The inferences to be drawn from the Kaiser’s personality are somewhat conflicting. Like all self-centered and highly neurotic personalities, his nature is essentially a dual one. This does not mean that he is in any sense a hypocrite, for one of the engaging features of his attractive personality has been the candor and sincerity which have marked nearly all his public acts. He has shown himself to be a man of opposite moods, and conflicting purposes, having almost as many public poses as he has costumes, and a strong desire to play as many varied rôles as possible on the stage of the world. Like Bottom in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, he would play all parts from the “roaring lion” to the shrinking Thisbe.
The ruler who sent a sympathetic message to Kruger as an insult to England is he who shortly thereafter gratuitously submitted to Queen Victoria military plans for the subjugation of the Boers.
The ruler, who sent the Panther to Agadir, later restrained his country from declaring war against England, when Lloyd George threw down the gauntlet in his Mansion House speech in the Moroccan crisis.
As preacher, the Kaiser exalted within sight of the Mount of Olives the precepts of Christian humility, and yet advised his soldiers, on their departure to China, to “take no prisoners and give no quarter.” The most affable and democratic monarch on occasion will in another mood assume the outworn toggery of mediæval absolutism. A democratic business monarch, and as such the advance agent of German prosperity, he yet shocks the common sense and awakens the ridicule of the world by posing as a combination of Cæsar and Mahomet.
The avowed champion of Christianity, who has preached with the fervor of Peter the Hermit against the Yellow Race, he has nevertheless, since this war began, instigated the Sultan of Turkey to proclaim in the Moslem world a “holy war” against his Christian enemies.
Pacific and bellicose by turns the monarch, who throughout his whole reign has hitherto kept the peace of the world, has yet on slight pretext given utterance to the most warlike and incendiary statements.
How is it possible to draw any inference from such a personality, of whom it could be said, as Sydney Smith once said of Lord John Russell, that
there is nothing he would not undertake. I believe he would perform an operation for stone, build St. Peter’s, assume (with or without ten minutes’ notice) the command of the Channel Fleet, and no one would discover from his manner that the patient had died, that St. Peter’s had tumbled down, and that the Channel Fleet had been knocked to atoms.
We should therefore dismiss all inferences suggested by his complex personality and should judge him by what he did from the time that he suddenly arrived in Berlin on July 26th, until the issuance by his direct order of the fatal ultimatum to Russia.
Before proceeding to analyze the very interesting and dramatic correspondence, which passed between the rulers of Germany, England, and Russia—doubly interesting because of the family relationship and the unusual personal and cousinly intimacy of these dispatches—it is well to inquire what the Kaiser could have done that would have immediately avoided the crisis and saved the situation. So far as the published record goes, he did not send a single telegram in the interests of peace to his illustrious ally, the Emperor Francis Joseph.