WILLIAM OF GERMANY by STANLEY SHAW, LL.D. Trinity College Dublin WITH A FRONTISPIECE 1913 The Frontispiece is from a photograph by E. Bieber, of Berlin CONTENTS PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY....................................... 1 II. YOUTH (1859-1881).................................. 10 III. PRE-ACCESSION DAYS (1881-1887)..................... 42 IV. "VON GOTTES GNADEN"................................ 56 V. THE ACCESSION (1888-1890).......................... 69 VI. THE COURT OF THE EMPEROR........................... 105 VII. "DROPPING THE PILOT"............................... 125 VIII. SPACIOUS TIMES (1891-1899)......................... 144 IX. THE NEW CENTURY (1900-1901)........................ 189 X. THE EMPEROR AND THE ARTS........................... 205 XI. THE NEW CENTURY--_continued_ (1902-1904)........... 237 XII. MOROCCO (1905)..................................... 255 XIII. BEFORE THE "NOVEMBER STORM" (1906-1907)............ 275 XIV. THE NOVEMBER STORM (1908).......................... 289 XV. AFTER THE STORM (1909-1913)........................ 321 XVI. THE EMPEROR TO-DAY................................. 342 INDEX ................................................... 391 I. INTRODUCTORY. William the Second, German Emperor and King of Prussia, Burgrave of Nürnberg, Margrave of Brandenburg, Landgrave of Hessen and Thuringia, Prince of Orange, Knight of the Garter and Field-Marshal of Great Britain, etc., was born in Berlin on January 27, 1859, and ascended the throne on June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, fifty-four years old in the present year of his Jubilee, 1913, and his reign--happily yet unfinished--has extended over a quarter of a century. The Englishman who would understand the Emperor and his time must imagine a country with a monarchy, a government, and a people--in short, a political system--almost entirely different from his own. In Germany, paradoxical though it may sound to English ears, there is neither a government nor a people. The word "government" occurs only once in the Imperial Constitution, the Magna Charta of modern Germans, which in 1870 settled the relations between the Emperor and what the Englishman calls the "people," and then only in an unimportant context joined to the word "federal." In Germany, instead of "the people" the Englishman speaks of when he talks politics, and the democratic orator, Mr. Bryan, in America is fond of calling the "peopul," there is a "folk," who neither claim to be, nor apparently wish to be, a "people" in the English sense. The German folk have their traditions as the English people have traditions, and their place in the political system as the English people have; but both traditions and place are wholly different from those of the English people; indeed, it may be said are just the reverse of them.