ure of the Conquerors, Caesar and
Alexander, Attila and Napoleon, Charlemagne and Cambyses, astride
their horses or in chariots in the centre of the picture, dark,
gloomy, menacing? On each side of them, lining a vast plain that
fades in the distance, lie the dead--stiff, cold, grey,
reproachful;--yet all the victims of those conquerors, as well as
all their battalions do not equal the countless number that have
already drenched a forgiving earth with their dying blood in this
war:--victims all of the vain-glorious ambition of a single
mortal--the German Kaiser.

But the despot who sends his subjects to die, as Frederick the
Great said, "in order to be talked about" is not indigenous to
any one particular country. Like conditions produce like results.
The career of Louis XIV, the "Sun King," for instance, whose wars
and extravagances sowed the seeds of the French Revolution, is
epitomised in two phrases uttered by him: "I am the State" and "I
almost had to wait."

After the French Revolution, another despot, the first Napoleon,
not only sought the conquest of the world, but made his ex-waiter
and ex-groom marshals and his washerwomen duchesses ape the
manners and customs of the old regime. Despotism has been
characteristic of many generations but the world had thought
itself rid of the worst offenders.

Royalty still lives to torture and retard civilisation. Its
methods of perpetuation are unchanged from the middle ages. What
is lese-majeste but a survival of feudalism, a kind of slavery to
inviolable tradition--the immunity of the monarch and his family
from that criticism and freedom of discussion which is the
essence of democracy?

[Illustration: THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY STAFF, BERLIN: MR.
GERARD IN THE CENTER]

To commit lese-majeste, to speak slightingly of royalty in
Germany, is a very serious offence.

I have taken the following examples of decisions in lese-majeste
cases not from the records of the lower courts, the decisions of
which may be reversed, but from the records of the Imperial
Supreme Court at Leipzig, the highest court in the land.

For instance: The defendant, a speaker at a meeting consisting
chiefly of sympathisers with the socialist cause, made the
following statement in reference to a speech of the Kaiser:

"Under the protection of the highest power of the State the
gauntlet has been flung before the (socialist) Party, the
gauntlet which means a combat for life and death. Well, the