And then President Butler came home, and when some one jeered at the Kaiser in the New York “Times,” he rushed to the rescue with a letter full of glowing and eloquent praise; detailing all the virtues which a great ruler and statesman might possess, and pointing out the Kaiser as the sum of them all. It culminated with the sentence: “He would have been chosen monarch or chief executive by popular vote of any modern people among whom his lot might have been cast.” In enthusiasm for Wilhelm our Miraculous Nicholas had been forestalled by Harvard University, which had already established an exchange professorship, and had got another Kaiser professor in the person of Muensterberg, the eminent psychologist of the plutocracy, who used to delight his employers by analyzing labor agitators in jail, and proving by up-to-date psychological tests that they had done whatever crimes they were accused of. There was bitter rivalry between these two Kaiser professors, and still more bitter rivalry between the Harvard professor and the Columbia professor in Berlin. For, of course, these exalted scholars did not go to represent the American people, they went to represent the plutocratic empire, and they did not appeal to the German people, they appealed to the Kaiser’s court. The wives of these two professors got into a scrap over the question of court precedence, and denounced each other in the newspapers, and a Frenchman, writing a book about Germany, described the Kaiser’s court chamberlain as “bewailing in disgust the presence of increasing numbers of rich and well-gowned American women who got on their knees to royalty, and on all occasions betrayed their total lack of breeding and good manners.” But, you see, a German court chamberlain fails to realize the drabness of life in America, where the wives of eminent scholars have no way to demonstrate their superiority over one another, and when they come to places where there are courts and ceremonials they can hardly be blamed if the glory goes to their heads. We can hardly blame President Butler, because, after having had an eight-hour session with Kaiser Wilhelm, he hailed his host as one of the greatest statesmen of all time; but I think we may blame him just a little because he failed to imitate any of the good things which the Kaiser had done, and chose only the despotic things for his praise. For example, Kaiser Wilhelm had established old-age pensions and unemployment insurance in Germany, and had abolished child labor from the country; but President Butler came home and in a telegram to the Illinois Bankers’ Association denounced the child labor law in such ferocious terms that even the interlocking directors were shocked, and refused to read the telegram at their meeting, or to give it to the press! CHAPTER IX NICHOLAS MIRACULOUS