Part 10

It is somewhat strange in this connection to remember, that we all wish to have our wives and daughters believers; that we all wish to bind to us those whom we love with more sacred bonds than those which we ourselves can supply. We are none of us loath to have those who keep our treasures, believe in some code higher than that of "honesty is the best policy." As Archbishop Whately said: "Honesty is the best policy, but he who is honest for that reason is not an honest man."

Far be it from me to appear as an advocate of the divine right of kings; but I am no fit person for this particular task if I have only a sniff, or a guffaw, as an explanation of another's beliefs. History sparkles with the lives of men and women, who proclaimed themselves messengers and servants of God, obedient to him first, and utterly and courageously negligent of that feline commodity, public opinion. Every man, even to-day,

"Who each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are," has a grain of this salt of divine independence in him. To-day, even as in the days of Pericles: "It is ever from the greatest hazards that the greatest honors are gained," and the greatest hazard of all is to shut your visor and couch your lance and have at your task with a whispered: God and my Right! It is well to remember that under no government, whether democratic or aristocratic, has the individual ever been given any rights. He has always everywhere been pointed to his duties; his rights he must conquer for himself.

The liberal in theology, as the liberal in politics, has perhaps leaned too far toward softness. The democratization of religion has gone on with the rest, and in our rebound from Calvin, and John Knox, and Jonathan Edwards, we have left all discipline and authority out of account. We have preached so persistently of the fatherhood of God, of his nearness to us, of his profound pity for us, that we have lost sight of his justice and his power. This nearness has become a sort of innocuous neighborliness, and God is looked upon not as a ruler, but as a vaporish good fellow whose chief business it is to forgive. We have substituted a feverish-handed charity for a sinewy faith, and are excusing our divorce from divinely imposed duties, by a cheerful but illicit intercourse with chance acquaintances, all of whom are dubbed social service.

This Cashmere-shawl theology is as idle an interpretation of man's relation to the universe, and far more debilitating, than any that has gone before. When we come to measure rulers who make divine claims for their duties, from any such coign of flabbiness as this, no wonder we stand dumb. I am willing to concede that perhaps even an emperor has been baptized with the blood of the martyrs, and feels himself to be in all sincerity the instrument of God; if we are to understand this one, we must admit so much.

In certain departments of life, we not only grant, but we demand, that our wives and mothers should look upon their special duties and peculiar functions as divinely imparted, and as beyond argument, and as above coercion. This assumption, therefore, of inalienable rights is not so strange to us; on the contrary, it is an every-day affair in most of our lives. This particular manifestation of it is all that is new or surprising. We Americans and English look upon it as dangerous, but the Germans, more mystical and far more lethargic about liberty than are we, are not greatly disturbed by it. The secular press, largely in Jewish hands, and the new socialist members of the Reichstag, jealous of their prerogatives but unable to assert them, criticise and even scream their abhorrence and unbelief; but I am much mistaken, if the mass of the Germans are at heart much disturbed by their Emperor's assertions of his divine right to rule. A conservative member of the Reichstag speaks of, "a parliament which will maintain the monarch in his strong position as the wearer of the German imperial crown, not the semblance of a monarch but one that is dependent upon something higher than party and parliament -- one dependent upon the King of all kings."

To a thoroughbred American, with two and more centuries of the traditions of independence behind him, this question of the divine right of kings is a commonplace. He is a king himself, he holds his own rights to be divine, and his influence and his power to be limited only by his character and his abilities, like that of any other sovereign. He may rule over few or many, he may control the destiny of only one or of many subjects, he may be well known or little known, but that he is a sovereign individual by the grace of God, it never occurs to him to doubt. It is perhaps for this reason that the real American is placid and unself-conscious before this claim. It is those who admit and suffer from the exactions and tyrannies of such a claim that he pities, not the man who makes it, whom he distrusts. I carry my sovereignty under my hat, says the American; if any man or men can knock off the hat and take away the sovereignty, there is a fair field and no favor; for those who whimper and complain of tyranny he has long since ceased to have a high regard.

That William the Second is the chief figure of interest in the world to-day is due, not alone to this assumption of a divine relation to the state, or to his own vigorous and electric personality, but to the freedom to develop and to express that personality. Men in politics have dwindled in importance and in power, as the voters have increased in numbers and in influence. Genius must be true to itself to bloom luxuriantly. It is impossible to be seeking the suffrage of a constituency and at the same time to be wholly one's self. The German Emperor is unhampered, as is no other ruler, by considerations of popular favor; and at the same time he directs and influences not Russian peasants, nor Turkish slaves, but an instructed, enlightened, and ambitious people. This environment is unique in the world to-day, and the Germans as a whole seem to consider their ruler a valuable asset, despite occasional vagaries that bring down their own and foreign criticism upon him.

Here we have a versatile and vigorous personality with no shadow of a stain upon his character, and with no question upon the part of his bitterest enemy of the honesty of his intentions, or of his devotion to his country's interests. So far as he has been assailed abroad, it is on the score that he has made his country so powerful in the last twenty-five years that Germany is a menace to other powers; so far as he has been criticised at home it is on the score of his indiscretions.

It is of prime importance, therefore, both to glance at the progress of Germany and to examine these so-called indiscretions. Throughout these chapters will be found facts and figures dealing with the fairy-like change which has taken place in Germany since my own student days. I can remember when a chimney was a rare sight. Now there are almost as many manufacturing towns as then there were chimneys. Leipzig was a big country town, Pforzheim, Chemnitz, Oschatz, Elberfeld, Riessa, Kiel, Essen, Rheinhausen, and their armies of laborers, and their millions of output, were mere shadows of what they are now.

In 1873, when Bismarck began his attempts at railway legislation, Germany was divided into sixty-three "railway provinces," and there were fifteen hundred different tariffs, and it is to be remembered that it was only as late as 1882 that the state system of railways at last triumphed in Prussia. In only ten years the railway trackage has increased from 49,041 to 52,216 miles; the number of locomotives from 18,291 to 26,612; freight-cars from 398,000 to 558,000; the passengers carried from 804,000,000 to 1,457,000,000; and the tons of freight carried from 341,000,000 tons to 519,000,000 tons. In Prussia alone there are 1,000,000 more horses, 1,000,000 more beef cattle, and 10,000,000 more pigs. The total production of beet sugar in the world approximates 7,000,000 tons; of this amount Germany produces 2,500,000 tons. Great Britain consumes more sugar per head of the population than any other country, and of her consumption of 1,460,000 tons of beet sugar all of it is produced from beets grown on the continent. Between 1885 and 1912 the population increased from 46,000,000 to 66,000,000. The expenditure on the navy has increased in the last ten years from $47,500,000 to $110,000,000, and the number of men from 31,157 to 60,805, with another increase in both money and men, voted at the moment of this writing in the summer of 1912.

The debt of Germany, exclusive of paper money, in 1887 was 486,201,000 marks; in 1903 it stood at 2,733,500,000. In 1911 the funded debt of the empire was 4,524,000,000 marks, and the funded debt of the states 14,880,000,000; and the floating debt amounts to 991,000,000, of which Prussia alone bears 610,000,000 and the empire 300,000,000. Between the years 1871 and 1897 a debt of $500,000,000 was incurred, bearing an average interest charge of 3 3/4 per cent. In the year 1908 the combined expenditures of the states and of the empire reached the enormous total of $1,775,000,000. The debt of the city of Berlin alone in 1910 had reached $110,750,000 and has increased in the last two years.

For purposes of comparison one may note that our own later national budgets run roughly to $1,000,000,000. The British budget for 1911 was $906,420,000. After the French war, speculation on a large scale ensued. The payment of the $1,000,000,000 indemnity had a bad effect. As has often happened in America, money, or the mere means of exchange, was taken for wealth. The earth will be as cold as the moon before men learn that the only real wealth is health. Many schemes and companies were floated and after 1873 there was a prolonged financial crisis in Germany. It is said that bankruptcy and the liquidation of bubble companies entailed a loss of a round $90,000,000. It was in 1876-7, when Germany was thus suffering, that the policy of protection was mooted and finally put into operation by Bismarck in 1879. Ten years later the laws for accident, old age, and sickness insurance were passed, at the instigation and under the direct influence of the present Emperor.

The tonnage of steam vessels under 4,000 tons in Great Britain (net tons) was, some five years ago, 8,165,527; in Germany (gross tons), 977,410; but the tonnage of steam vessels of 4,000 tons and over was in Great Britain 1,446,486, in Germany 1,119,537! It should be added that no small part of Great Britain's big ships belong to the American Shipping Trust, sailing under the British flag. Albert Ballin became a director of the Hamburg-American line in 1886, and was made general director in 1900. During his directorship the capital of the line has been increased from 15,000,000 to 125,000,000 of marks, and the number of steamers from 26 to 170.

Germany's combined export and import trade in 1880 was $1,429,025,000; in 1890, $1,875,050,000; and in 1905 it was $3,324,018,000; in 1910, $4,019,072,250. The German production of coal and coal products in 1910 was the highest in its history, amounting to 265,148,232 metric tons. It would be easy enough to chronicle the commercial and industrial strides of Germany during the last quarter of a century by the compilation of a catalogue of figures. It is not my intention to persuade the reader to believe in any such fantastic theory as that the present Kaiser is entirely responsible for this progress. I am no Pygmalion that I can make an Emperor by breathing prayers before pages of statistics.

It is only fair, however, in any sketch of the Emperor to give this skeleton outline of what has taken place in the empire over which he rules, and which, in certain quarters, it is said, he menaces by his predilection for war. These few figures spell peace, they do not spell war, and the ruler who has some 700,000 armed men at his back, and a navy the second in strength in the world guarding his shores, and a mercantile marine carrying his trade which is hard on the heels of Great Britain as a rival, but who has none the less kept his country at peace with the world for twenty-five years, may be credited at least with good intentions.

It may be said in answer to this same argument that this building and training and enriching of a nation are a threat in themselves. True, a strong man is more dangerous than a weak one; but it is equally true that a strong man is a greater safeguard than a weak one where the question of peace is at stake. It is also true that a rich and powerful man must needs take more precautions against attack and robbery than a tramp. A tramp seldom carries even a bunch of keys, and pays no premium on fire, accident, or burglary insurance.

William the Second knows his history as well as any of his people, and incomparably better than his English, French, or American critics. He knows that only twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great, the Prussian power went down before Napoleon like a house of cards, and that the country's humiliation was stamped in bold outlines when Napoleon was received in Berlin with the ringing of bells, the firing of cannons, and he himself greeted as a savior and a benefactor. That was only a hundred years ago. Is it an indiscretion, then, when the present ruler, speaking at Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, says: "I look upon the people and nation handed on to me as a responsibility conferred upon me by God, and that it is, as is written in the Bible, my duty to increase this heritage, for which one day I shall be called upon to give an account; those who try to interfere with my task, I shall crush"?

On his accession to the throne his first two proclamations were to the army and the navy, his third to the people. On the 14th of July, 1888, he reviewed the fleet at Kiel, and for the first time an Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia appeared there in the uniform of an admiral. In April, 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth year of her reign, and Prince Henry represented Germany, appearing as admiral of the fleet in an old battle-ship, the King William. On the 24th of April the Emperor telegraphed to his brother: "I regret exceedingly that I cannot put at your disposition for this celebration a better ship, especially when all other countries are appearing with their finest ships of war. It is a sad consequence of the manoeuvring of those unpatriotic persons who have obstructed the construction of even the most necessary war-ships. But I shall know no rest till I have placed our navy on a par for strength with our army." From that day to this he has gone steadily forward demanding of his people a strong army and a powerful fleet. He now has both. He has pulled Germany out of danger and beyond the reach, for the moment at least, of any repetition of the catastrophe and humiliation of a hundred years ago. This is a solid fact, and for this situation the Emperor is largely, one might almost say wholly, responsible.

One hears and one reads criticisms of the Emperor's habit of speaking and writing of "my navy." It is said that the other states of Germany have borne taxation to build the fleet, and that it is no more the Emperor's than that of the King of Bavaria, or of Wuertemberg, or of Saxony. This is the petty, pin-pricking babble of boarding-school girls, or of those official supernumeraries who have turned sour in their retirement. Even the honest democrat 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 preaches a capital sermon; he is an accomplished binder of books; he is a successful and enthusiastic farmer, and he is frankly audacious in his loves and hatreds, his ambitions and his beliefs. He has, in short, no vermin blood in him at any rate. If you do not like him, you know why; and if you do, you know why as easily. He even knows what he believes about woman's suffrage and about God, a rare conciseness of thinking in these troublous times.

There stands before you a man apparently as sound in mind and in body as any man who treads German soil; a man of great vivacity of mind and manner, and of wholesome delight in living; who bears huge responsibilities with good humor, and that most unwholesome of all things, undisputed power, with humility. At a banquet in Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, speaking of his many voyages, he said: "He who, alone at sea, standing on the bridge, with nothing over him but God's heaven, has communed with himself will not mistake the value of such voyages. I could wish for many of my countrymen that they might live through similar hours of self-contemplation, where a man takes stock of what he has tried to do, and of what he has accomplished. Then it is that a man is cured of vanity, and we have all of us need of that."

It is obvious that a man cannot be modest, as the above quotation would indicate, and at the same time preening with vanity; a Sir Philip Sidney and a Jew peddler; a careless, dashing cavalry officer or proud Prussian squire, and at the same time a wary and astute insurance agent for the empire; a preacher of duty and honor, and belief in God, and at the same time a political comedian deceiving his rivals abroad, and hoodwinking his subjects at home.

Not a few men, even of slight powers of observation and of meagre experience, have noted the strange fact that a blank and direct statement of the truth is very apt to be put down as a lie; and that a man who frankly expresses his beliefs and ambitions, and openly goes about his business and his pleasures with no thought of concealment, is often regarded as Machiavellian and deceitful, because a timid and cautious world finds it hard to believe that he is really as audacious as he appears.

Even those with the most limited list, of the great names of history at their disposal, cannot fail to remember that simplicity and directness have in the persons of their highest exemplars been misunderstood; hunted down like wild beasts, burned, crucified, and then, when they were well out of the way, crowned and held up to humanity as the saviors of the race. We will have none of them when authority, faith, truth, courage, show us our distorted images in the mirror of their lives. Crucify him, crucify him! has always been the cry when such a one asserts his moral kingship, or his sonship to God, or his audacious intention to live his own life; and in less tragic fashion, but none the less along the same lines, the world tends to pick at, and to fray the moral garments of, its leaders still to-day. When such a one succeeds through sheer simplicity, then that last feeble epitaph of mediocrity is applied to him: "He is lucky," because so few people realize that "luck," is merely not to be dependent upon luck.

It is apparent from the quotations I have given, and many more of the same tenor are at our disposal, that the personality we are studying has a very definite image of his place in the world, of the duties he is called upon to perform, of his rights according to his own conception of his authority and responsibilities, and of his intentions.

It is equally apparent that he looks upon history in quite another way than that usually accepted by the modern scientific historian. Taine and Green may explain everything, even kings and emperors, by the forces of climate, environment, and the slow-heaving influence of the people. This school of historians will tell you how Charlemagne, and Luther, and Cromwell, and Napoleon are to be accounted for by purely material explanations.