Young William was so enthusiastic a follower of his grandfather that people assumed he would imitate him in this, all the more because his own tastes are toward display. Upon this theory there has been a great deal printed about a forthcoming coronation which never comes. Only last year an unusually impressive statement appeared to the effect that William, moved by meditating upon the historic splendours of the old Holy Roman Empire, intended to have himself crowned German Emperor in the famous mediaeval church of the ancient imperial city of Frankfort-on-the-Main. The idea is a beautiful one, but there is no fact at the back of it. According to William’s present intention, he will not be crowned at all.
In the restless course of his travels during these first six months William had made numerous speeches, almost every one of which contained a sentence or two of enough significance to be reprinted everywhere. As a rule his utterances at foreign Courts were polite and amiable to a fault, while his speeches at home, made among cheering after-dinner audiences in various parts of Germany, were characterized by much violent extravagance of language. The most intemperate of these harangues were reserved for his State visits to the provincial divisions of Prussia. At the beginning of last year, on the occasion of a visit of this nature to Königsberg, capital of East Prussia, he was led by his enthusiasm into so fervid a strain of eloquence, and flourished the metaphorical sword so recklessly, that one of the Russian papers ironically congratulated the world upon the fact that Prussia only had thirteen provinces, and that the Kaiser had now exhausted the rhetorical possibilities of eleven of them.
The earliest and most interesting of these speeches was delivered at Frankfurt-am-Oder just two months after his accession. He referred of his own volition to the undoubtedly foolish talk that had been heard during his father’s brief reign, of Frederic’s alleged idea of giving back Alsace-Lorraine, an imputation which William characterized as shameful to his father’s memory.
“There is upon this point but one mind,” he went on amid loud hurrahs, “namely, that our eighteen army corps, and our 42,000,000 people should be left upon the field rather than that we should permit a solitary stone of what we have gained to be taken from us.”
Equally characteristic, and perhaps even more important as a clue to the manner in which the young Kaiser’s conceptions of his position shaped themselves, was his celebrated rebuke to the Burgomaster and municipal authorities of Berlin, which has for its date, October 28 1888. That we may the better comprehend this, it will be well to glance for a moment at the remarkable development of the new Berlin.
Twenty years ago—that is to say, when the Empire was founded—Berlin was of course much the largest city within the new German boundaries, but it was scarcely a capital in the sense that Paris, Vienna, or London is. Frankfurt-am-Main was the great banking centre of Germany; Hamburg was its commercial metropolis; Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and even smaller towns were more esteemed as places of fashionable residence and resort. Berlin was big and powerful, and rich in manufactures, no doubt, but nobody thought of it as beautiful or attractive, and nobody wanted to live there who could maintain himself in pleasanter surroundings.
The change which has been wrought in all this since 1870 is only to be matched by the phenomenal growth of great cities in the American West. Europe has seen nothing like it before. Within these twenty years Berlin has grown like a veritable Chicago. And not only has it attracted to itself hundreds of thousands of new citizens, and spread itself out on the Brandenburg plain over new square miles of stately brick and mortar and asphalt, but it has sapped the pre-eminence of its more ancient rivals, each in its speciality. Berlin has so absorbed the monetary power of the Empire that Frankfort is now scarcely thought of as a banking centre at all, and even Amsterdam and Paris are dwarfed financially. In similar fashion, the German nobility and wealthy classes, instead of scattering their town homes among a dozen local centres of social life, swarm now all to Berlin, and bid so strenuously for available building sites that prices for land and houses and floor rents are higher there than anywhere else in Europe.
Obviously, it is the establishment of the imperial Court in Berlin which has done this, and both the strength and weakness of the imperial system are reflected in greatest perfection of form and colour in the social conditions of this mighty new metropolis.
The enormous concentration here of rich or pretentious young nobles in the various regiments of the Guard Corps; of the ablest and most influential soldiers of Germany in the General Staff and the central military offices; of the cleverest politicians and administrators in the various civic departments, and of the great aristocratic and monied classes who must live where the Court is settled and the Reichstag meets and the finance of Europe is controlled—all this makes Berlin a peculiarly responsive mirror of the ideas and methods of German government.
In turn Berlin has imposed its character with increasing force upon the whole German people. The dear old indolent, amiable, incapable, happy-go-lucky, waltz-loving Vienna used to be the type of what people had in mind when they spoke of the sentimental German. Berlin has made Vienna seem now as remote and non-German almost as Pesth itself, and instead has impressed its own strongly-marked individuality upon the new Empire—energetic, exact, harsh under slight provocation, methodical as the multiplication table, coldly just to law-abiding people, and a fire-and-steel terror to everybody else.