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THE YOUNG EMPEROR, WILLIAM II OF GERMANY

A Study In Character Development On A Throne

By Harold Frederic

Author Of “In The Valley “The Lawton Girl”

With Portraits

New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons

1891


[Illustration: 0011]


[Illustration: 0012]


TO MY EDITOR, AND EVEN MORE TO MY FRIEND,

CHARLES R. MILLER

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED




THE YOUNG EMPEROR, WILLIAM II OF GERMANY




CHAPTER I.--THE SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS.

In June of 1888, an army of workmen were toiling in the Champ de Mars
upon the foundations of a noble World’s Exhibition, planned to celebrate
the centenary of the death by violence of the Divine Right of Kings.
Four thousand miles westward, in the city of Chicago, some seven
hundred delegates were assembled in National Convention, to select the
twenty-third President of a great Republic, which also stood upon the
threshold of its hundredth birthday. These were both suggestive facts,
full of hopeful and inspiring thoughts to the serious mind. Considered
together by themselves they seemed very eloquent proofs of the progress
which Liberty, Enlightenment, the Rights of Man, and other admirable
abstractions spelled with capital letters, had made during the century.

But, unfortunately or otherwise, history will not take them by
themselves. That same June of 1888 witnessed a spectacle of quite
another sort in a third large city--a spectacle which gave the lie
direct to everything that Paris and Chicago seemed to say. This sharp
and clamorous note of contradiction came from Berlin, where a helmeted
and crimson-cloaked young man, still in his thirtieth