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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 year, stood erect
on a throne, surrounded by the bowing forms of twenty ruling sovereigns,
and proclaimed, with the harsh, peremptory voice of a drill-sergeant,
that he was a War Lord, a Mailed Hand of Providence, and a sovereign
specially conceived, created, and invested with power by God, for the
personal government of some fifty millions of people.

It is much to be feared that, in the ears of the muse of history, the
resounding shrillness of this voice drowned alike the noise of the
hammers on the banks of the Seine and the cheering of the delegates at
Chicago.

Any man, standing on that throne in the White Saloon of the old
Schloss at Berlin, would have to be a good deal considered by his
fellow-creatures. Even if we put aside the tremendous international
importance of the position of a German Emperor, in that gravely open
question of peace or war, he must compel attention as the visible
embodiment of a fact, the existence of which those who like it least
must still recognize. This is the fact: that the Hohenzollerns, having
done many notable things in other times, have in our day revivified
and popularized the monarchical idea, not only in Germany, but to a
considerable extent elsewhere throughout Europe. It is too much to say,
perhaps, that they have made it beloved in any quarter which was hostile
before. But they have brought it to the front under new conditions, and
secured for it admiring notice as the mainspring of a most efficient,
exact, vigorous, and competent system of government. They have made an
Empire with it--a magnificent modern machine, in which army and civil
service and subsidiary federal administrations all move together like
the wheels of a watch. Under the impulse of this idea they have not only
brought governmental order out of the old-time chaos of German divisions
and dissensions, but they have given their subjects a public service,
which, taken all in all, is more effective and well-ordered than its
equivalent produced by popular institutions in America, France, or
England, and they have built up a fighting force for the protection of
German frontiers which is at once the marvel and the terror of Europe.

Thus they have, as has been said, rescued the ancient and time-worn
function of kingship from the contempt and odium into which it had
fallen during the first half of the century, and rendered it once more
respectable in the eyes of a utilitarian world.

But it is not enough to be useful, diligent, and capable. If it were,
the Orleans Princes might still be living in the Tuileries. A kingly
race, to maintain or increase its strength, must appeal to the national
imagination. The Hohenzollerns have been able to do this. The Prussian
imagination is largely made up of appetite, and their Kings, however
fatuous and limited of vision they may have been in other matters, have
never lost sight of this fact. If we include the Great Elector, there
have been ten of these Kings, and of the ten eight have made Prussia
bigger than they found her. Sometimes the gain has been clutched out of
the smoke and flame of battle; sometimes it has more closely resembled
burglary, or bank embezzlement on a large scale; once or twice it has
come in the form of gifts from interested neighbours, in which category,
perhaps, the cession of Heligoland may be placed--but gain of some sort
there has always been, save only in the reign of Frederic William IV and
the melancholy three months of Frederic III.

That there should be a great affection for and pride in the
Hohenzollerns in Prussia was natural enough. They typified the strength
of beak, the power of talons and sweeping wings, which had made Prussia
what she was. But nothing save a very remarkable train of surprising
events could have brought the rest of Germany to share this affection
and pride.

The truth is, of course, that up to 1866 most other Germans disliked
the Prussians thoroughly and vehemently, and decorated those head
Prussians, the Hohenzollerns, with an extremity of antipathy. That
brief war in Bohemia, with the consequent annexation of Hanover,
Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, and Frankfort, did not inspire any new love for
the Prussians anywhere, we may be sure, but it did open the eyes of
other Germans to the fact that their sovereigns--Kings, Electors, Grand
Dukes, and what not--were all collectively not worth the right arm of a
single Hohenzollern.

It was a good deal to learn even this--and, turning over this revelation
in their minds, the Germans by 1871 were in a mood to move almost
abreast of Prussia in the apotheosis of the victor of Sedan and Paris.
To the end of old William’s life in 1888, there was always more or less
of the apotheosis about the Germans’ attitude toward him. He was never
quite real to them in the sense that Leopold is real in Brussels
or Humbert in Rome. The German imagination always saw him as he is
portrayed in the fine fresco by Wislicenus in the ancient imperial
palace at Goslar--a majestic figure, clad in modern war trappings yet of
mythical aspect, surrounded, it is true, by the effigies of recognizable
living Kings, Queens, and Generals, but escorted also by heroic
ancestral shades, as he rides forward out of the canvas. Close behind
him rides his son, Fritz, and he, too, following in the immediate shadow
of his father to the last, lives only now in pictures and in sad musing
dreams of what might have been.

But William II--the young Kaiser and King--_is_ a reality. He has won no
battles. No antique legends wreathe their romantic mists about him. It
has occurred to no artist to paint him on a palace wall, with the mailed
shadows of mediaeval Barbarossas and Conrads and Sigismunds overhead.

The group of helmeted warriors who cluster about those two mounted
figures in the Goslar picture, and who, in the popular fancy, bring
down to our own time some of the attributes of mediaeval devotion and
prowess--this group is dispersed now. Moltke, Prince Frederic Charles,
Roon, Manteuffel, and many others are dead; Blumenthal is in
dignified retirement; Bismarck is at Friedrichsruh. New men crowd the
scene--clever organizers, bright and adroit parliamentarians, competent
administrators, but still fashioned quite of our own clay--busy new men
whom we may look at without hurting our eyes.

For the first time, therefore, it is possible to study this prodigious
new Germany, its rulers and its people, in a practical way, without
being either dazzled by the disproportionate brilliancy of a few
individuals or drawn into side-paths after picturesque unrealities.

*****

Three years of this new reign have shown us Germany by daylight
instead of under the glamour and glare of camp fires and triumphal
illuminations. We see now that the Hohenzollern stands out in the far
front, and that the other German royalties, Wendish, Slavonic, heirs
of Wittekind, portentously ancient barbaric dynasties of all sorts, are
only vaguely discernible in the background. During the lifetime of the
old Kaiser it seemed possible that their eclipse might be of only a
temporary nature. Nowhere can such an idea be cherished now. Young
William dwarfs them all by comparison even more strikingly than did his
grandfather.

They all came to Berlin to do him homage at the opening of the
Reichstag, which inaugurated his reign on June 25, 1888. They will never
make so brave a show again; even then they twinkled like poor tallow
dips beside the shining personality of their young Prussian chief.

Almost all of them are of royal lines older than that of the
Hohenzollerns. Five of the principal personages among them--the King of
Saxony, the Regent representing Bavaria’s crazy King, the heir-apparent
representing the semi-crazy King of Wurtemberg, the Grand Duke of Baden,
and the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt--owe their titles in their present
form to Napoleon, who paid their ancestors in this cheap coin for
their wretched treason and cowardice in joining with him to crush and
dismember Prussia. Now they are at the feet of Prussia, not indeed in
the posture of conquered equals, but as liveried political subordinates.
No such wiping out of sovereign authorities and emasculation of
sovere