The young Emperor’s dislike for the press was indeed a fruitful source of sensational incidents during the first year or two of his reign, and still is uneasily felt to contain the elements of possibly further disturbance. The fault of this attitude is by no means entirely on one side. Both the character of the Kaiser and the character of the German press are in large part what Bismarck has made them, and if their less admirable sides clash and grind into each other with painful friction from time to time, it is only what might be expected. During Bismarck’s twenty-eight years of power in Prussia he so by turns debauched and coerced the press that the adjective “reptile” had to be invented by outsiders properly to describe its venomous cowardice. He openly and contemptuously prostituted it to serve his poorest and pettiest uses, so that it was not possible for any one to think of it with respect; yet, oddly enough, he always showed the keenest and most thin-skinned sensitiveness when its attacks or inuendoes were aimed at himself.
This whimsical susceptibility to affront in the printed word, no matter how mean or trivial the force back of it, is a trait which has often come near making Bismarck ridiculous, and it is not pleasant to note how largely William seems also to be possessed with it. He is as nervous about what the papers will say as a young débutante on the stage. Not only does he keep an anxious watch upon the talk of the German editors, but he ordains a vigilant scrutiny of the articles printed in foreign countries from the pens of correspondents stationed at Berlin. In this he is very German. Nobody in England, for example, ever dreams of caring about, or for the most part of even taking the trouble to learn, what is printed abroad about English personages or politics. The foreign correspondents in London are as free as the wind that blows. But matters were ordered very differently at the beginning of the present reign in Berlin, and to this day journalists pursue their calling there under a sense of espionage hardly to be imagined in Fleet Street. It is true that a change for the better is distinctly visible of late, but it will be the work of many years to eradicate the low views of German journalism which Bismarck instilled, alike, unfortunately, in the royal palaces and the editorial offices of Prussia.
One of the very first acts of William’s reign was the expulsion from Berlin of two French journalists whose sympathetic accounts of his father’s dismissal of Puttkamer had been distasteful to the royal eye. In the following January the correspondents of the Figaro and National of Paris were similarly driven out. In March, 1889, simultaneously with the seizure of the Berlin Volks-Zeitung and the prosecution of the Freisinnige Zeitung, a new Penal Code was presented to the Reichstag which contained such arbitrary provisions for stamping out the remaining liberties of the press that even the Cologne Gazette denounced it as “putting a frightful weapon into the hands of the Government for suppressing freedom of speech and silencing opposition.” This measure did not pass, but the odium of having introduced it remained.
Although in other respects William was already observed to be separating himself from his Chancellor, it is clear that he has a large share in this odium. All his utterances, both at this time and up to the present date, show how thoroughly he believes in editing the editors. This tendency was during the year 1889 to exhibit its comical side.
The special organ of the Waldersee party was the high-and-dry old Tory journal, the Kreuz-Zeitung. Early in the year this mouthpiece of the anti-Bismarck coalition was raided by the Chancellor, and both its offices and the house of its editor, Baron Hammerstein, ransacked for incriminating documents. The Kaiser is believed to have intervened to prevent more serious steps being taken. Later in the year, as the success of the Waldersee combination in weaning the Kaiser away from Bismarck grew more and more marked, the Kreuz-Zeitung foolishly gave voice to its elation, and attacked the “Cartel” coalition of parties which controlled the Reichstag. The Kaiser thereupon printed a personal communique in the official paper saying that he approved of the “Cartel” and was “unable to reconcile the means by which the Kreuz-Zeitung assailed it with respect for his own person.” This warning proved insufficient, for in the following January Baron Hammerstein put up as a candidate for a vacancy at Bielefeld, and talked so openly about being the real nominee of the Kaiser that William caused to be inserted in all the papers a notice of his order that the Kreuz-Zeitung should not henceforth be taken at any of the royal palaces, or allowed in public reading-rooms. It may be imagined how the Liberal editors chuckled over this.
So recently as in May of last year, two months after the retirement of Bismarck, when the regular official deputation from the new Reichstag waited upon William, he pointed out to the Radical members that the Freisinnige press was criticizing the army estimates, which he and his generals had made as low as possible, and sharply warned them to see that a stop was put to such conduct on the part of their friends, the Radical editors. And only last December, in his remarkable speech to the Educational Conference, he lightly grouped journalists with the “hunger candidates” and others who formed an over-educated class “dangerous to society.”
This inability to tolerate the expression of opinions different from his own is very Bismarckian.
The ex-Chancellor, in fact, has for years past acted and talked upon the theory that anybody who did not agree with him must of necessity be unpatriotic, and came at last to hurl the epithet of Reichsfeind—enemy of the Empire—every time any one disputed him on any point whatsoever.
William has roughly shorn away Bismarck’s pretence to infallibility, but about the divine nature of his own claims he has no doubt. Some of his deliverances on questions of morals and ethics, in his capacity as a sort of helmeted Northern Pope, are calculated to bring a smile to the face of the Muse of History. His celebrated harangue to the Rector of the Berlin University, Professor Gebhardt, wherein he complained that, under the lead of democratic professors, the students were filled with destructive political doctrines, and concluded by gruffly saying, “Let your students go more to churches and less to beer cellars and fencing saloons”—was put down to his youth, for it dates from the close of 1888. It is interesting to note, from William’s recent speech at Bonn, that he has decidedly altered his views on both beer-drinking and duelling among students. He began his reign, however, with ultra-puritanical notions on these as well as other subjects.
Long after this early deliverance his confidence in himself, so far from suffering abatement, had so magnified itself that he called the professors of another University together and lectured them upon the bad way in which they taught history. He had discovered, he said, that there was now much fondness for treating the French Revolution as a great political movement, not without its helpful and beneficent results. This pernicious notion must no longer be encouraged in German universities, but students should be taught to regard the whole thing as one vast and unmitigated crime against God and man.
In this dogmatic phase of his character William is much more like Frederic William I than like any of his nearer ancestors in the Hohenzollern line. These later monarchs, beginning with Frederic the Great and following his luminous example, were habitually chary about bothering themselves with their subjects’ opinions. William at one time thought a good deal upon the fact that he was a successor of Frederic the Great, and by fits and starts set himself to imitate the earlier acts of that sovereign. His restless flying about from place to place, and, even more clearly, his edicts rebuking the army officers for gambling and for harshness to their men, were copied from that illustrious original. But in his attitude toward the mental and moral liberty of his subjects he goes back a generation to Frederic’s father—and suggests to us also the reflection that he is a grandson of that highly self-confident gentleman whom English-speaking people knew as the Prince Consort.
Frederic the Great had so little of this spirit in him that he made himself memorably unique among eighteenth-century sovereigns by allowing such freedom to the press that liberty sank into license, and the most scandalous and mendacious attacks upon his personal life were printed in and hawked about Berlin to the end of his days. As for his refusal to interfere in the alleged perversion of Protestant children by Catholic teachers, his comment on the margin of the ministerial complaint, “In this country every man must get to heaven in his own way,” is justly cherished to this day as worth all his other writings put together.
William’s spasms, so to speak, of imitative loyalty to the memories of his ancestors have been productive of many curious, not to say diverting, results. Their progressive consecutiveness is not always easy to make out, but they afford, as a whole, very interesting insights into the young man’s temperament.
When tragic chance thrust him forward and upon the throne, his youthful imagination happened to be in some mysterious way under the spell of that most astounding of all his forefathers, Frederic William I. He spoke frequently with enthusiasm of the character of this rude, choleric barbarian, and even brought himself to believe that there was something fine in that strange creature’s inability to speak any language but German. It was under the sway of this admiration for the second Prussian King that William, in January of 1889, had all the French cooks in his palaces discharged, and ordered that hereafter the royal bill of fare should be a Speisekarte, with the names of dishes in German, instead of the accustomed menu in French. It will not, however, have escaped notice that William is a changeable young man, and this ultra-Teutonic mood did not last very long. In the following autumn he had so far recovered from it that his visit to Constantinople was reported to have been marred by the Sultan’s mistaken hospitality in giving him nothing but German champagnes to drink. It must be admitted, however, that scarcely the most robust prejudice could stand out long under such a test.
In the spring of 1890 there came the 150th anniversary of the accession of Frederic the Great, and with it a sudden shift in the young Kaiser’s admiration. For a long time thereafter he made no speech without alluding to this most splendid figure in Prussian history, and quoting him as an example to be followed with reverential loyalty.
Then in December came the turn of still a third bygone Hohenzollern. It was on December 1, 1640, that the youth of twenty, who was later to be known as the Great Elector, entered upon the herculean task of saving hapless, bankrupt little Brandenburg from literal annihilation. William has told us that as a boy he scarcely learned anything at all about this illustrious ancestor of his. Apparently little had been done to make good this lack of information up to the time when, toward the close of 1890, he found that the Great Elector’s 250th anniversary was near at hand, and felt that it ought to be celebrated. He began reading the history of that memorable reign, and was at once excitedly interested and impressed. There has always been a charming, if childish, naivete about the manner in which William frankly exposes his mental processes, and, having just heard of something for the first time which everybody else knows, brings it forward to public notice as if it were a fresh and most remarkable discovery. The effect produced upon him by his belated introduction to the life and works of the last Elector affords an apt illustration of this tendency. At the celebration William made a long speech in eulogy of his ancestor, which in every sentence seemed to take it for granted that heretofore no one had written or thought or known about the Great Elector. Since that time the young Emperor has rarely spoken in public, at least to a Prussian audience, without some reference to this distinguished predecessor—whereas we never hear now of either Frederic the Great or his savage father.
Doubtless the fervour with which William has adopted the Great Elector as his model ancestor is in large part due to the fact that the latter’s first important act was the summary dismissal of his father’s Prime Minister, Schwarzenberg. The parallel to be drawn between the disgrace of this powerful favourite and the fall of Bismarck is often faulty and nowhere exact, but it is evident that it impressed William’s imagination greatly when he came upon it, and that he could not resist the temptation to suggest it to the world at large. In this same anniversary speech he said: “My stout ancestor had no one to lean upon.”
The eminent statesman who had served his predecessor was revealed to have worked for his own personal ends, and the young sovereign was forced to mark out his own path unaided. The comparison was a cruel one, because the manner in which Schwarzenberg “worked for his own personal ends” was that of taking bribes to betray his royal master and his country. Yet the loose phrase could also describe Bismarck’s hot-headed use of his vast governmental powers to crush his individual enemies, and in this sense every one felt that William was instituting a comparison.
But this embittered remark belongs to a much later period than has as yet come under our view, and marks an acute stage of the dramatic and momentous quarrel between Kaiser and Chancellor, of the dawning of which there were only vague anticipatory rumours in 1889.
The first few months of 1889 present nothing of special note to the observer. There was perhaps a trifle more nervousness on the bourses during that early spring-time which, for some occult reason, is the chosen season of alarmist war rumours, than had been usual in the lifetime of the old Kaiser, but this signified no more than a vague uneasiness born of the sword-clanking reputation which had preceded William’s accession to the throne. The surface of events at Berlin seemed smooth enough, although dissensions and jealousies were warring fiercely underneath. Everybody was talking about the tremendous battle going on between the Bismarcks and the Waldersees, but of public evidence of this conflict there was none, This very reticence shows that the Chancellor must thus early have become impressed with the menacing power of the combinations confronting him, for it was never his habit to be silent about quarrels in which he was confident of victory. He must have become truly alarmed when, on February 25th, he gave a great dinner, at which the Kaiser and Waldersee were the principal guests. So far from creating a false impression of cordiality, this banquet, with its incongruous people and its hollow gaiety, only strengthened the notion that Bismarck was toppling.
In May, however, two things happened which at the time much occupied the world’s attention—the abortive Strasburg visit incident and the great miners’ strike in Westphalia. These two episodes are particularly noteworthy in that they for the first time show us William confronted by something bigger than questions of personal politics and individual piques and prejudices. A dangerous international quarrel and a threatening domestic convulsion loomed up suddenly side by side before him—and the experience left him a wiser and more serious man.
To glance first at the incident which, creating the greater furor at the time, has left the slighter mark upon history—the King of Italy, with his son and his Premier, came, on May 21st, to visit William in Berlin, There were many reasons why the reception extended to him should have been, as indeed it was, of the most affectionate and enthusiastic character. The old Emperor William had grown to be considered at the Quirinal as Victor Emmanuel’s best friend, and Prussia was proudly pleased to be thought of as the chief protector and sponsor of young United Italy. The more romantic Frederic had cultivated a highly sentimental intimacy, later on, with King Humbert and Queen Marguerite, and had made all Rome a party to it by that celebrated spectacular appearance on the balcony of the Quirinal with the little Italian Crown Prince in his arms. Thus peculiarly emotional ties bound Humbert now to Frederic’s son, and his coming to Berlin was hailed as the arrival of a warm personal friend even more than as the advent of a powerful ally.
It may have been from mere lightness of heart—conceivably there was a deeper motive—but at all events William proposed to this good friend that on his way home they should together visit Strasburg, and the amiable Humbert, a slow, patient, honest fellow, consented. The assertion has since been authoritatively made by Italian statesmen that the idea really originated with the adventurous Italian Premier, Crispi, and that Bismarck and William merely fell in with it. However that may it is fact that the visit was agreed upon, and that orders were despatched to Strasburg to make things ready for the royal party.
When the news of this intended trip became public, its effect was that of a shock of earthquake. During the twenty-four hours which elapsed before the frightened Crispi could issue a statement that the report of such a visit was a pure Bourse canard, Europe was sensibly nearer a war than at any time in the last fifteen years. The French press raised a clamorous and vibrant call to arms, and the politicians of Rome and Vienna kept the wires to Berlin hot with panic-stricken protests. What it all meant was, of course, that Europe has tacitly consented to regard the possession of Alsace-Lorraine as an open question, to be finally settled when France and Germany fight next time. Upon this understanding, no outside sovereign has formally sanctioned the annexation of 1871 by appearing in person within the disputed territory. King Humbert’s violation of this point of international etiquette would have been a deliberate blow in the face of the French Republic. Luckily he had the courage to draw back when the lightnings began playing upon his path, and with diminishing storm mutterings the cloud passed away. Its net result had been to show the world William’s foolhardiness in favouring such a wanton insult to France, and his humiliation in having publicly to abandon an advertised intention—and the spectacle was not reassuring.
The episode is chiefly interesting now because it seems to have been of great educational value to the young Emperor. It really marked out for him, in a striking object lesson, the grave international limitations by which his position is hemmed in. He has never since made another such false step. Indeed the solitary other cause of friction between France and Germany which has arisen during his reign proceeded from an action of a diametrically opposite nature—to wit, an attempt to conciliate instead of offend.
Of much more permanent importance in the history of William and of his Empire was the great miners’ strike in Westphalia, which may be said to have begun on the 1st of May. This tremendous upheaval of labour at one time involved the idleness of over 100,000 men—by no means all miners or all Westphalians. The shortened coal supply affected industries everywhere, and other trades struck because the spirit of mutiny was in the air. In many districts the military were called out to guard the pits’ mouths, and sanguinary conflicts with the strikers ensued.
Evidently this big convulsion took William completely by surprise. Up to this time he had been deeply engrossed in the spectacular side of his position—the showy and laborious routine of an Emperor who is also a practical working soldier. Such thought as he had given to the great economic problems pressing for solution all about him, seems to have been of the most casual sort and cast wholly in the Bismarckian mould. What Bismarck’s views on this subject were and are, is well known. He believes that over-education has filled the labouring classes of Germany with unnatural and unreasonable discontent, which is sedulously played upon by depraved Socialist agitators, and that the only way to deal with the trouble is to imprison or banish as many of these latter as possible, and crush out the disaffection by physical force wherever it manifests itself. He decorates this position with varying sophistical frills and furbelows from time to time, but in its essence that is what he thinks. And up to May of 1889 that is apparently what William thought, too.
The huge proportions of this sudden revolt of labour made William nervous, however, and in this excited state he was open to new impressions. The anti-Bismarck coalition saw their chance and swiftly utilized it. With all haste they summoned Dr. Hinzpeter from his home at Bielefeld, and persuaded William to confer with his old tutor upon this alarming industrial complication, with which it was clearly enough to be seen his other advisers did not know how to deal. No exact date is given for the interview which William had with Dr. Hinzpeter, but the day upon which it was held should be a memorable one in German history. For then dawned upon the mind of the young Kaiser that dream of Christian Socialism with the influence of which we must always thereafter count.
It is true that the angered and dispossessed ex-Chancellor declares now that William never was morally affected by the painful aspects of the labour question, and that he took the side of the workmen solely because he thought it would pay politically. But men who know the Kaiser equally well, and who have the added advantage of speaking dispassionately, say that the new humanitarian views which Dr. Hinzpeter now unfolded to him took deep hold upon his imagination, and made a lasting mark upon his character. Even if the weight of evidence were not on its side, one would like to believe this rather than the cynical theory propounded from Friedrichsruh.
William did not become a full-fledged economic philosopher all at once under this new influence.
There was a great deal of the rough absolutist in the little harangue he delivered to the three working-men delegates who, on May 14th, were admitted to his presence to lay the case of the strikers before him. He listened gravely to their recital of grievances, asked numerous questions, and seemed considerably impressed. When their spokesman had finished he said that he was anxiously watching the situation, had ordered a careful inquiry into all the facts, and would see that evenhanded justice was done. Then, in a sharper voice, he warned them to avoid like poison all Socialist agitators, and specially to see to it that there were no riots or attempts to prevent the non-strikers from working. If this warning was not heeded, he concluded, in high peremptory tones, he would send his troops “to batter and shoot them down in heaps.”
It must be admitted that this sentiment does not touch the high-water mark of Christian Socialism, but the drift of the Kaiser’s mind was obviously forward. Two days later he received a delegation of mine masters, and to them spoke rather bitterly of the perversity and greed of capitalists, and their selfish unwillingness to “make certain sacrifices in order to terminate this perilous and troublous state of things.” On May 17th it was announced that Dr. Hinzpeter had been commissioned to travel through the disturbed districts and report to the Kaiser upon the origin and merits of the strike. This practically settled the matter. The masters as a whole made concessions, under which work was resumed. Those owners who displayed stubbornness were in one way or another made to feel the imperial displeasure, and soon the trouble was at an end. It is worthy of note that Germany has since that time been far less agitated by labour troubles than any of the states by which she is surrounded, and that upon the occasion of the recent May-day demonstrations German workmen were practically the only ones on the Continent who did not come into collision with the police.
But, after all, the vitally important thing was the reappearance of Dr. Hinzpeter, involving, as it did, the revival in the young Kaiser’s daily thoughts and moods of the gentle and softening influences of those old school days at Cassel, before Bonn and the Bismarcks came to harden and pervert.
Upon the heels of the Strasburg incident followed another flurry in international politics, which for the moment seemed almost as menacing, and which hurried forward a highly significant step on the part of William.
The precipitate haste with which the young Kaiser had rushed off to visit St. Petersburg, almost before the public signs of mourning for his father had been removed in Berlin and Potsdam, had impressed everybody as curious. Nearly a year had now elapsed, and the failure of the Czar to say anything about returning the visit was growing to seem odder still. It was, of course no secret that the Czar did not like William. No two men could present greater points of difference, physically and mentally. The autocrat of all the Russias is a huge, lumbering, slow, and tenacious man, growing somewhat fat with increasing years, hating all forms of regular exercise, and cherishing a veritable horror of noisy, overzealous, and bustling people. Every smart public servant in Russia is governed by the knowledge that his imperial master has a peculiar aversion to all forms of bother, and values his officials precisely in proportion as they make short and infrequent reports, free from all accounts of unpleasant things, and, still more important, from all meddlesome suggestions of reform. When a Russian diplomat was asked, a year ago, what the Czar’s personal attitude toward William was, he answered expressively by shrugging his shoulders and putting his fingers in his ears.
But now the Czar, from passively affronting William by not returning his visit, summoned the energy for a direct provocation. A palace luncheon was given in St. Petersburg, celebrating the betrothal of a Montenegrin Princess to a Russian Grand Duke, and the Czar, standing and in a loud, clear voice, drank to Prince Nikolo of Montenegro as “the only sincere and faithful friend Russia had” among European sovereigns. That there might be no doubt about this, the Czar had the words printed next day in the Official Messenger.
Germany was not slow to comprehend the meaning of this remarkable speech. But to make it still clearer the Czarowitch, three weeks later, paid a formal visit to Stuttgart to attend some Court festivities, and passed through Berlin both going and coming—though the Breslau-Dresden route would have been more direct—apparently for no other purpose than to insult the Kaiser by stopping for an hour each time inside the railway station, as if there were no such people as the Hohenzollerns to so much as leave a card upon. As a capstone to this insolence, the Russian officers of his suite refused to drink the toast to the German Empire at the Stuttgart banquet, and, when a dispute arose, left the room in a body.
The immediate effect of this was to remove the last vestige of reserve existing between William and his English relatives. He at once sent word that, if convenient, he would visit his grandmother, the Queen, at the beginning of August. An assurance of hearty welcome was as promptly returned.
This decision marked another stage in the decline of Bismarck’s power. We have seen how he had been gradually pushed aside in the management of German internal affairs. Now the Kaiser was to break through the dearest traditions of Bismarck’s foreign policy—the cultivation of Russian amiability at whatever cost of dignity, and the contemptuous snubbing of England. With a fatal inability to distinguish between the promptings of passion and the dictates of true policy, the Chancellor had been led into a position where he could maintain himself only if every one of the elements and chances combined to play his game for him, and keep William at daggers-drawn with all things English. The miracle did not happen. As we have seen, even the Czar took it into his head to interfere to the damage of Bismarck’s plans.
So the perplexed and baffled old Chancellor, noting with new rage and mortification how power was slipping from his hands, yet helpless to do other than fight doggedly to hold what yet remained, stopped behind in Berlin, the while Kaiser William steamed at the head of his splendid new squadron into Portsmouth Harbour, and the very sea shook with the thunderous cannon roar of his welcome. The world had never before seen such a show of fighting ships as was gathered before Cowes to greet him. There was one other thing which may be assumed to have been unique in human chronicles. William, in the exuberance of his delight at his really splendid reception, and at being created a British Admiral, issued a solemn imperial order making his grandmother a Colonel of Dragoons.
The English did well to surround the young Kaiser’s visit with all imaginable pomp and display of overwhelming naval force, for it meant very much more both to them and to him than any one is likely to have imagined at the time. The splendour of the material spectacle, and the sentimental interest attaching to the fact that this young man coming to greet his grandmother was the first German Emperor to set foot on English soil since the days of the Crusaders, were much-dwelt upon in the press. To us who have been striving to trace the inner workings of the influences shaping the young man’s character, the event has a nearer significance. It meant that William—having for years been estranged from the liberalizing English impulses and feelings of his boyish education; having since his majority exulted in the false notion that to be truly German involved hatred of all things English—had come to see his mistake.
It is not possible to exaggerate the importance of this visit, and of the causes leading up to it, upon William’s mind. The Hohenzollerns, until within our own times the comparatively needy Princes of a poor country, have always been greatly impressed by the superior wealth and luxurious civilization of the English. The famous Double-Marriage project of Frederic William I’s days was clung to in Berlin through years of British snubs and rebuffs because thrifty Prussian eyes saw these islands through a golden mist. To the imagination of German royalty, English Princesses appear in the guise of fairies, not invariably beautiful, perhaps, but each bearing the purse of Fortunatus. This view of the English colours the thoughts of more lowly-born Germans. When Freytag * seeks to explain the late Kaiser Frederic’s complete and almost worshipping subjection to his wife, he says: “She had come to him from superior surroundings.”
William had tried hard, in his ultra-German days, to despise English wealth along with English political ideas. The theory of a Spartan severity, governing expenditure and all other conditions of daily life, was the keynote of his Teutonic period. But when he became Kaiser he had yielded to the temptation of getting the Reichstag to augment his annual civil list by 3,500,000 marks. That in itself considerably modified his austere hatred of luxury. Now, as the guest of the richest nation in the-world, he was able to feel himself a relative, and wholly at home. The English conquest of William was complete.
No hint of unfilial conduct had been heard, now, for a long time, nor was henceforth to be heard. William had by this time become fully reconciled to his mother, and in the following month, September of 1889, he purchased for and presented to her the Villa Reiss, a delightful summer chateau in the Taunus Mountains.
Thereafter a strong sympathy with England has manifested itself in all his actions. The Czar did at last, in the most frosty, formal manner, pay a brief visit to Berlin, and William the following year returned the courtesy by attending the Russian manoeuvres, but this has not at all affected his open preference for English friendship. He always spoke German with an English accent—which now is more marked than ever.
He has a bewildering variety of uniforms, but the one which affords him the greatest pride is the dress of the British Admiral. He wears it whenever the least excuse offers. Upon his journey to Athens in October of 1889, to attend the wedding of his sister and the Greek Crown Prince, he was so much affected by his new English naval title that when he steamed into the classic Ægean Sea on his imperial yacht he flew the British Admiral’s flag from her top. A British fleet was also there to participate in the ceremonies, and William took his new position so seriously, and had such delight in descending suddenly upon the squadron at unexpected and unreasonable hours, and routing everybody out for parade and inspection, that the British officers themselves revolted and preferred an informal complaint to the British Minister. “This thing is played out,” they said. “If he would merely wear the uniform and let it end with that, we shouldn’t mind. But we didn’t make him Admiral to worry the lives out of us in this fashion.”
We have come now to a time when the effects of this reasserted English influence began to be apparent throughout Germany. Since his successful tour through the Westphalian strike district, Dr. Hinzpeter had been visibly growing in men’s eyes as the new power behind the throne. Another friend of William’s, Count William Douglas, began also to attract attention. This nobleman, ten years older than the Kaiser, and a capable writer and speaker as well as soldier is a descendant of one of the numerous Scotch cadets of aristocratic families who carried their swords into Continental service when the Stuarts were driven from the British throne. Both in appearance and temperament no one could be more wholly German than Count Douglas is, but his intimacy with William only became marked after the English visit.
Immediately upon his return from England, William delivered a speech at Münster in which he eulogized Hinzpeter as a representative Westphalian, whose splendid principles he had imbibed in his boyhood. During the ensuing autumn and winter the presence of Dr. Hinzpeter at the palace became so much a matter of comment that some of Bismarck’s “reptile” papers began to complain that if the Westphalian was to exert such power he ought to take office so that he could be openly discussed.
Similar attacks were made by the Chancellor’s organs upon Count Douglas, who had written a very complimentary pamphlet about the young Kaiser shortly after his accession, and who now, as an Independent Conservative, was thought to reflect the Kaiser’s own political preferences. Public opinion bracketed Hinzpeter and Douglas together as the active forces at the head of the Waldersee coalition, and we shall see that William himself treated them as such when the time for action came.
New men had gradually supplanted old ones in many important official posts. The gentlest of soft hints had long since (in August of 1888) been borne in by a little bird to the aged Count von Moltke, and he, on the instant, with the perfect dignity and pure gentility of his nature, had responded with a request to be permitted to retire from active labour. His letter, with its quaintly pathetic explanation that “I am no longer able to mount a horse.” was answered with effusion by William, who visited him personally at his residence, and made him President of the National Defence Commission, vice the Emperor Frederic, deceased. Later events rendered it natural to contrast the loyal behaviour of the great soldier with the mutinous and perverse conduct of the statesman whose name is popularly linked with his, and during the last year of his life Moltke existed in a veritable apotheosis of demonstrative imperial affection, which indeed followed his coffin to the grave with such symbols of royal favour as no commoner’s bier had ever before borne in Germany.
Somewhat later the Minister of Marine, General von Caprivi, received a delicate intimation that the Kaiser thought a soldier was out of place in charge of the navy, and he also promptly but gracefully resigned, and accepted the command of an army corps instead with cheerful obedience. It is a great gift to know when and how to get out, and Caprivi did it so amiably and intelligently that the Kaiser made a mental note of him as a good man to rely upon when the time should come.
General Bronsart von Schellendorf similarly resigned the War Ministry. He was a descendant of one of the large colony of Huguenot families which took refuge in Berlin after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—and it was a strange freak of Fate’s irony which, in 1871, sent him as Colonel out from the German headquarters before Sedan to convey a demand for surrender to the French Emperor. Curiously enough he was succeeded now as Minister of War by another descendant of these exiled French Protestants, General von Verdy du Vernois, the ablest military writer of his generation, a notably clever organizer and a deservedly popular man.
Neither von Verdy nor Waldersee, who succeeded to Moltke’s proud position as Chief of the General Staff, remained long in their new posts. The world had nothing but vague surmises as to the causes of their retirement, and, noting that they still retain the friendly regard of their sovereign, did not dally long with these. Here again the contrast forces itself upon public attention, for these two good soldiers and able administrators neither sought interviews with travelling correspondents in which to vent their grievances, nor inspired spiteful attacks in provincial newspapers against their young chief. They went loyally out of office, as they had entered it, and kept their silence.
Thus throughout the public service, civil and military alike, these changes went forward—the greybeards who had helped to create the Empire on the field or in the council-room, one by one stepping down and out to make room for the new generation—but Bismarck, though becoming more and more isolated, clung resolutely to his place. It was no secret to him that the Kaiser’s principal advisers and friends were keen to throw him out of the Chancellorship; it must have long been apparent to him that the Kaiser was accustoming his mind to thoughts of a Berlin without Bismarck. But the Iron Chancellor had neither the simple dignity of Moltke nor the shrewd suavity of Caprivi. He would not leave until he had been violently thrust forth, and even then he would stand on the doorstep and shout.
The opponents of Bismarck had long been gathering their forces for a grand attack. Their difficulty had been the unwillingness of the Kaiser definitely to give his assent to the overthrow of the great man. Often, in moments of impatience at the autocratic airs assumed by Bismarck and his son, William had seemed on the point of turning down his thumb as a signal for slaughter. But there always would come a realization of how mighty a figure in German history Bismarck truly was—and perhaps, too, some modified reassertion of the tremendous personal influence with which for years the Chancellor had magnetized him. Almost to the end the young man had recurring spasms of subjection to this old ideal of his youth. Even while he was sporting his British ensign in Greek waters, and showing to the whole world how completely the breach between him and English royalty had been healed, he salved his conscience, as it were, by addressing enthusiastic and affectionate despatches to Bismarck from every new stopping-place on those classic shores.
But now, in January of 1890, the long-looked-for opportunity came. The natural term of the Reichstag elected in 1887—the last one chosen for only three years’ service—was on the point of expiration. The anti-Socialist penal laws would lapse in September of 1890 unless renewed either by this dying Reichstag or, without delay, by its successor. Prince Bismarck was, of course, committed to their prompt and emphatic renewal. His enemies—another term for William’s new friends—had secretly been preparing for the defeat of these laws in the Reichstag, and now, in the middle of the month, found that they had secured an absolute majority. They conveyed this fact to the Kaiser, with the obvious corollary that the time had arrived for him to take the popular lead in his Empire, and make an issue on this question with his Chancellor. William saw the point, and reluctantly took the decisive step.
Space permits only the most cursory glance at this parliamentary battlefield, whereon Bismarck had waged so many rough Berserker fights, and which now was to see his complete annihilation.
The Reichstag at Berlin is by no means powerful in the sense that Parliament is in London or Congress in Washington. It is a convention of spectacled professors, country nobles, and professional men desirous of advertisement or the pretence of employment, with a sprinkling of smart financiers and professional politicians who have personal ends to serve. They play at legislation—some seriously, others not—but as a rule what they do and say makes next to no difference whatever. They have not even the power of initiating legislation. That function belongs to the Bundes-rath or Federal Council, which means the Prussian Ministry, which in turn meant Bismarck. His historic conception of law-making was to combine by bribes and threats a sufficient number of the fragmentary parties to constitute a majority, and to use this to pass his measures as far as it would go. Then he would swing around, create a different majority out of other groups, and carry forward another line of legislation. In turn he had been at the head of every important political faction and the enemy of each, and if he was unable to get his way through one combination always managed sooner or later to obtain it by a new shaking-up of the dice.
Parliamentary institutions were not always at this low estate in Prussia. Three hundred years ago the Brandenburg Diet was a strong and influential body, which stoutly held the purse-strings and gave the law to sovereigns. The Hohenzollerns broke it down, first by establishing and fostering Stände, or small local diets, to dispute its power and jurisdiction, and then, in 1652, by the Great Elector boldly putting his mailed heel on it as a nuisance. It still lingered on in a formal, colourless, ineffective fashion until in the time of Frederic William I, when it was contemptuously kicked out of sight. That stalwart despot explained this parting kick by saying: “I am establishing the King’s sovereignty like a rock of bronze;” and, whatever its composition, there the rock stood indubitably in all men’s sight for much more than a century, with neither parliaments to shake its foundations nor powerful ministers to crumble away its sides.
Bismarck had made it a condition of his acceptance of office in 1862 that he would govern Prussia without a Parliament. When the fortune of war and the federation of the states enlarged the scope of his responsibilities to the limits of the new Empire, he proceeded upon the same autocratic lines. There was a greater necessity, it is true, of pretending to defer to the parliamentary idea, but he never dissembled his disgust at this necessity. He bullied the leaders of the opposition factions with such open coarseness, imputing evil and dishonest motives, introducing details of personal life which his spies had gathered, and using all the great powers at his command to insult and injure, that a large proportion of the educated and refined gentlemen of Germany, who should have been its natural political leaders, either declined to enter the Reichstag at all, or withdrew, disheartened and humiliated, after a brief term of service. All this reflected, and brought down in embodied form into our own times, the traditional attitude of the Hohenzollerns toward the poor thing called a Parliament.
It was therefore very much of an anachronism to find, in the year of grace 1890, a Prussian King invoking the aid of a Parliament to help him encompass the overthrow of his Prime Minister.
The situation on January 20th, briefly stated, was this: The Reichstag, consisting of 397 members, had been governed by Bismarck’s “Cartel” combination of 94 National Liberals, 78 Conservatives, and 37 Imperialists, a clear majority of 21. The efforts of the Waldersee party, however, had honeycombed this majority with disaffection, and the National Liberals had been induced to agree that they would not vote for a renewal of the clause giving the Government power to expel obnoxious citizens. On the other hand, the Conservatives promised not to vote for the renewal of the anti-Socialist law at all unless it contained the expulsion clause. Thus, of course, the measure was bound to fall between two stools. This apparent clashing of cross purposes might have been stopped in ten minutes if it had proceeded spontaneously from the two factions themselves. But everybody knew that it had been carefully arranged from above, and that the leader of each party had had an interview with the Kaiser. This affectation of irreconcilable views on the expulsion clause, therefore, deceived no one—least of all Prince Bismarck. He ostentatiously remained at Friedrichsruh until the very last day of the Reichstag; then, indeed, he arrived in Berlin, but did not deign to show himself at either the Chamber or the Schloss.
The National Liberals voted down the expulsion clause on January 23rd. Then the Conservatives, two days later, joined the Clerical, Freisinnige, and Socialist Parties in throwing out the whole measure. Thereupon the dissolution of the Reichstag was immediately announced, and the members proceeded to the Schloss to receive their formal dismissal from the Kaiser. William spoke somewhat more nervously than usual, but was extremely cordial in his manner. He praised the labours of the Reichstag, dwelt upon his desires to improve the condition of the working classes, and said never a word about the defeated Socialist laws. Everybody felt that the imperial reticence and the absence of Bismarck portended big events.
Next week came the first overt movement in the struggle which all Germany now realized that Bismarck was waging for political life itself. He resigned his minor post as Prussian Minister of Commerce, and the place was promptly filled by the appointment of Baron Berlepsch. This selection was felt to be symbolical—because Berlepsch had been Governor of the Rhineland during the strikes, and had managed to preserve order without recourse to violence, and to gain the liking of the working men. To make the meaning of this promotion more clear, the Governor of Westphalia, who had rushed to declare his province in a state of siege when the strike broke out, and had called in soldiers to overawe the miners, was now curtly dismissed from office.
All this signified that the Hinzpeter propaganda of Christian Socialism had at last definitely captured the young Kaiser. Once enlisted, he threw himself with characteristic vehemence of energy into the movement. Events now crowded on each other’s heels.
On February 4th William issued his famous brace of rescripts to Bismarck and to the Minister of Commerce, reciting the woes and perils of German industrial classes, and ordaining negotiations with certain European States for a Labour Conference, “with a view to coming to an understanding about the possibility of complying with the needs and desires of labourers, as manifested by them during the strikes of the last few years and otherwise.”
“I am resolved,” wrote the Emperor, “to lend my hand toward bettering the condition of German working men as far as my solicitude for their welfare is reconcilable with the necessity of enabling German industry to retain its power of competing in the world’s market, and thus securing its own existence and that of its labourers. The dwindling of our native industries through any such loss of their foreign-markets would deprive not only the masters, but the men, of their bread.... The difficulties in the way of improving our working men’s condition have their origin in the stress of international competition, and are only to be surmounted, or lessened, by international agreement between those countries which dominate the world’s market.” Hence, he had decided upon summoning an International Labour Conference.
On the evening of the day on which William thus astonished Germany and Europe, he was the principal guest at a dinner given by Bismarck in his palatial residence in the Wilhelmstrasse, and it was noted that he took special pleasure in talking with Dr. Miquel, Chief Burgomaster of Frankfort, to whom he spoke with zeal and at length upon his desire to promote the welfare and protect the natural rights of the labouring classes. Court gossip was swift to mark Miquel as a coming man, and to draw deductions of its own from the story that Bismarck had, even as the host of an emperor, seemed preoccupied and depressed.
A fortnight of unexampled uncertainty, of contradictory guesses and paradoxical rumours, now kept Berlin, and all Germany for that matter, in anxious suspense. That Bismarck had been confronted with a crisis was evident enough. Day after day he was seen to be holding prolonged conferences with the young Emperor, and the wildest surmises as to the character of these interviews obtained currency. There were stories of stormy scenes, of excited imperial dictation and angry ministerial resistance, which had no value whatever as contributions to the sum of popular information, but which were everywhere eagerly discussed. The weight of Berlin opinion inclined toward the theory that Bismarck would in the end submit. He had never in his life shown any disposition to make sacrifices for political consistency, and it was assumed that, once his personal objections were overcome, he would not at all mind adapting his political position to the new order of things. This view was, of course, based upon the idea that the Kaiser really desired to retain Bismarck in office; the loosest German imagination did not conceive the actual truth: to wit, that the Chancellor’s retirement had been decided upon, and was the one end at which all these mystifying moves and counter-moves aimed.
The preparations for the Conference went on, meanwhile. A new Council of State for Prussia was founded, to have charge of the general social and fiscal reforms contemplated. The public noted that chief among the names gazetted were those of Dr. Hinzpeter and Count Douglas, and these were given such associates as Herr Krupp, of Essen; Prince Pless, a great Silesian mine-owner; Baron von Stumm, another large employer; and Baron von Hune, a leading Catholic and important landed proprietor. These were new strong names, altogether out of the old Bismarckian official rut, and their significance was emphasized by the Emperor’s selection of Dr. Miquel as reporter of the Council. People recognized that events were being shaped at last from the royal palace instead of the Chancellery.
In the very middle of this period of political suspense came the elections for the new Reichstag. Never before had Germany seen such a lamb-like and sweet-tempered electoral campaign. Three years before Bismarck had literally moved heaven and earth to wrest a majority from the ballot-boxes, for he had induced the Vatican to formally recommend his nominees to Catholic voters, and had gone far beyond the bounds of diplomatic safety in his famous “sturm und drang” speech, threatening nothing less than war if a hostile Reichstag should be elected. But this time he preserved an obstinate and ominous silence. Nothing could tempt him to say a word in favour of any candidate.
Under the double influence of the Kaiser’s enthusiastic new Socialism and the Chancellor’s grim seclusion, the German electorate knocked the old “Cartel” parties into splinters. The polling results amazed everybody. Of the “Cartel” factions, the National Liberals fell from 94 to 39, the Conservatives from 78 to 66, and the Imperialists from 37 to 20. On the other hand, the Freisinnigen rose from 35 to 80, and the Socialists from 11 to 37. Equally interesting was the fact that for the first time the German imperial idea had made an impression on the Alsacian mind, and from sending a solid delegation of 15 dissentients, the two conquered provinces now elected 5 who accepted the situation.
Allusion has heretofore been made to Bismarck’s recent declaration that the Kaiser took up the whole Social-reform policy solely as a political dodge. If we could accept this theory, it would be of distinct interest to know what William thought of his bargain, after the returns were all in. The stupendous triumph of the dreaded Socialists and hated Freisinnigen must have indeed been a bitter mouthful to the proud young Hohenzollern. But he swallowed it manfully, and the results have been the reverse of harmful. No parliamentary session of the year, anywhere in the world, was more businesslike, dignified, and patriotic than that of the new Reichstag at Berlin.
But at the outset this political earthquake threw William into a great state of excitement. One might almost say that the electrical disturbances which ushered in the convulsion affected the young man’s mind, for he did perhaps his most eccentric action on election day. While the voters of Berlin were going to the polls at noon, on this 20th of February, the Kaiser suddenly “alarmed” the entire garrison of the capital, and sent the whole surprised force, cavalry, artillery, baggage trains and foot, rattling and scurrying through the streets of the capital at their utmost speed. It turned out to be nothing more serious than an abrupt freak of the Kaiser to utilize the fine weather for a drill on the Tempelhof. At least that was the explanation given: but the spectacle produced a sinister impression at the time, and there are still those who believe it to have been intended to influence and overawe the voters.
No doubt consciousness of the gravity of the quarrel with Bismarck, which the Kaiser and his new friends saw now must come swiftly to a point, contributed with the unexpected election results to temporarily unsettle William’s nerves. For a week or so, during this momentous period, there were actual fears lest his mental balance should break down under the strain. Fortunately the excited tension relaxed itself in good time, and there has since been no recurrence of the symptoms which then caused genuine alarm.
It was at the culmination of this unsettled period that William made his celebrated speech to the Brandenburg Diet. The occasion was the session dinner, March 5th, and those present noted that the Kaiser’s manner was unwontedly distrait and abstracted. His words curiously reflected his mood—half poetic, half pugilistic. He began by a tender reference to the way in which the Brandenburgers had through evil and joyous days alike stood at the back of the Hohenzollerns. With a gloomy sigh he added: “It is in the hour of need that one comes to know his true friends.” After an abrupt reference to a joke which had recently been made about him as the reisende, or Travelling, Kaiser, and a pedagogic injunction to his hearers to by all means travel as much in foreign lands as they could, he drifted into a lofty and beautiful description of the spiritualizing effects his recent sea voyages had had upon him. Standing alone on the great deck at night, he said, communing with the vast starry firmament, he had been able to look beyond politics and to realize the magnitude and tremendous responsibilities of the position he held. He had returned with a new and more exalted resolve to rule mercifully and well under God’s providence, and to benefit all his people. Then there came a sudden anti-climax to this graceful and captivating rhetoric. “All who will assist me in my great task,” he called out, throwing a lion’s glance over the tables, “I shall heartily welcome; but those who attempt to oppose me I will dash to pieces!”
The reporters were so frightened at these menacing words that they toned them down in their accounts of the speech; but the Kaiser with his own hand restored the original expression in the report of the official Reichsanzeiger. Naturally the phrase created a painful sensation throughout Germany. Everybody leaped to the conclusion that the threat was levelled at the Socialist and Radical leaders in particular, and the new Reichstag in general. But within a fortnight the astonished world learned that it was Bismarck who was to be dashed to pieces.
The time has not yet arrived for a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding Bismarck’s actual fall. We have been able to trace clearly enough the progression of causes and changes which led up to that fall. Of the event itself a great deal has been printed, but extremely little is known. The reason for this is simple. The Kaiser and his present friends are possessed with the rigid Prussian military sense of the duty of absolute silence about official secrets. Prince Bismarck has insisted vehemently upon the necessity of this quality in other people, yet has not always distinguished himself by respecting its demands. In his surprising latter-day garrulity, it is easy to believe that he would tell the story about which the others preserve so strict a reticence, if it were not that the story involves his own cruel personal humiliation.
Throughout the trying crisis William never lost sight of the proud and historic reputation of the man with whom he had to deal, or of the great personal reverence and affection which he, as a young King, owed to this giant among European statesmen, this most illustrious of the servants of his dynasty, this true creator of the new German Empire. Every step of the Emperor during the whole affair is marked with delicate courtesy and the most painstaking anxiety to avoid giving the doomed Chancellor unnecessary pain. Although it was entirely settled in the more intimate palace counsels at the end of 1889 that the Prince was to be retired from office, William sent him the following New Year’s greeting, than which nothing could be more cordial or kindly:
“In view of the impending change from one year to another, I send you, dear Prince, my heartiest and warmest congratulations. I look back on the expiring year, in which it was vouchsafed to us not only to preserve to our dear Fatherland external peace, but also to strengthen the pledges of its maintenance, with sincere gratitude to God. It is to me also a matter for deep satisfaction that, with the trusty aid of the Reichstag, we have secured the law establishing old age and indigence assurance, and thus taken a considerable forward step toward the realization of that solicitude for the welfare of the working classes which I have so wholly at heart. I know well how large a share of this success is due to your self-sacrificing and creative energy, and I pray God that He may for many more years grant me the benefit of your approved and trusted counsel in my difficult and responsible post as ruler.
“Wilhelm.
“Berlin, Dec. 31,1889.”
A few days later came the death of the venerable Empress Augusta, and William wrote again to Bismarck at Friedrichsruh, affectionately enjoining him not to endanger his health by trying to make the winter journey to Berlin for the funeral.
This friendly attitude was, to the Kaiser’s mind, entirely compatible with the decision that a new Chancellor was needed to carry on the enlightened programme of the new reign. But Bismarck stubbornly refused to recognize this. When his obstinacy made peremptory measures necessary, he had even the bad taste to instance these recent amiable messages as proofs of the duplicity with which he had been treated.
The best authenticated story in Berlin, of all the legion grown up about this historic episode, is to the effect that one afternoon, in the course of an interview between Kaiser and Chancellor on the approaching Labour Conference, Bismarck was incautious enough to use the old familiar threat of resignation with which he had been wont to terrify and subdue the first Kaiser. Young William said nothing, but two or three hours later an imperial aide-de-camp appeared at the Foreign Office in Wilhelmstrasse with the statement that he had come for that resignation. Bismarck, flushed and shaken, sent an evasive reply. The aide-de-camp came again, with a reiterated demand. Bismarck stammered out that he had not had the time to write it as yet, but that he would himself wait upon the Emperor with it the next day. He made this visit to the Schloss, prepared to urge with all the powers at his command, in the stress of a personal appeal, that the demand be reconsidered. But at the palace he was met with that equivalent for the housemaid’s transparent “Not at home” which is used in the halls of kings; and on his return to Wilhelmstrasse he found the inexorable aide-de-camp once more waiting for the resignation. Then only, in bitter mortification and wrath, did Bismarck write out his own official death-warrant, which a few days later was to be followed by his son Herbert’s resignation.
The widely circulated report that, in his extremity, the Chancellor appealed for aid to the Empress Frederic, seems to be apocryphal. It is certain, however, that he did, during the twenty-four hours in which that stolidly-waiting aide-de-camp darkened his life, make strenuous efforts in other almost equally unlikely and hostile quarters to save himself. They availed nothing save to reveal in some dim fashion to his racked and despairing mind how deeply and implacably he was hated by the officials and magnates all about him. But to the general public, astonished and bewildered at this sudden necessity to imagine a Germany without Bismarck, the glamour about his name was still dazzling. When it came their turn to act, they made the fallen Chancellor’s departure from Berlin a great popular demonstration. It is well that they did so. With all his faults, Bismarck was the chief German of his generation, and the spectacle of cold-blooded desertion which the official and journalistic classes of Berlin presented in their attitude toward him upon the instant of his tumble, offended human nature. Nothing could be more true than that he himself was responsible for this attitude. It was the only possible harvest to be expected from his sowing. He had done his best to make all preferment and power in Germany depend upon callous treachery and the calculation of self-interest. He had contemptuously thrust ideals and generous aspirations out of the domain of practical politics. He had systematically accustomed the German mind to the rule of force and cunning, to the savage crushing of political opponents, and the shameless use of slander and scandal as political weapons. That this official mind of his own moulding, inured to sacrificial horrors, familiar with the spectacle of statesmen destroyed and eminent politicians flung headlong from the “rock of bronze,” should have viewed his own prodigious downward crash without pity, was not at all unnatural. But for the credit of Germany with the outside world it is fortunate that the Berliners, as a whole, responded to the pathetic side of the episode.
William’s emotional nature was peculiarly stirred by the separation, when it finally came. The Reichsanzeiger of March 20th—two days after the final act in the comedy of the unresigned resignation—contained the imperial message granting Prince Bismarck permission to retire. The phraseology of the document was excessively eulogistic of the passing statesman, and no hint of differing opinions was allowed to appear. Bismarck was created Duke of Lauenburg, and given the rank of a Field Marshal.
More eloquent by far, however, than any rhetorical professions of grief in his public proclamations, were the Emperor’s statements to personal friends of the distress he suffered at seeing Bismarck depart. The ordeal was rendered none the less painful by the fact that it had been foreseen for months, or by the consideration that it was really unavoidable. On the 22nd William wrote to an intimate, in response to a message of sympathy:
“Many thanks for your kindly letter. I have, indeed, gone through bitter experiences, and have passed many painful hours. My heart is as sorrowful as if I had again lost my grandfather. But it is so ordered for me by God, and it must be borne, even if I should sink under the burden. The post of officer of the watch on the Ship of State has devolved upon me. Her course remains the same. So now full steam ahead!”