A quarter century of peace had removed much apprehension. After the dismissal of Bismarck he had shaped his own policy and gone his own way. To his great advisers he had seemed to say: "_Ôte-toi que je m'y mette._" Yet his career had ceased to disquiet, and the youthful exuberance had given way to mature and conscientious labor. With unshakable confidence in himself and with a determined application he was making Germany the greatest state in Europe. To those who, unlike Renan, did not have the misfortune to have been born too soon to be his later contemporaries, the riddle _seemed_ to be solving itself to the greater good of humanity. The Emperor's army, so he tells us himself, is invincible. Never has Germany been defeated so long as she was united, and God, who has taken such infinite pains with us, will never leave us "in the lurch." By means of this powerful, unconquerable army, at whose side he had now set one of the greatest fleets on the seas, he had, so he told us, laid firm and sure the foundations of peace. Then suddenly "the abyss is opened, ... the sword is thrust into his hand," and reluctantly and with a heavy heart he goes forth to do battle. Like a shuttle he flits from frontier to frontier, now planning an invasion of England, now supervising the readministration of Belgian industries, and now directing a battle in Poland. Surely such a destiny, so immense a power, has been granted to no man. It may be he is the great predestined victim; it may be that Time is preparing for him a final and well-earned European triumph. What shall be the end, and where lies the responsibility? No ethical or political problem of our time forces itself upon us with greater insistence. His utterances may help to make the question if not the answer clear. Looking forward dispassionately twenty-three years ago that Portuguese student prophesied that this could not last, that there would be war; and in the light of later events that prophecy about "the allied armies" has been recently recalled. It was in these words that he closed his brilliant study of the youthful Emperor and King: "William II runs the awful danger of being cast down Gemoniæ. He boldly takes upon himself responsibilities which in all nations are divided among various bodies of the state--he alone judges, he alone executes, because to him alone it is (not to his ministers, to his council, or to his parliament) that God, the God of the Hohenzollerns, imparts his transcendental inspiration. He must therefore be infallible and invincible. At the first disaster--whether it be inflicted by his burghers or by his people in the streets of Berlin, or by allied armies on the plains of Europe--Germany will at once conclude that his much-vaunted alliance with God was the trick of a wily despot.