NOT LIKELY
A Barbados plantation negro is reported to have said to his overseer:
“Massa, is it true that before the war the Kaiser sent a bag of rice to King George and told him, ‘King George, I’se got as many soldiers as there is rice in this bag,’ and that King George sent to the Kaiser a bottle of the hottest peppers that grows and tell him, ‘I only got as many soldiers as peppers in this bottle, but you just bite one of them and you’ll see how your soldiers will like ’em’?”
THE KAISER’S INCOME
How His Money Is Invested
Thanks to the advice of financiers who, for obvious reasons, he admitted to his friendship, the Kaiser’s private fortune has increased to such an extent of late years that it was estimated a short time ago by the eminent German authority, Herr Rudolph Martin, that he is easily the richest man in Germany, having an annual income of five million dollars derived from possessions valued at approximately $100,000,000.
Apart from the Kaiser’s fortune, his son, the Crown Prince, has a separate income of $250,000, drawn from property valued at nearly $5,000,000, while the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry, enjoys some $150,000 a year on account of an estate worth two and a half million. Altogether the principal members of the Hohenzollern family own property valued at approximately $125,000,000.
The Kaiser’s fortune has been mainly built up by investments in many businesses. He has some very large holdings in the big German steamship lines, is extensively interested in the diamond-mine enterprises of German West Africa, owns forests and lands to the value of seventeen and a half millions, carries on a large lumber business, and has a horse-breeding establishment in Western Prussia which brings him in a handsome revenue. Furthermore, he has great financial interests in a municipal lager-beer brewery at Hanover, and founded an extensive pottery factory on his private estates at Cadinen.
Altogether the Kaiser owns about forty castles and country houses, valued at $10,000,000, and various property in Berlin, approximately worth $5,000,000. In seven different provinces he owns seventy-four estates, comprising close on half a million acres.
It is interesting to note that ever since Germany began to make preparations for a great war the Kaiser has been investing immense sums of money on the other side of the Atlantic. He is one of the largest landowners in the Western United States—not in his own name, of course—and owns a considerable section of property in the West of Canada. So notorious is the fact that it was at one time a standing joke at Vancouver that, although the Kaiser was a large owner of property in a certain district, he declined to join the local ratepayers’ association, which would have been materially assisted in its propaganda by the use of his name.