foreboding of coming disaster than the ageing steward of William's rich inheritance. Some men are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them; never was the truth of an old adage more strikingly exemplified than in the case of the new Kaiser. Had he been born to any other walk in life, William II might have won for himself the regard of his fellow men and enduring renown. For he was gifted above the average, and under the discipline of everyday life might have turned his gifts to good account. Fate willed otherwise, and his name goes down to posterity with the opprobrium that attaches itself to the names of those who have neglected great opportunities for service in the pursuit of vainglory and self-indulgence. Such men merit pity rather than the contempt that is commonly meted out to them in their hour of adversity. Pity, in that, being unable to master their own temperaments, they were yet called upon to rule over millions of their fellow men.

The history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contains figures no less fascinating and baffling in their complex psychology than those lending colour and dramatic interest to the Renaissance. Sforzas, Borgias, and Viscontis had their modern counterparts in the ruling classes in Germany before the war. Machiavellis were not wanting to teach the theory, even as Bismarck and Holstein and Bülow demonstrated the practice, of Realpolitik. None among them more successfully baffles analysis than the man to whom was assigned the task of ruling over the new Germany, with its hopes and fears, its arrogance, its hate, and its lust for world power. A man is more often than not judged by the company he keeps, and it is for this reason that Herr Ludwig has excluded from his study the evidence of the Emperor's numerous enemies. He is to be condemned, if he is to be condemned at all, solely upon his own testimony and that of “his relatives and friends, his chancellors, ministers, generals, courtiers and servants." Count Julius Andrássy the Younger, who was well acquainted with the emperor and had many opportunities for closely observing him, gives a character study, which reveals the conflicting reactions invariably experienced by independent minds when brought into contact with the Kaiser's singular mixture of charm and repulsiveness.

A

The emperor was unquestionably a man of no mean talents. patriot of the first order, Bismarck could not have loved his country more

sincerely than [did] his imperial master. A chauvinist to the backbone, William held the Germans to be the finest and first race on God's earth-while he was, of course, the first German! Whosoever injured Germany, wounded him. I once had an opportunity personally to observe the Emperor William in his quality as a German chauvinist. In the spring preceding the outbreak of the memorable World War, I happened to be at Corfu with certain members of his Imperial Majesty's suite. Excavations were in progress, and it was while inspecting these that the Kaiser called my attention to the fact that the ground-plan of the ancient Greek houses was exactly identical with that of the primitive German dwellings, which (he said) was a clear proof that the Hellenic people had received their culture from the creations of the original Germanic genius.

Versatile, tolerant and many-sided, and—unlike so many of his countrymen-receptive of new ideas, William II most certainly possessed a mind capable of apprehending facts and tendencies that were beyond the reach of the "single-track " minds of so many of his subjects. Unhappily for himself and for his Empire, this very catholicity was the Kaiser's undoing. He knew a little of everything without knowing any one thing well-a knowall, whose innate arrogance and self-esteem led him to seek to teach their trade to master craftsmen, though himself the master of none. His dilettantism and superficiality were nowhere more strikingly revealed than in the domain of international politics. Despite his possession of an intuition that at times led him to see clearly the sloping path down which he and his ministers were hurrying Germany, the Kaiser, in all the hundreds of marginalia which he added to dispatches and memoranda, never once displays any true understanding of the basic forces underlying and motivating the European situation: neither had he any clear and definite aims nor any carefully planned political system. For he was impulsive and moody, now taking up a scheme eagerly, now rejecting it as suddenly for some other, and he expected his distracted advisers to accommodate themselves and the policy of Germany as best they could to his sudden changes of interest.

Crippled from birth, and subjected from his infancy to a discipline so harsh that the marvel is it did not crush his spirit entirely, the Kaiser grew up with one idea ever present to his mind the idea that as Prussian King and German Kaiser he must never appear as of other than normal physique, and that indeed he must, if possible, excel in all the occupations and amusements of everyday life. But this was precisely what he was patently unfitted by nature to do. Hence there grew up in

his mind an “inferiority complex," to which is traceable much of his self-assertiveness and arrogance. Moreover, the fact that by sheer hard work and will-power he finally succeeded in great measure in realizing his ideal, bred in him an egotism that the splendour of his imperial station and the adulation of his sycophantic courtiers did nothing to diminish. His physical deformity was also responsible for the existence of that strain of self-pity that was an even more repulsive element in his composition than his overweening vanity and megalomania. What monarch-let alone the ruler of a great military State-ever penned so amazing, so despicable a letter as that which the Kaiser addressed to Bülow after the latter had informed him that the secret treaty he (the Kaiser) had signed with Nicholas II on board the Tsar's yacht at Björkö, must be regarded as non avenu?

If Bismarck (wrote the Kaiser in a gush of self-pity) had succeeded in this . . . he would have been beside himself with joy, and would have made all the nations acclaim him. . . . It (Bülow's threat of resignation) has dealt me such a terrible blow that I feel quite broken, and cannot but fear I may have a serious nervous attack. ... No, you shall not do this, for both our sakes! We are elected by God; we were made for each other. . . . To please you, and because the Fatherland seemed to demand it of me, I consented, as it were, to ride (with my disabled arm, too) a horse I knew nothing about; and if it has brought me within an inch of my life, you are accountable. . . . And now, because I'm in this quandary, you, for whom I did the whole thing, want to let me down like this!! No, Bülow, I have not deserved it of you. Why, it would be a disavowal of your whole policy, and I should be a laughing-stock for the rest of my life. But I should never survive it. . . . Telegraph Telegraph" All right" as soon as you get this, and then I shall know you're not going. For the day after I receive your resignation the emperor will no longer exist. Think of my poor wife and children!

But never: "Think of my poor subjects!" For the Kaiser the sting lay in his fear of ridicule, of being made “a laughing-stock for the rest of my life." His was a nature to expand in the sunshine of popular applause; but let a tempest gather, let applause give way to loud outcries of indignation (as after the Daily Telegraph interview), and the Emperor shrivelled like a sensitive plant at a rough touch. He fled, a craven at heart, lest the storm should break over his unprotected head.

Between Bismarck and the Emperor William I a working compromise had, as we have seen, been found possible; but between the Iron Chancellor and William II it was out of the

question. Their conceptions of the place and function of the monarch in the State were too divergent, their temperaments too hopelessly ill-assorted, for harmonious co-operation in the governance of the Empire. William II was permeated by the pure and undiluted doctrine " of his favourite model, Frederick the Great, who once summed it up in a phrase: "Authority in my country belongs solely to the King of Prussia. I will bear the entire responsibility for the coming venture (the war with Austria), that the world may know that the King of Prussia does not take the field under the tutelage of a mayor of the palace." Bismarck, on the other hand, while doing lip-service to this doctrine of the divine right of kings to govern alone, did in practice make of himself a mayor of the palace far more tyrannical than any that ever troubled the peace or wounded the pride of the Merovingian kings. Out of two so diametrically opposed ideals, conflict could alone arise, and arise it did, within a very short space of time. We cannot here follow Herr Ludwig into his detailed and dramatic narrative of the embittered struggle between emperor and chancellor that poisoned the political life of Germany for a generation, and that in its conduct reflected equal discredit on the two protagonists. Seemingly the emperor triumphed. Bismarck fell. A few years later the emperor stood by the grave of the man to whom he owed all he had, and thought: "Where now are your carping strictures? You lie in your coffin, but I stand here with my wreath, alive and flourishing, in undisputed might . . Does not my realm prosper? Are not my subjects happy? Unthreatened, the imperial power augments from year to yearEurope dreads the greatest lord of earth. You go to the oblivion of the grave. I have conquered."

Twenty years passed away, and the proud emperor stood at the door of a guard-house on the Dutch frontier seeking safety from his subjects' wrath. His luxurious motor-car rolled smoothly across the frontier, and "far and ever farther off behind him the emperor heard the moaning of his land." Perhaps in that bitter moment his thoughts went back to the grave at Friedrichsruh? Perhaps he was not now so certain that the ultimate victory had been his? Empire and princes had been swallowed up in shadows: but Germany lived. "The people-whom he came to understand too late-have endured and have saved Bismarck's lifework."

VOL. 246. NO. 501.

IAN F. D. MORROW

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FOR

FRANCHISE REFORM

'OR more than a quarter of a century the various political parties in Great Britain have been engaged in promoting what they by way of compliment to themselves-call social reform. In practice the social reform for which parliament has been responsible resolves itself into the building-up of public organizations to meet the private wants of individuals.

These public organizations are financed by compulsory levies upon the taxpayer and by compulsory contributions from employers and employed; they are administered by government officials. That most of the recipients of the money thus obtained and thus administered welcome what they receive may be safely admitted. It may also be admitted that in many cases the money spent by the State upon such services as old age pensions, widows' pensions, sickness insurance and unemployment insurance, prevents or mitigates much undeserved hardship and suffering. On the other hand, the system necessarily creates new forms of injustice. Essentially it involves the taking of money forcibly from 'A' for the benefit of B.' Even in cases where 'A' is rich and 'B' is poor there are grave reasons for doubting the ultimate justice of such a compulsory transference of wealth. But in practice it may easily happen that the person who pays may be at least as poor, or even poorer, than the person who receives. This danger applies both to the contributions made by the persons who are compulsorily insured and to the contributions from the general body of taxpayers.

On this point it is interesting to quote a criticism expressed by the leader of the Labour party. Speaking in Lambeth, on March 15th of this year, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald said that when the government" decreed that pensions should be paid to widows they did not feel how grave an injustice they were doing to poor men and women whom they compelled to provide, both directly and indirectly, the larger part of the funds from which their neighbour widows were to get benefits." As a particular illustration of this injustice, reference may be made to the case of the childless spinster. Thousands of unmarried women who have very little chance of becoming widows are compelled to pay contributions