In Constantinople and the scarcely less Oriental Athens they still recall his energetic daily routine with bewildered astonishment. He was up long before the drowsy muezzins from the minarets summon the faithful at the hour of prayer—rattling indefatigably about to see all the sights, reviewing the Sultan’s troops, inspecting all the chief military establishments, War Ministry, military school, artillery barracks, and what not besides, asking questions of everybody who had anything to tell, peering into every nook and cranny with an insatiable curiosity, working through it all upon notes of instruction and reference to be forwarded to Berlin every evening, and then sitting up until all the others were yawning with sleep.
Of course he could not bear the strain of this constant activity if he were not endowed with two great gifts—prodigious physical vitality and imagination. Mere strength alone, mated with dulness of mind, would be broken down and destroyed by the wear and tear of such a life. William is, physically and mentally, the heir of the best things which European royalty has to offer. He inherits the bodily force and resolution of the Hohenzollerns, the savoir faire and comeliness of the Guelphs, the intellectual acuteness and philosophical tastes of the Coburgs, and the romantic mediaeval Ascanien strain which Catherine II took to Russia and her granddaughter brought back again to Weimar—a leaven half divine half daemonic, which swings between genius and madness. The product of these marriages might be expected to be what he is—by far the most striking personality in the whole gallery of contemporary kings.
What other dynasty in Western Europe does not envy William his six handsome, sturdy, and superbly healthy little sons? Seeing them with their shining, bright-eyed faces and ordinary well-worn clothes, one cannot but reflect upon the contrast afforded at Vienna, where the great rival house of Hapsburg is dying miserably out in pallid epileptics and vicious dullards.
These six fine boys, the oldest of whom is now in his tenth year, are reared in the Spartan traditions of the Hohenzollerns. Winter and summer they are up at six o’clock and into their cold tubs with merciless punctuality. As a rule they breakfast with their father half an hour later, and throughout the meal he talks with them alone. They salute him on entering, and again on leaving, in military fashion; even at this tender age a considerable portion of their education is upon martial subjects. The Emperor, in his recent speech at Bonn, indicated an intention of having the Crown Prince eventually matriculate there, but for the present, as soon as the lads outgrow their private tutors it is understood that they are to go to the great cadet school at Lichterfelde, just outside Berlin. Evidently the gymnasium has no part in the plans for their education.
The predominance of the military idea, which envelops even these little baby princes, is indeed the keynote to every phase of their father’s character. He is first of all a soldier. He lives a plain and simple life; the service and routine of his palaces are those of an officer’s mess. He is a heavy eater, with a preference for homely dishes; he smokes great numbers of light Dutch cigars which cost about three halfpence each. He addresses all persons whom he meets in an official capacity in the terse form and curt, sharp tone of a drill sergeant. Although in private conversation with friends his voice is soft and pleasant, all his public speeches are declaimed in a harsh and rattling voice, with abruptly ended sentences. His relations with other Germans, from the kings down to the peasants, are, in short, those of a commanding officer on the parade ground. This attitude does not suggest tact, or lend itself to roundabout’ methods. The bluntly-expressed rescripts to the officers of the army which William from time to time has issued, complaining about the harsh personal treatment of the men, denouncing gambling and extravagant living, and so on, might easily have provoked a spirit of discontent in a country less wholly ruled by the idea of military discipline.
Naturally enough, his innate liking for display and scenic effects is strongly coloured by militarism. He cannot see too many uniforms about him, and he literally inundates Berlin with martial pageants. One might suppose that the effect of this would be to satiate the Berliners, but they maintain a most vigorous and unabated interest in seeing the troops march by, and throng the sidewalks every time as if the spectacle had all the excitement of novelty.
In almost every other country the personal tastes or whims of the sovereign, if he be at all a man of the world, leave a certain mark upon the every-day dress of the people about him. The Prince of Wales, for example, during the quarter century in which he has assumed the social work of his mother’s reign, has made a good many changes in the fashions of men’s clothes—changes which have been respected in Melbourne and Washington and Toronto as well as in London. But hardly anybody in Germany has ever seen the adult William in citizen’s clothes—and positively no one ever thinks of him save as in uniform.
As William is a soldier in manners and habits, so his conceptions of government and of domestic statecraft are largely those which might be expected in a chief of staff. He addresses his people always as their commander-in-chief. The starting-point of his resolve to get rid of Bismarck and bring in new men like Miquel and Caprivi, was his discovery that the Chancellor and the various political parties and factions which he alternately bullied and cajoled were really so many impediments standing between him and his subjects. The Hohenzollern desired to speak directly to the people, as a general to his army, and he has swept aside whatever stood in the way. Such a posture does not, at first sight, seem to promise much for progress and enlightened development, but it must be remembered that universal service in the army has had the effect of familiarizing all other Germans with this same point of view, so that really sovereign and subjects get on much better together than in many countries nominally more free.
The difficulties of government in Germany are almost wholly social and economic. The Prussian artizan, perforce, spends seven years at school and three years in the army before he seriously takes up his trade and sets to working for himself. He marries early and has a swarm of children, and the necessity of toiling to support all these in an overcrowded and underpaid labour market grinds upon his temper. He has, to begin with, a racial tendency to think highly of himself and to criticize other people; he is afforded only too much justification for his rooted dislike of aristocrats, employers, and rich people generally, who in Germany are much less generous and considerate than in some other countries. Thus he is peculiarly open to the arguments and allurements of the social democratic propaganda.
The Kaiser’s idea is to meet and counteract this by appealing to the workman’s military recollections and pride. It is difficult for outsiders to realize the potency of this appeal. Americans and Englishmen see the scores of thousands of young Germans who expatriate themselves to escape military service, and assume, therefore, that it must be a hateful thing. To those who look forward to it this may be true. But to the poor German artizan who looks backward upon it this term of service in the army is apt to seem the pleasantest period of his life. By comparison with the hardships of his later independent struggle for existence, he comes to regard this time when he was fed and clothed and instructed and lodged, and wore a uniform, with affectionate regret.