William of Germany

William of Germany, by Stanley
Shaw

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Title: William of Germany
Author: Stanley Shaw
Release Date: July 28, 2004 [eBook #13043]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM
OF GERMANY***
E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project
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WILLIAM OF GERMANY
by

STANLEY SHAW, LL.D. Trinity College Dublin
WITH A FRONTISPIECE
1913

The Frontispiece is from a photograph by E. Bieber, of Berlin

CONTENTS PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY....................................... 1
II. YOUTH (1859-1881).................................. 10
III. PRE-ACCESSION DAYS (1881-1887)..................... 42
IV. "VON GOTTES GNADEN"................................ 56
V. THE ACCESSION (1888-1890).......................... 69
VI. THE COURT OF THE EMPEROR........................... 105
VII. "DROPPING THE PILOT"............................... 125
VIII. SPACIOUS TIMES (1891-1899)......................... 144
IX. THE NEW CENTURY (1900-1901)........................ 189
X. THE EMPEROR AND THE ARTS........................... 205
XI. THE NEW CENTURY--continued (1902-1904)........... 237
XII. MOROCCO (1905)..................................... 255
XIII. BEFORE THE "NOVEMBER STORM" (1906-1907)............ 275
XIV. THE NOVEMBER STORM (1908).......................... 289

XV. AFTER THE STORM (1909-1913)........................ 321
XVI. THE EMPEROR TO-DAY................................. 342
INDEX ................................................... 391

I. INTRODUCTORY.
William the Second, German Emperor and King of Prussia, Burgrave
of Nürnberg, Margrave of Brandenburg, Landgrave of Hessen and
Thuringia, Prince of Orange, Knight of the Garter and Field-Marshal of
Great Britain, etc., was born in Berlin on January 27, 1859, and
ascended the throne on June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, fifty-four years
old in the present year of his Jubilee, 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 matter much to the King, so long as the folk did not
ask for further, or worse still, as occurred in England, for all his powers;
and accordingly the parties continued their discussions, as they do
to-day, sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting their own or the
King's suggestions about law-making. Generally speaking, the relation
is not unlike that established by the dame who said to her husband,
"When we are of the same opinion, you are right, but when we are of
different opinions, I am right." If the Parliament does not agree with the
Emperor, the Emperor