"Then will there not be stones enough from Lorraine to Pomerania to stone this counterfeit Moses. William II is in very truth casting against fate those terrible 'iron dice' to which the now-forgotten Bismarck once alluded. If he win he may have within and without the frontiers altars such as were raised to Augustus; should he lose, exile, the traditional exile, in England awaits him--a degraded exile, the exile with which he so sternly threatens those who deny his infallibility. "M. Renan is therefore quite right: there is nothing more attractive at this period of the century than to witness the final development of William II. In the course of years (may God make them slow and lengthy!) this youth, ardent, pleasing, fertile in imagination, of sincere, perhaps heroic, soul, may be sitting in calm majesty in his Berlin Schloss presiding over the destinies of Europe--or he may be in the Hôtel Métropole in London sadly unpacking from his exile's handbag the battered double crown of Prussia and Germany." * * * * * This drama of a life is twenty-three years nearer its climax than it was when Renan bade the world good night. With a certain finality of pathos a Greek poet whom Renan loved, thinking doubtless of his unhappy countrymen who had fallen in the long wars between Athens and Sparta, had said: "They that have died are not sick, nor do they possess any evil things." If this be true, quite possibly, then, the world was kinder to this aged Frenchman than he shall ever know. For the disasters which were to follow the rising star of the Emperor, which he regarded so curiously, were to be far greater than he had ever dreamed. It may be, therefore, that it is he and not some of his younger countrymen who are to be congratulated on the bournes which marked the time of his coming and his passing. The question of the responsibility of the Emperor and the limits of his power is one which perhaps only time can decide. Undeniably Germany has a written Constitution. But that Constitution is of comparatively recent date (April 16, 1871). It is not looked upon, as is the American Constitution, as the source of Germany's political life. It is the empire and not the Constitution that is holy. Struggles for personal liberty find little place in the history of Prussia. They have no Cromwell, no Washington, no Robespierre, and, significantly too, they have had in times past no Ravaillac and no Guiteau. There, still, a certain majesty doth hedge about a king. The old idea of fealty, of _deutsche Treue_, which led the retainers of Teutonic chiefs or rulers to submit uncomplainingly to every abuse and all oppression and to follow their lords into misfortune and into exile, though it has doubtless waned, nevertheless retains some vestiges of its traditional force even to-day.