emocrat is made indignant. If the
German navy is not the work of William the Second, then its parentage
is far to seek; and if the German navy is not proud to be called "my
navy," it is wofully lacking in gratitude to its creator.

No man who looks back over his own career, say of twenty-five years,
but is both chastened and amused. He is chastened by the unforeseen
dangers that he has escaped; he is amused by the certificates of
failure, and the prophecies of disaster, that always everywhere
accompany the man who takes part in the game in preference to sitting
in the reserved seats, or peeking through a hole in the fence. I have
not been honored with any such intimate association with the German
Emperor as would enable me to say whether he has a highly developed
sense of humor or not. I can only say for myself, that if I had lived
through his Majesty's last twenty-five years, I should need no other
fillip to digestion than my chuckles over the prophecies of my
enemies.

It has been said of him that he is volatile; that he flies from one
task to another, finishing nothing; that his artistic tastes are the
extravagant dreams of a Nero; that he loves publicity as a worn and
obese soprano loves the centre of the stage; that his indiscretions
would bring about the discharge of the most inconspicuous petty
official. Others speak and write of him as a hero of mythology, as a
mystic and a dreamer, looking for guidance to the traditions of
mediaeval knighthood; while others, again, dub him a modernist, insist
that he is a commercial traveller, hawking the wares of his country
wherever he goes, and with an eye ever to the interests of Bremen and
Hamburg and Essen and Pforzheim. Again, you hear that he is a Prussian
junker, or that he is a cavalry officer, with all the prejudices and
limitations of such a one; while, on the other hand, he is chided for
enlisting the financial help of rich Jews and industrials. He is
versatile, but versatility is a virtue so long as it does not extend
to one's principles. Every man who has profoundly influenced the life
of the world, from Moses to Lincoln, has been versatile. Carlyle goes
so far as to say: "I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man
that could not be all sorts of men." He speaks French well enough to
address the Academie; he speaks English as well as a cultivated
American, and no one speaks it more distinctly, more crisply, more
trippingly upon the tongue, these days; he p