The German Emperor as Shown in His Public Utterances. German Emperor William II
closely as was at all consistent with fair English usage. The speeches have been chosen to represent in due proportion his many interests, and range therefore from agriculture and art to Biblical criticism, national and international politics.
The Emperor has, of course, not given titles to his speeches, and the headings have been assigned by the compiler. It has been his aim to explain the circumstances under which each address was delivered and to make plain the references to events embodied therein. Questions which have had a continuous interest, or which have had some lasting effect on Germany’s policy, such as the attitude toward Alsace-Lorraine, the Social Democratic party, the retirement of Bismarck, the development of the navy, the Morocco question, have been treated at greater length on the first fitting occasion. For the introductions, therefore, the compiler assumes responsibility. In preparing them he has had recourse to many incidental sources of information, and in many cases the true inwardness of certain situations is still as much a matter of controversy as the causes of the present war. For his facts generally, he has followed where possible, besides such incidental and contemporary sources, Bruno Gebhardt’s “Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte” (1913), the “Cambridge Modern History—The Latest Age,” volume XII (1910), and the volumes of the “Statesman’s Yearbook.” In addition, for information concerning the internal development of Germany he has consulted and drawn upon the literature of this subject which has appeared in the last decade, but is more particularly indebted to Doctor Paul Liman’s “Der Kaiser,” Dawson’s “The Evolution of Modern Germany,” Barker’s “Modern Germany,” Price Collier’s “Germany and the Germans,” Forbes’s “William of Germany,” Gibbons’s “The New Map of Europe,” and the “Reichsgesetzblatt.”
As the Emperor has spoken upon almost every phase of German political life, with the editorial introductions which aim to set forth briefly the occasion and causes of each address, it is hoped that altogether the volume will offer a fairly accurate picture of the trend of German affairs for the last twenty-five years.
For help in the preparation of this volume, the writer is much indebted to his wife, whose assistance has amounted to collaboration.
Princeton, N. J.
December 20, 1914.
ILLUSTRATIONS
| William II, German Emperor | Frontispiece | |
| FACING PAGE | ||
| The Emperor in the Year of His Coronation, 1888 (Age 29) | 26 | |
| “Our Future Lies upon the Water.” The Emperor on Shipboard in the Autumn of 1898 | 126 | |
| The Emperor in 1900 | 168 | |
I
THE HOHENZOLLERN TRADITION
Ernest Renan, the author of that once heretical “Life of Jesus,” was by temperament unenthusiastic and had further schooled himself to look upon all human events with high unconcern. The great sceptic had been born in 1823; he was therefore sixty-five at the time of the accession of William II, and his declining health, in Horatian phrase, refused to allow him to enter upon any long hope. In looking forward to his inevitable end one thing, he said, afflicted him. He regretted only that he was not to see, in its later and more decisive phases, the unfolding of the multiform personality of the new German Emperor. To him it was an intellectual puzzle, more intricate and more interesting than any he had encountered in the many cycles of the history of the Hebrews or in the complicated schisms of the church. In the early years of his reign the youthful Emperor was regarded with much interest and some concern by his contemporaries generally. He was the chameleon among the royal figures of Europe. One day he receives the Czar at Berlin and proclaims peace to the world. A few weeks later he visits the Sultan at Constantinople, and shortly thereafter he announces to his loyal Brandenburgers that he will lead them on to greater things. What did he mean? Now he is a soldier, jesting with his officers; and, with the rising of another sun, in workman’s garb, with the axe upon his shoulder, he goes forth as woodman or laborer on his own estates. At home he was regarded as Benjamin Constant regarded Madame de Staël. He was the “bel orage,” the beautiful storm which had come upon Europe in the dull and piping times of peace of the last decades of the nineteenth century. He cleared the air of Continental politics in the years of late Victorianism. He was a dilettante of dangerous activities, as Renan had been of antiquated heresies and harmless, outworn systems, and to him Fate seemed to have given the future as a toy. Such, at least, was the view of the famous Portuguese poet Eça de Queiroz, who cast his horoscope in 1891.
A quarter century of peace had removed much apprehension. After the dismissal of Bismarck he had shaped his own policy and gone his own way. To his great advisers he had seemed to say: “Ôte-toi que je m’y mette.” Yet his career had ceased to disquiet, and the youthful exuberance had given way to mature and conscientious labor. With unshakable confidence in himself and with a determined application he was making Germany the greatest state in Europe. To those who, unlike Renan, did not have the misfortune to have been born too soon to be his later contemporaries, the riddle seemed to be solving itself to the greater good of humanity. The Emperor’s army, so he tells us himself, is invincible. Never has Germany been defeated so long as she was united, and God, who has taken such infinite pains with us, will never leave us “in the lurch.” By means of this powerful, unconquerable army, at whose side he had now set one of the greatest fleets on the seas, he had, so he told us, laid firm and sure the foundations of peace.
Then suddenly “the abyss is opened, … the sword is thrust into his hand,” and reluctantly and with a heavy heart he goes forth to do battle. Like a shuttle he flits from frontier to frontier, now planning an invasion of England, now supervising the readministration of Belgian industries, and now directing a battle in Poland. Surely such a destiny, so immense a power, has been granted to no man. It may be he is the great predestined victim; it may be that Time is preparing for him a final and well-earned European triumph.
What shall be the end, and where lies the responsibility? No ethical or political problem of our time forces itself upon us with greater insistence. His utterances may help to make the question if not the answer clear. Looking forward dispassionately twenty-three years ago that Portuguese student prophesied that this could not last, that there would be war; and in the light of later events that prophecy about “the allied armies” has been recently recalled. It was in these words that he closed his brilliant study of the youthful Emperor and King:
“William II runs the awful danger of being cast down Gemoniæ. He boldly takes upon himself responsibilities which in all nations are divided among various bodies of the state—he alone judges, he alone executes, because to him alone it is (not to his ministers, to his council, or to his parliament) that God, the God of the Hohenzollerns, imparts his transcendental inspiration. He must therefore be infallible and invincible. At the first disaster—whether it be inflicted by his burghers or by his people in the streets of Berlin, or by allied armies on the plains of Europe—Germany will at once conclude that his much-vaunted alliance with God was the trick of a wily despot.
“Then will there not be stones enough from