He has a thorough knowledge of engineering and electricity, paints pictures, plays chess, and he does all this with the use of his one hand. He feels that all these things are his avocations, an outlet for his energy. With his great talent for organization, he realized that a country to be prosperous needs factories and plenty of trade schools. He was absorbed in the trade and commercial schools along with the school of forestry, which have had an international and enviable reputation, and which has made Germany one of the great industrial powers of modern times. He gave every incentive to have his men stay at home in encouraging all kinds of factories, lake, and water ways, the building of canals, ocean liners and merchant marine. For it was the increasing of the numbers of ocean liners and merchant marine that made German merchandise popular and well-known in most of the ports of the world. He has kept abreast of the times regarding the manufactures in England and the United States. He has always taken an active interest in the machinery and electrical contrivances used in American factories and in the home. Every year he sent many men to this country to study the methods employed in our shoe factories, tanneries, cotton mills, our electrical appliances and telephone services. As a result many of the German factories have the best of American machinery, American mechanics at the head, and they have worked out their telephone service, typewriters, adding machines and cash registers after our designs. Though the Emperor spent much of his time enlarging the army and navy, he considered these as a safeguard to his country, but it is the commercial interests of Germany he has at heart most. He loved to read about the Panama Canal and to hear people discuss it, for he recognized it as the great engineering feat of the century. He would rather had it said that Germany had built the Panama Canal than that she had organized the largest and strongest army in Europe. So eager was he to know all these things that he mastered six languages fluently. He began his day's work at seven and continued it until five, with a short interval for his noonday meal and afternoon drive. Though he often had a few intimate friends to supper, his evenings usually finished with work which lapsed way into midnight. Though the Emperor is often blamed as having precipitated the war, the point is overlooked that Servia, backed by Russia, was trying her utmost to disintegrate Austria. When Austria made war on Servia without consulting Germany, it was the war party in Germany that held it was up to Germany to help her ally. The Emperor of Germany was lukewarm in this matter. He felt that the war should be confined to Austria and Servia. He was surprised and grief-stricken when he returned to Berlin and learned what had happened. It was only after he learned that England and France were backing Russia that he considered the war justifiable.