om his subjects, and
though there is something of the autocrat in him, there is nothing of
the despot.

Certainly for the present, Germans, with rare exceptions, are
satisfied with him. They are prospering under him. The shoe pinches
here and there, and if it pinches too hard they will cry out and
perhaps do more than cry out. They do not consider the Emperor
perfect, but they forgive his errors, and particularly the errors of
his impetuous youth, even though on three or four occasions they
brought the country into danger. Monarchy has been defined as a State
in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person
doing interesting things: a republic, as a State in which the
attention is divided between many who are all doing uninteresting
things: Germans find their Emperor interesting, and that is a stage on
the road to popularity.

The imperial ego, which is quite consistent with the German view of
monarchical rule and conformity with the _Rechtstaat_, is specially
advertised by the pictures and statues of the Emperor which are to be
found all over Germany, to the apparent exclusion of the pictures and
statues of national and local men of distinction. The Emperor's
picture almost monopolizes the walls of every public and municipal
office, every railway-station refreshment-room, every shop, every
restaurant throughout the Empire. Wherever it turns the eye is
confronted by the portrait or bust of the Emperor, and if it is not
his portrait or bust, it is the portrait or bust of one or other of
his ancestors. An exception should be made in the case of Bismarck,
the reproduction of whose rugged features, shaggy eyebrows, and bulky
frame are not infrequent; statues and portraits, too, of Moltke and
Roon, though much more rarely met with than those of Bismarck, are to
be seen, while those of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Lessing, Wagner, or
other German "Immortal," are still rarer. Only once, or perhaps twice,
in all Germany is there to be found a public statue of Heine--for
Heine was a Jew and said many unpleasant, because true, things about
his country. The travelling foreigner in Germany after a while begins
to wonder if he is not in some far Eastern country where
ancestor-worship obtains, and where one tremendous personality
overshadows, obscures, and obliterates all the rest. In truth,
however, this is not the lesson of the imperial images for the
foreigner. They teach him that he is in a country with a system o