William of Germany | Page 5

people
seem to have this knowledge instinctively, others acquire something of
it in the school of sad experience. It is not the fault of the Emperor, if,
in his youth, his knowledge of humanity was not profound. There was
always a strong vein of idealism and romance among Hohenzollerns,
the vein of a Lohengrin, a Tancred, or some mediæval knight. The
Emperor, of course, never lived among the common people; never had
to work for a living in competition with a thousand others more
fortunate than he, or better endowed by nature with the qualities and
gifts that make for worldly success; never, so far as is known to a
watchful and exceptionally curious public, endured domestic sorrow of
a deep or lasting kind; never suffered materially or in his proper person
from ingratitude, carelessness, or neglect; never knew the "penalty of
Adam, the seasons' difference"; never, in short, felt those pains one or
more of which almost all the rest of mankind have at one time or other
to bear as best they may.
The Emperor has always been happy in his family, happy in seeing his
country prosperous, happy in the admiration and respect of the people
of all nations; and if he has passed through some dark hours, he must
feel happy in having nobly borne them. Want of knowledge of the trials
of ordinary humanity is, of course, no matter of reproach to him; on the
contrary, it is matter of congratulation; and, as several of his frankest
deliverances show, he has, both as man and monarch, felt many a pang,
many a regret, many a disappointment, the intensity of which cannot be
gauged by those who have not felt the weight of his responsibilities.
A discharge of 101 guns in the gardens of Crown Prince Frederick's
palace in Berlin on the morning of January 27, 1859, announced the
birth of the future Emperor. There were no portents in that hour. Nature
proceeded calmly with her ordinary tasks. Heaven gave no special sign
that a new member of the Hohenzollern family had appeared on the
planet Earth. Nothing, in short, occurred to strengthen the faith of those
who believe in the doctrine of kingship by divine appointment.

It was a time of political and social turmoil in many countries, the
groundswell, doubtless, of the revolutionary wave of 1848. The
Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, and the war with China had kept
England in a continual state of martial fever, and the agitation for
electoral reform was beginning. Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister,
with Lord Odo Russell as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Mr.
Gladstone as Minister of Finance. Napoleon III was at war with Austria
as the ally of Italy, where King Emmanuel II and Cavour were laying
the foundations of their country's unity. Russia, after defeating Schamyl,
the hero of the Caucasus, was pursuing her policy of penetration in
Central Asia.
In Prussia the unrest was chiefly domestic. The country, while
nominally a Great Power, was neutral during the Crimean War, and
played for the moment but a small part in foreign politics. Bismarck, in
his "Gedanke und Erinnerungen," compares her submission to Austria
to the patience of the French noble-man he heard of when minister in
Paris, whose conduct in condoning twenty-four acts of flagrant
infidelity on the part of his wife was regarded by the French as an act of
great forbearance and magnanimity. Prince William, the Emperor's
grandfather, afterwards William I, first German Emperor, was on the
throne, acting as Prince Regent for his brother, Frederick William IV,
incapacitated from ruling by an affection of the brain. The head of the
Prussian Ministry, Manteuffel, had been dismissed, and a "new era,"
with ministers of more liberal tendencies, among them von Bethmann
Hollweg, an ancestor of the present Chancellor, had begun. General
von Roon was Minister of War and Marine, offices at that time united
in one department. The Italian War had roused Germany anew to a
desire for union, and a great "national society" was founded at
Frankfurt, with the Liberal leader, Rudolf von Bennigsen, at its head.
Public attention was occupied with the subject of reorganizing the army
and increasing it from 150,000 to 210,000 men. Parliament was on the
eve of a bitter constitutional quarrel with Bismarck, who became
Prussian Prime Minister (Minister President) in 1862, about the grant
of the necessary army funds. Most of the great intellects of
Germany--Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher--had
long passed away. Heinrich Heine died in Paris in 1856. Frederick

Nietzsche was a youth, Richard Wagner's "Tannhäuser" had just been
greeted, in the presence of the composer, with a storm of hisses in the
Opera house at Paris. The social condition of Germany may be partially
realized if one remembers that the death-rate was over