Elsewhere in these pages an attempt has been made to give some idea of the character and significance of “German Michel.” This cartoon, which appeared at the time of the Boulangist excitement in France, shows how Michel’s native shrewdness and stolidity rendered him proof against the ingenious, but far from ingenuous, attempts of Prince Bismarck to make capital for the War Department out of the disturbances in France. The sturdy toiler, overworked and overtaxed already, showed not only a frank unwillingness to add to his burdens, but bore himself toward the princes and potentates that were set above him with a certain self-confident freedom of attitude which had not been his wont of old time. [Illustration] GOOD GRACIOUS! _PUCK, March 19th, 1890._ “‘German Michel’ is a typical figure of which the most remarkable characteristic is that it has made itself absolutely inappropriate to its original purposes. It is a figure created by the German caricaturists--a loutish, sleepy, heavy peasant, gazing on the world with dull, uninterested eyes. It stood for the political spirit of the German people--the spirit that existed in the years between ’48 and ’70--the spirit of indifferentism, of hopeless submission to superior power, of acceptance of whatever state of affairs it might please the rulers of the land to establish. It was aptly chosen. Even the possibilities of brute force suggested by the bumpkin’s sturdy build had a deeply significant application.... But 1870 and the war changed the spiritual state of Germany, or rather, began a process of change of which we have not yet seen the end. And now for twenty years the German government has been educating Michel, and Michel has been educating himself. While the government has been teaching him to read, and he has been teaching himself various things that are useful and interesting to any good citizen and patriot, there have been plenty of people who have devoted themselves to giving him what might be called an underground education. Recent events in Germany show that this part of Michel’s education has certainly not been neglected--at least, so far as the inculcation of the beauties of socialism is concerned.... Now it is to this Michel, not to the old Michel, to the public spirit of Germany of 1850 or 1860, that the young Emperor Wilhelm is issuing his extraordinary ‘rescripts,’ in which he describes himself as the emissary of God, sent to take charge of the future of the German nation (without specifying any qualifications for the task with which the Almighty may have been pleased to endow him); announces his intention of solving at once the everlasting problem of poverty and ignorance, and offers to ‘shatter’ or ‘dash in pieces,’ all who oppose him in his plans. Surely, this young man, this inexperienced youth, the son of an Emperor who reigned only on his death-bed, the grandson of an Emperor whose best work was done before that grandson had got well used