lee, 1913, and his reign--happily yet
unfinished--has extended over a quarter of a century.

The Englishman who would understand the Emperor and his time must
imagine a country with a monarchy, a government, and a people--in
short, a political system--almost entirely different from his own. In
Germany, paradoxical though it may sound to English ears, there
is neither a government nor a people. The word "government" occurs
only once in the Imperial Constitution, the Magna Charta of modern
Germans, which in 1870 settled the relations between the Emperor and
what the Englishman calls the "people," and then only in an
unimportant context joined to the word "federal."

In Germany, instead of "the people" the Englishman speaks of when he
talks politics, and the democratic orator, Mr. Bryan, in America is
fond of calling the "peopul," there is a "folk," who neither claim
to be, nor apparently wish to be, a "people" in the English sense.
The German folk have their traditions as the English people have
traditions, and their place in the political system as the English
people have; but both traditions and place are wholly different from
those of the English people; indeed, it may be said are just the
reverse of them.

The German Emperor believes, and assumes his people to believe, that
the Hollenzollern monarch is specially chosen by Heaven to guide and
govern a folk entrusted to him as the talent was entrusted to the
steward in Scripture. Until 1848, a little over sixty years ago, the
Emperor (at that time only King of Prussia) was an absolute, or almost
absolute, monarch, supported by soldiers and police, and his wishes
were practically law to the folk. In that year, however, owing to the
influence of the French Revolution, the King by the gift of a
Constitution, abandoned part of his powers, but not any governing
powers, to the folk in the form of a parliament, with permission to
make laws for itself, though not for him. To pass them, that is; for
they were not to carry the laws into execution--that was a matter the
King kept, as the Emperor does still, in his own hands.

The business of making laws being, as experience shows, provocative of
discussion, discussion of argument, and argument of controversy, there
now arose a dozen or more parties in the Parliament, each with its own
set of controversial opinions, and these the parties applied to the
novel and interesting occupation of law-making.

However, it did not matte