king class as with
the army.

What a strange riddle his character presents--this quietist, this
worshipper of an angry and a jealous God, with a mania for achieving
the happiness of his people in the twinkling of an eye! A strange
figure, this Emperor of country squires, who despises the bourgeois and
who threatens to despoil the aristocracy of the very privileges which
have been the safeguard of the Hohenzollerns' throne for centuries.

These peculiarities are due to an occult influence which weighs on the
mind of William II, an influence which, while it points the way to
action, blinds him to its consequences. The dead hand is upon him!

Frederick III, that liberal, bourgeois monarch, compels his
reactionary, Old-Prussian-school son, to do those things which he would
have done himself, had he not been victimised by Bismarck and his pupil.

I wonder whether the ever-mystical William II sometimes reflects on the
ways by which God leads men into His appointed ways? Such thoughts
might do more to enlighten him than his way of gazing at the heavens in
the belief that all the stars are his.

There is one piece of advice that William's friends should give
him--not to restore the sixty millions of Guelph money to the Duke of
Cumberland. This ultra-modern young Emperor will very soon have
greater need of the services of the reptile Press than even Bismarck
himself; for every one of his latest rescripts adds new public
difficulties to the number of those secret ones which the
ex-Chancellor, with his infinite capacity for intrigue, will hatch for
him.

Bismarck, of the biting wit, who accepts the title of Duke of
Lauenburg, because, as he says, "it will enable him to travel
incognito," sends forth from Friedrichsruhe winged words which sink
deep into the mind of the people. This phrase, for example, which sums
up the whole of William's policy: "The Emperor has selected his best
general to be Chancellor and made of his Chancellor a field marshal."
And Bismarck begs his readers to insert the adjectives, good and bad,
where they rightly belong.

April 28, 1890. [3]

Emperor William continues to increase the list of his excursions into
every field of mental activity. Intellectually divided between the
Middle Ages and the late nineteenth century, it would seem as if he
were trying to forget the infirmity of his one useless arm by assuming
a prominent role modelled on men of action. He tries to combine in his
per