the arrogance of the ruling classes were accepted as a matter of course, one might say as a divine institution. Thus those traits of character, which had come to light under the cruel stress of the Thirty Years War, fostered by the rule of despotism and the worst vices, took deeper root. To these belong that greed for social position, for titles and the smiles of the great; servility towards those who hold a higher position as bearers of official titles and dignity, a fear of publicity, above all a rather remarkable inclination to a peevish, petty, and sceptical attitude as regards the knowledge and ability of others. The exaltation of the position of the prince extended to his Court and his officials, as well as to the nobility, which had long since become a Court nobility.”

But absolutism had to go with the changes in human thought under the influence of Rationalism, which brought with it the idea of the State, not the absolute prince, as ruler. This idea was embodied in the Rechtstaat, or State based on law, which was introduced by Frederick the Great, the “first servant of the State.” The State, he said, exists for the sake of the citizens. “One must be insane,” he wrote,

“to imagine that men should have said to one of their equals, ’We will raise you so that we may be your slaves, we will give you the power to guide our thoughts according to yours.’ They rather said: ’We need you in order to execute our laws, that you show us the way, and defend us. But we understand that you will respect our liberties.’”

The Rechtstaat exists in Germany to the present day, the Emperor is at the head of it, and the people are content to live within its confines. It is not, as has been seen, coterminous with the whole liberty of the subject, but is yet a vast bundle of rights and obligations which in public, and much of private, life leaves as little as possible to the unaided or undirected intelligence or goodwill of the citizen. It is an exaggeration, but still expresses a popular feeling even in Germany itself and certainly describes an impression made on the Anglo-Saxon to say that outside this bundle of laws and regulations, which, clearly and logically paragraphed, orders to a nicety all the public, and many of the private, relations of the citizens, everything is forbidden or discouraged by authority. Yet, as has been said, the people are satisfied with it, and it must be admitted that if it confines individual liberty within what to the Anglo-Saxon seem narrow limits, still, by directing the individual to common ends, it works great public advantage. It is in truth a very intelligent and practical form of Socialism, infinitely less oppressive to the people than would be the socialism of the professed Socialist.

It left, however, the German caste system of Frederick’s day undisturbed; as Professor Richard says:

“The nobility retained its privileged position. It was considered a law of nature that the noblemen should assist the monarch in the administration of the State and as leaders of the army; the peasant should cultivate the fields and provide food; the commoner should provide money through industry and commerce.”

To the Anglo-Saxon, of course, brought up with individualistic views of life and demanding complete personal freedom, the German Rechtstaat would be galling, not to say intolerable. The Englishman, however, has his Rechtstaat too, but the limits it places on his liberty are not nearly so restrictive in regard to public meeting, public talking, public writing, in short, public action of all sorts, as in Germany. Besides, the spirit of laws in England, as naturally follows from the Englishman’s political history, is a much more liberal one than the German spirit, which is still to some extent under the influence of the age of absolutism.

The German conception of the Rechtstaat entails, as one of its consequences, a sharp contrast between the rights and privileges of the Crown and the rights and privileges of the people; and therefore, while the Emperor is never without apprehension that the people may try to increase their rights and privileges at the expense of those of the Crown, the people are not without apprehension that the Crown may try to increase its rights and privileges at the expense of the political liberties of the people. To this apprehension on the part of the people is to be attributed their widespread dissatisfaction with the Emperor’s so-called “personal regiment,” which, until recently, was the chief hindrance to his popularity. In truth the Emperor is in a difficult position. To be popular with the people he must be popular with the Parliament, but if he were to seek popularity with the Parliament he would lose popularity and prestige with the aristocracy and large landowners, who have still a good deal of the old-time contempt for the mere “folk,” the burgher, and he would lose it with the military officer class, which is aristocratic in spirit, and is, as the Emperor is constantly assuring it, the sole support of throne and Empire. In addition to this it has to be remembered that a large majority of South Germany is Catholic, and, generally speaking, no great lover of Prussia, its people, and their airs of stiff superiority.

The personal relations of the Emperor to his people, and in especial to the vast burghertum, are precisely those to be expected from his traditional and constitutional relations. He is not popular, but he is widely and sincerely respected. His preference for the army, intelligible though it is, and the cleavage that separates Government and people, explain to some extent the want of popularity, using that word in its “popular” sense; while the consciousness of all the nation owes to his “goodwill,” his initiative and energy, his conscientiousness in all directions, is quite sufficient to account for the respect. It is, in truth, in part at least, the respect which excludes the popularity. No one is ever likely to be popular, anywhere, who is constantly endeavouring to teach people how to live and what to think, and at the same time seems to have no social weaknesses to reconcile him with those no small number who are fond of cakes and ale. Some of the Emperor’s acts and speeches have postponed, if not precluded, eventual popularity his breach with Bismarck, for example, the whole “personal regiment,” and speeches like that at Potsdam in 1891, when he told his recruits that if he had to order them to shoot down their brothers, or even their parents, they must obey without a murmur. Speeches of this last kind live long in public memory. In his dealings with his people the Emperor is neither arrogant “high-nosed” is the elegant German expression: “arrogant” is no German word, Prince Buelow would doubtless say towards his subjects, nor are they cringing towards him, though this statement does not exclude the excusable embarrassment an ordinary mortal may be expected to feel in the presence of a monarch. The Emperor himself desires no “tail-wagging” from his subjects, and though there is something of the autocrat in him, there is nothing of the despot.

Certainly for the present, Germans, with rare exceptions, are satisfied with him. They are prospering under him. The shoe pinches here and there, and if it pinches too hard they will cry out and perhaps do more than cry out. They do not consider the Emperor perfect, but they forgive his errors, and particularly the errors of his impetuous youth, even though on three or four occasions they brought the country into danger. Monarchy has been defined as a State in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting things: a republic, as a State in which the attention is divided between many who are all doing uninteresting things: Germans find their Emperor interesting, and that is a stage on the road to popularity.

The imperial ego, which is quite consistent with the German view of monarchical rule and conformity with the Rechtstaat, is specially advertised by the pictures and statues of the Emperor which are to be found all over Germany, to the apparent exclusion of the pictures and statues of national and local men of distinction. The Emperor’s picture almost monopolizes the walls of every public and municipal office, every railway-station refreshment-room, every shop, every restaurant throughout the Empire. Wherever it turns the eye is confronted by the portrait or bust of the Emperor, and if it is not his portrait or bust, it is the portrait or bust of one or other of his ancestors. An exception should be made in the case of Bismarck, the reproduction of whose rugged features, shaggy eyebrows, and bulky frame are not infrequent; statues and portraits, too, of Moltke and Roon, though much more rarely met with than those of Bismarck, are to be seen, while those of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Lessing, Wagner, or other German “Immortal,” are still rarer. Only once, or perhaps twice, in all Germany is there to be found a public statue of Heine for Heine was a Jew and said many unpleasant, because true, things about his country. The travelling foreigner in Germany after a while begins to wonder if he is not in some far Eastern country where ancestor-worship obtains, and where one tremendous personality overshadows, obscures, and obliterates all the rest. In truth, however, this is not the lesson of the imperial images for the foreigner. They teach him that he is in a country with a system of government and views of the State different from his own, that the Empire is ruled in a military, not a civic spirit, and that the counterfeit presentment of the Emperor, always in dazzling uniform, is the sign of the national acceptance of system, views, and spirit.

A similar lesson is taught by the Emperor’s speeches. In England the King rarely speaks in public, and then with well-calculated brevity and reserve. In five words he will open a museum and with a sentence unveil a monument. The Emperor’s speeches fill four stout volumes and he is only fifty-four. The speeches deal with every sort of topic, and have been delivered in all parts of the Empire now to Parliament, now to his assembled generals, now at the celebration of some national or individual jubilee, now at the dedication of a building or the opening of a bridge. The style is always clear and logical, in this respect contrasting favourably with the German style of twenty years ago, when the language wriggled from clause to clause in vermiform articulations until the thought found final expression in a mob of participles and infinitives. Metaphors abound in the speeches, some of them slightly far-fetched, but others of uncommon beauty, appropriateness, and pith. There is no brilliant employment of words, but not seldom one comes across such terse and happy phrases as the famous “We stand under the star of commerce,” “Our future lies on the water,” “We demand a place in the sun.”

On the English reader the speeches will be apt to pall, unless he is thoroughly saturated with Prussian historic, military, and romantic lore and can place himself mentally in the position of the Emperor. The tone, never quite detached from consciousness of the imperial ego, hardly ever descends to the level of familiar conversation nor rises to heights of eloquence that carry away the hearer. With three or four exceptions, there is no argumentation in the speeches, for they are not meant to persuade or convince, but to enjoin and command. They do not contain any of the important and interesting facts and figures of which, nevertheless, the Emperor’s mind must be full, and they are wanting in wit and humour, though nature has endowed the Emperor with both.

On the other hand, it should be remembered that they are the speeches of an Emperor, not of a statesman. The speeches have no political timeliness or object save that of rousing and directing imperial spirit among the people by appeals to their imagination and patriotism. Had the Emperor been actuated by the spirit of a Minister or statesman, he would have been far more alive to the fact than he appears to have been, that every word he uttered would instantly find an echo in the Parliament, Press, and Stock Exchange of all other countries.

The Emperor’s fundamental mistakes, as disclosed by his speeches, appear to an Englishman to have been in assuming when they were made that the Empire was in a less advanced stage of consolidation and settlement than it in fact was, and in underrating the intelligence, knowledge, and patriotism of his people. From this point of view his early speeches in particular sound jejune or superfluous. What would the Englishman say to a king who began his reign by a series of homilies on Alfred the Great or Elizabeth or Queen Victoria; by using strong language about the Labour party or the Fabian Society; by appeals to throne and altar; by describing to Parliament the chief duties of the monarch; by recommending the London County Council to build plenty of churches; by calling journalists “hunger-candidates”; by frequent references to the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar? Yet, mutatis mutandis, this is not so very unlike what the young Emperor did, and not for a year or two, but for several years after his accession. To an Englishman such addresses would appear rather ill-timed academic declamation.

Yet there was much, and perhaps is still much, to account for, if not quite justify, the Emperor’s rhetoric. The peculiarity of Germany’s monarchic system placed, and places, the monarch in a patriarchal position not very different from that of Moses towards the Israelites a leader, preacher, and prophet. Again, the Empire, when the Emperor came to the throne, was not a homogeneous nation inspired by a centuries-old national spirit, but suffered, as it still in a measure suffers, from the particularism of the various kingdoms and States composing it: in other words, from too local a patriotism and stagnation of the imperial idea. Thirdly, the Empire had no navy, while an Empire to-day without a navy is at a tremendous and dangerous disadvantage in world-politics, and the mere conception that a navy was indispensable had to be created in a country lying in the heart of Europe and with only one short coast-line.

The Englishman is as loyal to his King as the German is to his Emperor, and England, as little as Germany, is disposed to change from monarchy to republicanism. But the Englishman’s political and social governor, guide, and executive is not the King, but the Parliament; because while in the King he has a worthy representative of the nation’s historical development and dignity, in the Parliament he sees a powerful and immediate reflection of himself, his own wishes, and his own judgments. Moreover, with the spread of democratic ideas, the position of a monarch anywhere in the civilized world to-day is not what it was fifty years ago. The general progress in education since then; the drawing together of the nations by common commercial and financial interests; the incessant activity of writers and publishers; the circulation and power of the Press themselves almost threatening to become a despotism such facts as these tend to change the relations between kings and peoples. Monarchs and men are changing places; the ruler becomes the subject, the subject ruler; it is the people who govern, and the monarch obeys the people’s will.

Such is not the view of the German Emperor nor of the German people. To both the monarch is no “shadow-king,” as both are fond of calling the King of England, but an Emperor of flesh and blood, commissioned to take the leading part in decisions binding on the nation, responsible to no one but the Almighty, and the sole bestower of State honours. There are, it is true, three factors of imperial government constitutionally the Emperor, the Federal Council, and the Imperial Parliament; but while the Council has only very indirect relations with the people, the Parliament, a consultative body for legislation, is not the depositary of power or authority, or an assembly to which either the Emperor, or the Council, or the Imperial Chancellor is responsible. It must be admitted that, while such is the constitutional theory, the actual practice is to a considerable extent different. The Emperor is no absolute monarch, even in the domain of foreign affairs, as he is often said to be, but is influenced and guided, certainly of late years, both by the Federal Council and by public opinion, the power of which latter has greatly augmented in recent times. Whether the Reichstag really represents public opinion in the Empire is a moot-point in Germany itself. It can hardly be denied that it does so, at least in financial matters, since with regard to them it has all the powers, or almost all, possessed by the English House of Commons in this respect. Where its powers fail, it is said, is in regard to administration; for though it deliberates on and passes legislation, it is left by the Constitution to the Emperor and his Ministers to issue instructions as to how legislation is to be carried into effect. The result is to throw excessive power over public comfort and convenience into the hands of the official class of all degrees, which naturally employs it to maintain its own dignity and privileged position.

Towards one class of the population, and that a highly important and exceptional one, the Emperor’s attitude of unprejudiced goodwill has never varied. Israelites form only a small proportion about 1 per cent. of the whole people, and are to be found in very large numbers only in Berlin and Frankfurt; but to their financial and commercial ability Germany owes a debt one may almost describe as incalculable. There is a strong national prejudice against them in all parts of the Empire, as there probably is in all countries, and it must be admitted that the manners and customs of the lower-class Jew, his unpleasant and insistent curiosity, his intrusiveness where he is not desired, his want of cleanliness, his sharpness at a bargain, his oily bearing to those he wishes to propitiate and his ruthless sweating of the worker in all fields when in his power, are all disagreeable personal qualities. There is also, as a concomitant of the nation’s growth in wealth of every sort, and mostly perhaps to be found in the capital a class of Jewish parvenu, remarkable for snobbishness, ostentation, and affectation.

But one must distinguish; and of a large percentage of the educated class of Jew in Germany it would be difficult to speak too highly. Germans may be the “salt of the earth,” as the Emperor once told them they were, but Jewish talent can with quite as much, perhaps more, justice be called the salt of German prosperity. And not alone in the region of finance and commerce. Some of the best intellect, most of the leading enterprise in Germany, in all important directions, is Jewish. Many of her ablest newspaper proprietors and editors are Jews. Many of her finest actors and actresses are Jews and Jewesses. Many of her cleverest lawyers, doctors, and artists are Jews. The career of Herr Albert Ballin, the Jewish director of the Hamburg-Amerika line, the Emperor’s friend, to whom Germany owes a great deal of her mercantile marine expansion, is a long romance illustrative of Jewish organizing power and success.

The Emperor’s friendship for Herr Ballin is obviously not entirely disinterested, but the interest at the root of it is an imperial one. In this spirit he cultivates to-day, as he has done since he took over the Empire, the society of all his subjects, German or Jew, who either by their talents or through their wealth can contribute to the success of the mighty task which occupies his waking thoughts, and for all one knows, his sleeping thoughts his dreams as well. Accordingly, the wealthy German is quite aware that if he is to be reckoned among the Emperor’s friends he must be prepared to pay for the privilege, since the Emperor is neither slow nor shy about using his influence in order to make the more fortunate members of the community put their hands deeply into their pockets for national purposes. A little time ago he invited a number of merchant princes and captains of industry, as American papers invariably call wealthy Germans, to a Bier-abend at the palace. When the score or so of guests were seated, he announced that he was collecting subscriptions for some public object the national airship fund, perhaps and sent a sheet of paper to Herr Friedlander Fuld, the “coal-king” of Germany, to head the list. Herr Fuld wrote down L5,000, and the paper was taken back to the Emperor. “Oh, this will never do, lieber Fuld,” he exclaimed, on seeing the amount. “At this rate people will be putting down their names for L50. You must at least double it.” And Herr Fuld had to do so. A few weeks afterwards there was another invitation to the palace, and the same sort of scene took place. A little later still Herr Fuld got a third invitation, and as an imperial invitation is equivalent to a command, he had to go. When he arrived he noticed his fellow-industrials looking uneasy, not to say sad. The Emperor noticed it too, for his first words were: “Dear gentlemen, to-night the beer costs nothing.”

Throughout the reign Germany has made it her constant policy to cultivate friendly relations with the United States. Chancellor von Buelow, in 1899, apropos of Samoa, said in the Reichstag: “We can confidently say that in no other country has America during the last hundred years found better understanding and more just recognition than in Germany.” This is true of the educated classes, professional, professorial, and scientific; but the ordinary European German, who does not know and understand America, still displays no particular love for the ordinary American. At the same time he probably prefers him to the people of any other nation. American outspokenness in politics, for example, must be refreshing to minds penned within the limits of the Rechtstaat. He sees in them, too, millionaires, or at least people who come from a country where money is so abundant that, as many country-people still think, you have only to stoop to pick it up. When it comes to business, however, he is a little afraid of their somewhat too sanguine enterprise, and is given to suspect that a “bluff” of some sort is behind the simplest business proposition. Much of this, of course, is due to ignorance heightened by yellow journalism, for as a rule only the vastly interesting, but mostly untrue, “stories” regarding Germany printed in the yellow press come back to the Fatherland.

The German, again, is made uneasy by what he thinks the hasty manners of the Americans; he considers them uncivil. So, let it be admitted, they sometimes appear to be to people of other nationalities; but then as a rule Americans who jar on European nerves will be found to hail from places where life, to use the American expression, is “woolly,” or too strenuous to allow of the delicacies of real refinement. The ordinary idea of the German in Germany, held by the stay-at-home American, is a vague species of dislike, founded on the conviction that the American, not the German, is the salt of the earth; that the German regard for tradition makes them a slow and slowly moving race; and that the Emperor as War Lord for he is almost solely known to him in that capacity must be ever desirous of war, in particular wishes to seize a coaling-station or even a country, in South America, and, generally speaking, set at naught the Monroe doctrine. The Governments on both sides, of course, know and understand each other better. In November, 1906, Prince Buelow publicly thanked America for her attitude at Algeciras, implying that it was due to her representative’s conciliatory and reconciliatory conduct that the Conference did not end in a fiasco. “This,” said the Chancellor, “was the second great service to the world rendered by America; the other,” he added, “being the bringing about of peace between Russia and Japan.”

A great deal of the increased intercourse between the two countries is due to the personal endeavours of the Emperor. What his motives are may be conjectured with fair accuracy from a general knowledge of his “up-to-date” character, the commercial policy of his Empire, and the events of recent years. He has a whole-hearted admiration for the American character and genius, so akin in many ways to his own character and genius; and if he refuses to recommend for Germans similar institutions to those in States, federated in a manner somewhat analogous to that of the kingdoms and States composing his own Empire, it is not from want of liberality of mind, but because they are wholly opposed to Prussian tradition, because his people do not demand them, and because he honestly believes that in respect of topographical situation, climate, historical development, and race feelings and sentiment, the safeguards and requirements of Germany are widely different from those of America.

As a young man he naturally had very little to do with America or Americans, though among his schoolboy playmates was a young American, Poulteney Bigelow, who afterwards wrote an excellent appreciation of the fine traits in the Emperor’s character. At the same time the Emperor himself has stated that the country always interested him, and recent visitors bear out the statement fully. In 1889, a year after his accession, he expressed his admiration for America, when receiving the American Ambassador, Mr. Phelps. “From my youth on,” the Emperor said,

“I have had a great admiration for that powerful and progressive commonwealth which you are called on to represent, and the study of its history in peace and war has had for me at all times a special interest. Among the many distinguished characteristics of your people, which draw to them the attention of the whole world, are their enterprising spirit, their love of order, and their talent for invention. The predominant sentiment of both peoples is that of affinity and tested friendship, and the future can only strengthen the heartiness of their relations.”

More than twenty years have elapsed since the words were uttered, and the prediction has been fulfilled.

Scores of anecdotes, it need hardly be said, are current in connexion with the Emperor and American friends. One of them is that of an American, Mr. Frank Wyberg, the husband of a lady who, with her children, used often to visit Mr. and Mrs. Armour on their yacht Uttowana at Kiel, there met the Emperor, and was invariably kindly greeted by him. Mr. Wyberg was summoned with his friend, General Miles, to an audience of the Emperor in Berlin. Before going to the palace Mr. Wyberg went to a well-known picture-dealer in the city and bought a small but artistic painting costing about L1,000. He had the picture neatly done up, and carried it off under his arm to the hotel where he was to meet General Miles. As they were leaving for the palace the General asked Mr. Wyberg what he was carrying. “Oh, only a trifle for the Kaiser!” was the reply. The General was horrified, and tried to dissuade his friend from bringing the picture, telling him that the proper procedure was to ask through the Foreign Office or the American Embassy for the Emperor’s gracious acceptance of it. Otherwise the Emperor would be annoyed, he would think badly of American manners, and so on. Mr. Wyberg, however, was not to be deterred, and insisted that it would be “all right.” While waiting in the reception-room for the Emperor, Mr. Wyberg unwrapped the picture and placed it leaning against the wall on a piano. By and by the Emperor came in, and almost the first thing he said, after shaking hands, was to ask what the presence of the picture meant. Mr. Wyberg explained that it was a mark of gratitude for the kindness the Emperor had shown his wife and children at Kiel. The Emperor smiled, said it was a very kind thought, and willingly accepted the gift. The story has a sequel. A day or two after a Court official called at the hotel, to get from General Miles Mr. Wyberg’s initials, and after another few days had passed reappeared with a bulky parcel. On being opened the parcel was found to consist of a large silver loving-cup, with Mr. Wyberg’s name chased upon it, and underneath the words, “From Wilhelm II.”

Another anecdote refers to an American naval attache, a favourite of the Emperor’s. Dinner at the palace was over, and the attache, wishing to keep a memento of the occasion, took his large menu card and concealed it, as he thought, between his waistcoat and his shirt. Unfortunately, when taking leave of the Emperor, the card slipped down and part of it became visible. The Emperor’s quick eye immediately noticed it. “Hallo! H ,” he exclaimed; “look out, your dickey’s coming down!” The story shows the Emperor’s acquaintance with English slang as well as his geniality.

The Emperor seems to take pleasure in displaying himself to Americans in as republican a light as possible, and when he desires the company of an American friend, stands on no sort of ceremony. The American’s telephone bell may ring at any hour of the day or evening, and a voice is heard “Here royal palace. His Majesty wishes to ask if the Herr So-and-So will come to the palace this evening for dinner.” On one occasion this happened to Professor Burgess. The telephone at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin rang up from Potsdam about six in the afternoon, and there was so little time for the Professor to catch his train that he was forced to finish his dressing en route. Or the invitation may be for “a glass of beer” after dinner, about nine o’clock.

If it is a dinner invitation, the guest, in evening clothes, with his white tie doubtless a trifle more carefully adjusted than usual, drives or walks to the palace. He enters a gate on the south side facing the statue of Frederick the Great, and under the archway finds a doorway with a staircase leading immediately to the royal apartments on the first floor. In an ante-room are other guests, a couple of Ministers, the Rector Magnificus of the university, and perhaps a “Roosevelt” or “exchange” professor; and if the party is not one of men only, such as the Emperor is fond of arranging, and the Empress is expected, the wives also of the invited guests. Without previous notice the Emperor enters, an American lover of slang might almost say “blows in,” with quick steps and a bustling air that instantly fills the room with life and energy, and showing a cheery smile of welcome on his face. The guests are standing round in a half or three-quarter circle, and the Emperor goes from one to the other, shaking hands and delivering himself of a sentence or two, either in the form of a question or remark, and then passing on. When it is not a bachelors’ party, the Empress comes in later with her ladies. A servant in the royal livery of red and gold, on a signal from the Emperor, throws open a door leading to the dining-room, and the Emperor and Empress enter first. The guests take their places according to the cards on the table. If it is a men’s party of, say, four guests, the Emperor will seat them on his right and left and immediately opposite, with an adjutant or two as makeweights and in case he should want to send for plans or books. On these occasions he is usually in the dark blue uniform of a Prussian infantry general, with an order or two blazing on his breast. He sits very upright, and starts and keeps going the conversation with such skill and verve that soon every one, even the shyest, is drawn into it. There is plenty of argument and divergence of view. If the Emperor is convinced that he is right, he will, as has more than once occurred, jestingly offer to back his opinion with a wager. “I’ll bet you” he will exclaim, with all the energy of an English schoolboy. He enjoys a joke or witticism immensely, and leans back in his chair as he joins in the hearty peal about him. When cigars or cigarettes are handed round, he will take an occasional puff at one of the three or four cigarettes he allows himself during the evening, or sip at a glass of orangeade placed before him and filled from time to time. When he feels disposed he rises, and having shaken hands with his guests, now standing about him, retires into his workroom. A few moments later the guests disperse.

Conversation, both in England and Germany, sometimes turns on the question whether or not the Emperor will be known to future generations as William “the Great.” It is agreed on all sides that he will not take a place among the mediocrities or sink into oblivion. We have, though only negatively and indirectly, his own view of the matter, if, that is, it may be deduced from the fact that he has more than once tried to attach this epitheton ornans to the memory of his grandfather. At Hamburg in 1891 he desired a statue to the Emperor William I to bear the inscription “William the Great.” The cool common sense of the cautious Hamburgers refused to anticipate the decision of posterity and placed on the pedestal the simple words “William the First.” In deference to the Emperor’s well-known wishes, if not at his request, the Hamburg-Amerika line of steamers christened one of their ocean greyhounds Wilhelm der Grosse. The mere fact that people discuss the question in his lifetime is of happy augury for the Emperor. Perhaps some other epithet will be found for him. “Puffing Billy” is one of his titles among English officers, taken from the name given locally to Stephenson’s first locomotive. But history has many ranks in her peerage and many epithets at her disposal great, good, fair, lionhearted, silent that the Emperor will not have and a host more. Maybe the greatest rulers were those whom history, as though in despair of finding a single term with which to do them justice, has refrained from decorating. Timur, Akbar, Attila, Julius Cæsar, Elizabeth, Victoria, Napoleon have no epithets, and need none. However, it is clear that a verdict on the Emperor’s deserts is premature. Suppose him at the bar of history. The case is still proceeding, the evidence is not complete, counsel have not been heard, and most obvious defect of any the jury has not been impanelled.

More than half a century has passed since the Emperor was born. How time flies!

“Alas, alas, O Postumus, Postumus,
The years glide by and are lost to us, lost to us.”

But not the memories they enshrine. It is, let us imagine, the night of the Emperor’s Jubilee, and he lies in the old Schloss, still awake, reflecting on the past. What a multitude of happenings, gay and grave, throng to his recollection, what a glorious and crowded canvas unrolls itself before his mental vision! The toy steamer on the Havel; the games in the palace corridors, with the grim features of the Great Elector betrayed, one is tempted to think, into a half-smile as he watches the innocent gaiety of the romping children from the old wainscoted walls; the irksome but disciplinary hours in the Cassel schoolroom; the youthful escapades with those carefree Borussian comrades at the university on the broad bosom of Father Rhine; the excursions and picnics among the Seven Hills; the visits to England, its crowded and bustling capital, its country seats with their pleasant lawns and stately oaks; the war-ships in the Solent, with their black mass and frowning guns, as they towered, like Milton’s Leviathan, above his head.

What a good time it was, and how rich in manifold and picturesque impressions!

The canvas continues to unroll and a literary period opens that age between youth and manhood, of all ages most passionate and ideal, when we are enthralled and moved by what we read by those studies which

“adolescentiam agunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solatium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris; pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.”

It was the Lohengrin period, when, filled with the ardour and imaginativeness of high-souled youth, the future Emperor was dimly thinking of all he would do in the days to come for the happiness and prosperity of his people, nay, of all mankind.

Another tableau presents itself. Life has now become real and the Emperor’s soldiering days have begun never to conclude! His regiment is his world; parades and drills, the orderly-room and the barrack square occupy his time; and would seem monotonous and hard but for the little Eden with its Eve close beside them.

The Emperor turns uneasily, for his thoughts recur to the painful circumstances of his accession; but calmness soon succeeds as the curtain rises on the splendid panorama of the reign. He sees himself, a young and hitherto unknown actor, leaving the wings and taking the very centre of the stage, while the vast audience sits silent and attentive, as yet hardly grasping the significance of his words and gestures, emphatic though they are. And then he recalls the years of Sturm und Drang, the growth of Empire in spite of grudging rivals and of fellow-countrymen as yet not wholly conscious of their destinies, which one can now see constituted a whole drama in themselves, fraught with great consequences to the world.

But we are keeping the Emperor awake when he should be left to well-deserved repose. He has doubtless half forgotten it all; the Bismarck episode is one of those

“... old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago”

of which the poet sings. One unquiet political care excepted, all the rest must be pleasant for him to remember the rising with the dawn, the hurried little breakfast with the Empress, the pawing horses of the adjutants and escort in the courtyard of the palace; the constant travelling in and far beyond the Empire; the incessant speech-making, with its appeals to the past and its promises, nobly realized, of “splendid days” in the future its calls to the people to arms, to the sea, to the workshop, to school, to church, to anything praiseworthy, provided only it was action for the common good; the dockyards in Kiel and Danzig, with their noise of “busy hammers closing rivets up”; the ever-swelling trade statistics; and the proud feeling that at last his country was coming into her own.

Even the sensation the Emperor caused from time to time in other countries must have had a certain charm for him endless telegrams, endless scathing editorials, endless movement and excitement. There is no fun like work, they say. The Emperor worked hard and enjoyed working. It was the “personal regiment,” maybe, and it could not last for ever; but while it did it was doubtless very gratifying, and, notwithstanding all his critics say, magnificently successful.

Those strenuous times are long over, and if strenuous times have yet to come they will find the Emperor alert and knowing better how to deal with them. He has, one may be sure, no thoughts of well-earned rest or dignified repose he probably never will, with his strong conception of duty and his interest in the fortunes of his Empire. Still, he is a good deal changed. Time has taught him more than his early tutor, worthy Dr. Hinzpeter, ever taught him; and if his spring was boisterous, and his summer gusty and uncertain, a mellow autumn gives promise of a hale and kindly winter.