If the Emperor rattles the
sabre occasionally, it is because the time has not come yet, when this
German people can be allowed to forget what they have suffered from
foreign conquerors, and what they must do to protect themselves from
such a repetition of history.

When the final judgment is passed upon the Emperor, we must recall his
deep religious feeling that he is inevitably an instrument of God; his
ingrained and ineradicable method of reading history as though it were
a series of the ipse dixits of kings; his complacent neglect of how
the work of the world is done by patient labor; of how works of art
are only born of travail and tears: his obsession by that curious
psychology of kings that leads them to believe that they are somehow
different, and under other laws, as though they lived in another
dimension of space. In addition, he is a man of unusually rapid mental
machinery, of overpowering self-confidence, of great versatility, of
many advantages of training and experience, and, above all, he is
unhampered. He is answerable directly to no one, to no parliament, to
no minister, to no people. He is father, guardian, guide, school-
master, and priest, but in no sense a servant responsible to any
master save one of his own choosing.

The only wonder is that he is not insupportable. Those who have come
under the spell of his personality declare him to be the most
delightful of companions; what Germany has grown to be under his reign
of twenty-five years all the world knows, much of the world envies,
some of the world fears; what his own people think of him can best be
expressed by the statement that his supremacy was never more assured
than to-day.

I agree that no one man can be credited with the astonishing expansion
of Germany in all directions in the last thirty years; but so
interwoven are the advice and influence, the ambitions and plans, of
the German Emperor with the progress of the German people, that this
one personality shares his country's successes as no single individual
in any other country can be said to do.

Whether he likes Americans or not one can hardly know. No doubt he has
made many of them think so; and, alas, we suffer from a national
hallucination that we are liked abroad, when as a matter of fact we
are no more liked than others; and in cultured centres we are in
addition, laughed at by the careless and sneered at by the sour.

That the Kaiser is liked by Americans, both by those wh