the statute book, and equally required to obey them as any ordinary
German citizen. The only advantage that the emperor enjoys is that
he possesses certain prerogatives in connection with the giving
of evidence, and with the punishment of offences that are directed
against his person and his honor.

In this obligation to submit to the laws of the land he differs
from his grandmother Queen Victoria, and from his ally, Emperor
Francis-Joseph, the tenure of whose thrones was originally based on
what in olden times was known as the Divine right of kings. Thus, in
England, as in Austria, and even in Spain and Portugal, the mediaeval
theory still prevails that "_the king can do no wrong!_" Queen
Victoria, for instance, is not below the law like Emperor William,
but above it. No court has jurisdiction over her, and legally speaking
there is no jurisdiction upon earth to try her in a civil or criminal
way, much less to condemn her to punishment.

Of all the prerogatives enjoyed by Queen Victoria, the one, however,
of which the kaiser is the most envious is her supremacy of the state
Church of England. His ambition is to acquire the same position with
regard to the whole Lutheran Church as she enjoys over the Anglican
denomination. This dream, difficult of execution for reasons which I
will proceed to explain, originated with his great-grandfather, King
Frederick-William III., who first conceived the idea of a species of
Lutheran Kaliphate, with its headquarters at Berlin, and its Mecca at
Jerusalem.

His successor, King Frederick-William IV., took up the notion with all
the enthusiasm natural to his mystic character, and kept one of his
most trusted statesmen and confidants busily employed for years in
endeavoring to federate all the Reformed Churches, with the exception
of that of England, under the protectorate and supremacy of the
Hohenzollerns. Emperor William goes still further. He aspires to
become, not merely the temporal head of the Lutheran Church throughout
the world, but likewise its spiritual chief, its pontiff, in fact, in
the same manner that the czar is the chief ecclesiastical dignitary
and the duly consecrated spiritual head of the national Church
of Russia. William bases his claims to the dignity of a
_summus-episcopus_ on the fact that he is a titular bishop and
archbishop, some nineteen times over, for his ancestors, when annexing
the various petty states and sovereignties in bygone times, always
made a