ted the tradition of the
European unity under the Roman empire; all the Germanic monarchs had an
itch to be called Caesar. The Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian empire and
the Czar had, so to speak, the prior claim to the title. The Prussian
king set up as a Caesar in 1871; Queen Victoria became the Caesar of
India (Kaisir-i-Hind) under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, and last
and least, that most detestable of all Coburgers, Ferdinand of Bulgaria,
gave Kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by setting up as Czar of
Bulgaria. The weakening of the Bourbon system by the French revolution
and the Napoleonic adventure cleared the way for the complete ascendancy
of the Germanic monarchies in spite of the breaking away of the United
States from that system.

After 1871, a constellation of quasi-divine Teutonic monarchs, of which
the German Emperor, the German Queen Victoria, the German Czar, were the
greatest stars, formed a caste apart, intermarried only among
themselves, dominated the world and was regarded with a mystical awe by
the ignorant and foolish in most European countries. The marriages, the
funerals, the coronations, the obstetrics of this amazing breed of idols
were matters of almost universal worship. The Czar and Queen Victoria
professed also to be the heads of religion upon earth. The
court-centered diplomacies of the more firmly rooted monarchies steered
all the great liberating movements of the nineteenth century into
monarchical channels. Italy was made a monarchy; Greece, the motherland
of republics, was handed over to a needy scion of the Danish royal
family; the sturdy peasants of Bulgaria suffered from a kindred
imposition. Even Norway was saddled with as much of a king as it would
stand, as a condition of its independence. At the dawn of the twentieth
century republican freedom seemed a remote dream beyond the confines of
Switzerland and France--and it had no very secure air in France.
Reactionary scheming has been an intermittent fever in the French
republic for six and forty years. The French foreign office is still
undemocratic in tradition and temper. But for the restless disloyalty of
the Hohenzollerns this German kingly caste might be dominating the world
to this day.

Of course the stability of this Teutonic dynastic system in
Europe--which will presently seem to the student of history so curious a
halting-place upon the way to human unity--rested very largely upon the
maintenance of peace. It