Have not the delegates of the old House of Peers ingenuously complained during these last few days that they no longer possess any initiative of legislation? But they have just as much or as little as the honourable members of the Prussian Diet.
All schemes of reform emanate from the Emperor. The people have no right to be Emperor. Surely that is simple enough?
To bulk larger in the public eye, William dwells apart; he can no longer endure that any one should presume to think himself useful or agreeable to him or to give him advice. He is fulfilling the prediction that he made of himself when he was twenty-one: "When I come to reign I shall have no friends; I shall only have dupes."
More infatuated with himself than ever, the Emperor wears his mystic helmet à la Lohengrin, tramples the purple underfoot and has the throne surrounded by his life-guards, wearing the iron-plated bonnets of the days of Frederick II. Thus he deludes himself with the dream of absolute authority. His mania for power is boundless, his pride knows no limits. He recognises only God and Himself.
To his recruits, he says: "After having sworn fidelity to your masters upon earth, swear the same oath to your Saviour in Heaven!"
But in his moments of solitude, in the privacy of the potentate's toilet-chamber, must it not be dreadful for him to reflect that his silver helmet rests on ears that suppurate, that his voice comes from a mouth afflicted with fistula of the bone, and that there are days when his sceptre is at the mercy of the surgeon's knife?
December 11, 1890. [17]
The rumour has spread, and has not yet been authoritatively contradicted, that William is suffering from disease of the brain. Is not this in itself good and sufficient reason to make him wish to prove that no one in his Empire can do as much brain work as he can? We, whose minds are so confused in the endeavour to follow William's movements at a distance, where little things escape us, can imagine what it must be to observe them from close at hand!
One of the chief glories of his reign will be to have produced the
diagnosis of a new disease, "locomotor Caesarism" of the restless type.
Before his case, these symptoms were always associated with paralysis.
Here is a discovery that may turn out to be more genuine that that of
Dr. Koch.
The unfortunate Koch is one more of William's victims. It was his Imperial will that Germany should wake up one morning to find herself possessed of a Pasteur of her own. He could not even wait long enough to allow the necessary experiments to be made with a remedy which is so violent that it may well be mortal. At the word of command "Forward, march," Koch found himself propelled by His Majesty into the position of a benevolent genius.