We should misjudge William II. if we attributed to him any jealousy of his son’s growing popularity. He has too exalted an idea of his own worth for that, and he cannot cherish any illusions as to the real capacity of his heir. To insinuate that the Emperor took time by the forelock owing to his fear of this popularity, which threatened to eclipse his own, would be tantamount to saying that the Crown Prince was the _causa causans_, the prime mover of the appeal to arms; and this would be assigning to him an importance and an influence which he has never at any time possessed. His incitements to war and his martial ardour would never have succeeded in making any impression on the Emperor, if the latter had not himself resolved to forge ahead, and to risk the great gamble in which the fate of Germany and of Europe was at stake. The German Empire as Bismarck conceived it, with a single minister bearing on his own shoulders, like some Atlas, the whole weight of the vast governmental machine, was cut to the measure of its founder. If this system is to last, the nation must always have at its head either a great Chancellor, or a great monarch under whom the Chancellor merely acts as his deputy. So long as Bismarck was at the helm, he steered the ship of Empire with an unfaltering hand through all the reefs of internal politics—_Kulturkampf_, anti-Socialist legislation, party divisions, unstable majorities in the Reichstag. After the dismissal of the great man, and under the powerful impetus that he had given her, the vessel kept on her course for some time, having for her pilot the Sovereign himself, who made up for his lack of genius by his ample self-confidence. In this way she safely passed many rocks, borne along by the swelling tide of national prosperity, but occasionally threatened with disaster for want of a submissive majority to vote credits in the Imperial Parliament.