William of Germany

William of Germany.

by Stanley Shaw.

I. INTRODUCTORY.

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

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

In Germany, instead of "the people" the Englishman speaks of when he talks politics, and the democratic orator, Mr. Bryan, in America is fond of calling the "peopul," there is a "folk," who neither claim to be, nor apparently wish to be, a "people" in the English sense.

The German folk have their traditions as the English people have traditions, and their place in the political system as the English people have; but both traditions and place are wholly different from those of the English people; indeed, it may be said are just the reverse of them.

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

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

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

These parties, from the situation of their seats in a parliament of 397 deputies, became known as the parties of the Right, or Conservative parties, and the parties of the Left, or Liberal parties.

Between them sat the members of the Centre, who, as representing the Catholic populations of Germany--roughly, twenty-two millions out of sixty-six--became a powerful and unchanging phalanx of a hundred deputies, which had interests and tactics of its own independently of Right or Left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems indeed as though neither in England nor in Germany has the least attention been paid to the astonishing growth of commerce between the countries or to the repeated declarations made through a long series of years by the respective Governments on their countries'

behalf. The growth in commerce needs no statistics to prove it, for it is a matter of everyday observation and comment. The English Government declares it a vital necessity for an insular Power like Great Britain, with colonies and duties appertaining to their possession in all, and the most distant, parts of the world, to have a navy twice as powerful as that of any other possibly hostile Power.

The ordinary German immediately cries out that England is planning to attack him, to annihilate his fleet, destroy his commerce, and diminish his prestige among the nations. The German Government repeatedly declares that the German fleet is intended for defence not aggression, that Germany does not aim at the seizure of other people's property, but at protecting her growing commerce, at standing by her subjects in all parts of the world if subjected to injury or insult, and at increasing her prestige, and with it her power for good, in the family of nations. The ordinary Englishman immediately cries out that Germany is seeking to dispute his maritime supremacy, to rob him of his colonies, and to appropriate his trade. Is it not conceivable that both Governments are telling the truth, and that their designs are no more and no less than the Governments represent them to be? The necessity for Great Britain possessing an all-powerful fleet that will keep her in touch with her colonies if she is not to lose them altogether, is self-evident, and understood by even the most Chauvinistic German. The necessity for Germany's possessing a fleet strong enough to make her rights respected is as self-evident.

Moreover, if Germany's fleet is a luxury, as Mr. Winston Churchill says it is, she deserves and can afford it. As a nation she has prospered and grown great, not by a policy of war and conquest, but by hard work, thrift, self-denial, fidelity to international engagements, well-planned instruction, and first-rate organization. Why should she not, if she thinks it advisable and is willing to spend the money on it, supply herself with an arm of defence in proportion to her size, her prosperity, and her desert? It may be that, as Mr. Norman Angell holds, the entire policy of great armaments is based on economic error; but unless and until it is clear that the German navy is intended for aggression, its growth may be viewed by the rest of the world with equanimity, and by the Englishman, as a connoisseur in such matters, with admiration as well. A man may buy a motor-car which his friends and neighbours think must be costly and pretentious beyond his means; but that is his business; and if the man finds that, owing to good management and industry and skill, his business is growing and that a motor-car is, though in some not absolutely clear and definite way, of advantage to him in business and satisfying to his legitimate pride--why on earth should he not buy or build it?

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

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

"Men's evil manners live in bra.s.s; their virtues We write in water."

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

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

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

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

II.

YOUTH

1859-1881

As the education of a prince, and the surroundings in which he is brought up, are usually different from the education and surroundings of his subjects, it is not surprising if, at least during some portion of his reign, and until he has graduated in the university of life, misunderstandings, if nothing worse, should occur between them: indeed the wonder is that princes and people succeed in living harmoniously together. They are separated by great gulfs both of sentiment and circ.u.mstance. Bismarck is quoted by one of his successors, Prince Hohenlohe, as remarking that every King of Prussia, with whatever popularity he began his reign, was invariably hated at the close of it.

The prince that would rule well has to study the science of government, itself a difficult and incompletely explored subject, and the art of administration; he has to know history, and above all the history of his own country; not that history is a safe or certain guide, but that it informs him of traditions he will be expected to continue in his own country and respect in that of others; he must understand the political system under which his people choose to live, and the play of political, religious, economic, and social forces which are ever at work in a community; he must learn to speak and understand (not always quite the same thing) other languages besides his own; and concurrently with these studies he must endeavour to develop in himself the personal qualities demanded by his high office--health and activity of body, quick comprehension and decision, a tenacious memory for names and faces, capacity for public speaking, patience, and that command over the pa.s.sions and prejudices, natural or acquired, which is necessary for his moral influence as a ruler. On what percentage of his subjects is such a curriculum imposed, and what allowances should not be made if a full measure of success is not achieved?

But even when the prince has done all this, there is still a study, the most comprehensive and most important of all, in which he should be learned--the study of humanity, and in especial that part of it with the care of whose interests and happiness he is to be charged. A few people seem to have this knowledge instinctively, others acquire something of it in the school of sad experience. It is not the fault of the Emperor, if, in his youth, his knowledge of humanity was not profound. There was always a strong vein of idealism and romance among Hohenzollerns, the vein of a Lohengrin, a Tancred, or some mediaeval knight. The Emperor, of course, never lived among the common people; never had to work for a living in compet.i.tion with a thousand others more fortunate than he, or better endowed by nature with the qualities and gifts that make for worldly success; never, so far as is known to a watchful and exceptionally curious public, endured domestic sorrow of a deep or lasting kind; never suffered materially or in his proper person from ingrat.i.tude, carelessness, or neglect; never knew the "penalty of Adam, the seasons' difference"; never, in short, felt those pains one or more of which almost all the rest of mankind have at one time or other to bear as best they may.

The Emperor has always been happy in his family, happy in seeing his country prosperous, happy in the admiration and respect of the people of all nations; and if he has pa.s.sed through some dark hours, he must feel happy in having n.o.bly borne them. Want of knowledge of the trials of ordinary humanity is, of course, no matter of reproach to him; on the contrary, it is matter of congratulation; and, as several of his frankest deliverances show, he has, both as man and monarch, felt many a pang, many a regret, many a disappointment, the intensity of which cannot be gauged by those who have not felt the weight of his responsibilities.

A discharge of 101 guns in the gardens of Crown Prince Frederick's palace in Berlin on the morning of January 27, 1859, announced the birth of the future Emperor. There were no portents in that hour.

Nature proceeded calmly with her ordinary tasks. Heaven gave no special sign that a new member of the Hohenzollern family had appeared on the planet Earth. Nothing, in short, occurred to strengthen the faith of those who believe in the doctrine of kingship by divine appointment.

It was a time of political and social turmoil in many countries, the groundswell, doubtless, of the revolutionary wave of 1848. The Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, and the war with China had kept England in a continual state of martial fever, and the agitation for electoral reform was beginning. Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister, with Lord Odo Russell as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Mr. Gladstone as Minister of Finance. Napoleon III was at war with Austria as the ally of Italy, where King Emmanuel II and Cavour were laying the foundations of their country's unity. Russia, after defeating Schamyl, the hero of the Caucasus, was pursuing her policy of penetration in Central Asia.

In Prussia the unrest was chiefly domestic. The country, while nominally a Great Power, was neutral during the Crimean War, and played for the moment but a small part in foreign politics. Bismarck, in his "Gedanke und Erinnerungen," compares her submission to Austria to the patience of the French n.o.ble-man he heard of when minister in Paris, whose conduct in condoning twenty-four acts of flagrant infidelity on the part of his wife was regarded by the French as an act of great forbearance and magnanimity. Prince William, the Emperor's grandfather, afterwards William I, first German Emperor, was on the throne, acting as Prince Regent for his brother, Frederick William IV, incapacitated from ruling by an affection of the brain.

The head of the Prussian Ministry, Manteuffel, had been dismissed, and a "new era," with ministers of more liberal tendencies, among them von Bethmann Hollweg, an ancestor of the present Chancellor, had begun.

General von Roon was Minister of War and Marine, offices at that time united in one department. The Italian War had roused Germany anew to a desire for union, and a great "national society" was founded at Frankfurt, with the Liberal leader, Rudolf von Bennigsen, at its head.

Public attention was occupied with the subject of reorganizing the army and increasing it from 150,000 to 210,000 men. Parliament was on the eve of a bitter const.i.tutional quarrel with Bismarck, who became Prussian Prime Minister (Minister President) in 1862, about the grant of the necessary army funds. Most of the great intellects of Germany--Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher--had long pa.s.sed away. Heinrich Heine died in Paris in 1856. Frederick Nietzsche was a youth, Richard Wagner's "Tannhauser" had just been greeted, in the presence of the composer, with a storm of hisses in the Opera house at Paris. The social condition of Germany may be partially realized if one remembers that the death-rate was over 28 per _mille_, as compared with 17 per _mille_ to-day; that only a start had been made with railway construction; that the country, with its not very generous soil, depended wholly upon agriculture; that savings-bank deposits were not one-twelfth of what they are now; that there were 60 training schools where there are 221 to-day, and 338 evening cla.s.ses as against 4,588 in 1910; that many of the princ.i.p.al towns were still lighted by oil; that there was practically no navy; and that the bulk of the aristocracy lived on about the same scale as the contemporary English yeoman farmer. Berlin contained a little less than half a million inhabitants, compared with its three and a half millions of to-day, and the state of its sanitation may be imagined from the fact that open drains ran down the streets.

The Emperor's father, Frederick III, second German Emperor, was affectionately known to his people as "unser Fritz," because of his liberal sympathies and of his high and kindly character. To most Englishmen he is perhaps better known as the husband of the Princess, afterwards Empress, Adelaide Victoria, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, and mother of the Emperor. Frederick III had no great share in the political events which were the birth-pangs of modern Germany, unless his not particularly distinguished leadership in the war of 1866 and that with France be so considered. The greater part of his life was pa.s.sed as Crown Prince, and a Crown Prince in Germany leads a life more or less removed from political responsibilities. He succeeded his father, William I, on the latter's death, March 9, 1888, reigned for ninety-nine days, and died, on June 15th following, from cancer of the throat, after an illness borne with exemplary fort.i.tude.

To what extent the character of his parents affected the character of the Emperor it is impossible to determine. The Emperor seldom refers to his parents in his speeches, and reserves most of his panegyric for his grandfather and his grandfather's mother, Queen Louise; but the comparative neglect is probably due to no want of filial admiration and respect, while the frequent references to his grandfather in particular are explained by the great share the latter took in the formation of the Empire and by his unbounded popularity. The Crown Prince was an affectionate but not an easy-going father, with a pa.s.sion for the arts and sciences; his mother also was a disciplinarian, and, equally with her husband, pa.s.sionately fond of art; and it is therefore not improbable that these traits descended to the Emperor. As to whether the alleged "liberality" of the Crown Prince descended to him depends on the sense given to the word "liberal." If it is taken to mean an ardent desire for the good and happiness of the people, it did; if it is taken to mean any inclination to give the people authority to govern themselves and direct their own destinies, it did not.

The mother of the Emperor, the Empress Frederick, had much of Queen Victoria's good sense and still more of her strong will. A thoroughly English princess, she had, in German eyes, one serious defect: she failed to see, or at least to acknowledge, the superiority of most things German to most things English. She had an English nurse, Emma Hobbs, to a.s.sist at the birth of the future Emperor. She made English the language of the family life, and never lost her English tastes and sympathies; consequently she was called, always with an accent of reproach, "the Englanderin," and in German writings is represented as having wished to anglicize not only her husband, her children, and her Court, but also her adopted country and its people. A chaplain of the English Church in Berlin, the Rev. J.H. Fry, who met her many times, describes her as follows:--

"She was not the wife for a German Emperor, she so English and insisted so strongly on her English ways. The result was that she was very unpopular in Germany, and the Germans said many wicked things of her. She hated Berlin, and if her son, the present Emperor, had not required that she should come to the capital every winter, she would have lived altogether at Cronberg in the villa an Italian friend bequeathed to her.

"She was extremely musical, had extensively cultivated her talents in this respect, and was an accomplished linguist.

Like her mother, Queen Victoria, she was unusually strong-minded, and was always believed to rule over her amiable and gentle husband. Her interest in the English community was great, another reason for the dislike with which the Germans regarded her. To her the community owes the pretty little English church in the Mon Bijou Platz (Berlin), which she used to attend regularly, and where a funeral service, at which the Emperor was present, was held in memory of her.

"German feeling was further embittered against her by the Morell Mackenzie incident, and to this day controversy rages round the famous English surgeon's name. The controversy is as to whether or not Morell Mackenzie honestly believed what he said when he diagnosed the Emperor's illness as non-cancerous in opposition to the opinion of distinguished German doctors like Professor Bergmann. Under German law no one can mount the throne of Prussia who is afflicted with a mortal sickness. For long it had been suspected that the Emperor's throat was fatally affected, and, therefore, when King William was dying, it became of dynastic and national importance to establish the fact one way or other. Queen Victoria was ardently desirous of seeing her daughter an Empress, and sent Sir Morrell Mackenzie to Germany to examine the royal patient. On the verdict being given that the disease was not cancer, the Crown Prince mounted the throne, and Queen Victoria's ambition for her daughter was realized.

"The Empress also put the aristocracy against her by introducing several relaxations into Court etiquette which had up to her time been stiff and formal. Her relations with Bismarck, as is well known, were for many years strained, and on one occasion she made the remark that the tears he had caused her to shed 'would fill tumblers.' On the whole she was an excellent wife and mother. She was no doubt in some degree responsible for the admiration of England as a country and of the English as a people which is a marked feature of the Emperor's character."

This account is fairly correct in its estimation of the Empress Frederick's character and abilities, but it repeats a popular error in saying that German law lays down that no one can mount the Prussian throne if he is afflicted with a mortal sickness. There is no "German law" on the subject, and the law intended to be referred to is the so-called "house-law," which, as in the case of other German n.o.ble families, regulates the domestic concerns of the House of Hohenzollern. Bismarck disposes of the a.s.sertion that a Hohenzollern prince mortally stricken is not capable of succession as a "fable,"

and adds that the Const.i.tution, too, contains no stipulation of the sort. The influence of his mother on the Emperor's character did not extend beyond his childhood, while probably the only natural dispositions he inherited from her were his strength of will and his appreciation of cla.s.sical art and music. Many of her political ideas were diametrically opposed to those of her son. Her love of art made her pro-French, and her visit to Paris, it will be remembered, not being made _incognito_, led to international unpleasantness, originating in the foolish Chauvinism of some leading French painters whose ateliers she desired to inspect. She believed in a h.o.m.ogeneous German Empire without any federation of kingdoms and states, advocated a Const.i.tution for Russia, and was satisfied that the common sense of a people outweighed its ignorance and stupidity.

The Emperor has four sisters and a brother. The sisters are Charlotte, born in 1860, and married to the Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Meiningen; Victoria, born in 1866, and married to Prince Adolphus of Schaumberg-Lippe; Sophie, born in 1870, and married to King Constantine, of Greece; and Margarete, born in 1872, and married to Prince Friederich Karl of Hessen.