If it be true--and the future may demonstrate it--that this war was planned by Germany at least as far back as the Moroccan crisis, then the Kaiser's responsibility for the commencement of the quarrel cannot be doubted. It is inconceivable that the German Foreign Office could pursue for three years the policy of precipitating a European war without the knowledge and consent of the "Over War Lord." When full data are accessible as to the importations by Germany in advance of the war, as to its withdrawal of foreign credits and placing of foreign loans, its sales of stocks by influential investors, and its importations on the eve of the war of horses and foodstuffs, a strong circumstantial case may be developed of a deliberate purpose to retrieve the Moroccan fiasco by an audacious _coup_ which would determine the mastery of Europe. The levy in 1913 of an extraordinary tax upon capital, which virtually confiscated the earnings of the German people for military purposes, adds much support to this contention. According to Giolitti, the former Italian Premier, Austria sounded Italy in August, 1913, as to its willingness to participate in a war against Servia.[59] [Footnote 59: Giolitti Speech, Italian Chamber, Dec. 5, 1914.] The inferences to be drawn from the Kaiser's personality are somewhat conflicting. Like all self-centered and highly neurotic personalities, his nature is essentially a dual one. This does not mean that he is in any sense a hypocrite, for one of the engaging features of his attractive personality has been the candor and sincerity which have marked nearly all his public acts. He has shown himself to be a man of opposite moods, and conflicting purposes, having almost as many public poses as he has costumes, and a strong desire to play as many varied _rôles_ as possible on the stage of the world. Like Bottom in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, he would play all parts from the "roaring lion" to the shrinking Thisbe. The ruler who sent a sympathetic message to Kruger as an insult to England is he who shortly thereafter gratuitously submitted to Queen Victoria military plans for the subjugation of the Boers. The ruler, who sent the _Panther_ to Agadir, later restrained his country from declaring war against England, when Lloyd George threw down the gauntlet in his Mansion House speech in the Moroccan crisis. As preacher, the Kaiser exalted within sight of the Mount of Olives the precepts of Christian humility, and yet advised his soldiers, on their departure to China, to "take no prisoners and give no quarter." The most affable and democratic monarch on occasion will in another mood assume the outworn toggery of mediæval absolutism. A democratic business monarch, and as such the advance agent of German prosperity, he yet shocks the common sense and awakens the ridicule of the world by posing as a combination of Cæsar and Mahomet.