Speaking of his Impressions of the Kaiser, the Hon. David Jayne Hill says: 'It seemed like a real personal contact, frank, sincere, earnest and honest. One could not question that, and it was the beginning of other contacts more intimate and prolonged; especially at Kiel, where the sportsman put aside all forms of court etiquette, lying flat on the deck of the Meteor as she scudded under heavy sail with one rail under water; at Eckernforde, where the old tars came into the ancient inn in the evening to meet their Kaiser and drink to his Majesty's health a glass of beer.'
'Did you ever see anything more democratic in America?' the Kaiser asked, gleefully, one time. 'What would Roosevelt think of this?' he inquired at another.
'Hating him, as many millions no doubt do,' Mr. Hill continues, 'it would soften their hearts to hear him laugh like a child at a good story, or tell one himself. Can it be? Yes, it can be. There is such a wide difference between the gentler impulses of a man and the rude part ambition causes him to play in life! A rôle partly self-chosen, it is true, and not wholly thrust upon him. A soul accursed by one, great, wrong idea, and the purposes, passions, and resolutions generated by it. A mind distorted, led into captivity, and condemned to crime by the obsession that God has but one people, and they are his people; that the people have but one will, and that is his will; that God has but one purpose, and that is his purpose; and being responsible only to the God of his own imagination, a purely tribal divinity, the reflection of his own power-loving nature, that he has no definite responsibility to men.'
Nevertheless, in Copenhagen, we understood from those who knew him well that he was a capital actor, that he never forgot the footlights except in the bosom of his family, and even there, as the young princes grew older, there were times when he had to hide his real feelings and assume a part. In 1908, he was determined that the United States should be with him; he never lost an opportunity of praising President Roosevelt or of expressing his pleasure in the conversation of Americans. I think I have said that he boasted that he knew Russia better than any other man in Germany, and it seemed as if he wanted to know the United States to the minutest particular.
It is a maxim among diplomatists that kings have no friends, and that the only safe rule in conducting one's self towards them are the rules prescribed by court etiquette. It is likewise a rule that politeness and all social courtesies shall be the more regarded by their representatives as relations are on the point of becoming strained between two countries. How little the Kaiser regarded this rule is obvious in the case of Judge Gerard, who however frank he was at the Foreign Office—and the outspoken methods he used in treating with the German Bureaucrats were the despair of the lovers of protocol—was always most discreet in meetings with the Kaiser. I was asked quietly from Berlin to interpret some of his American 'parables,' which were supposed to have an occult meaning. There was a tale of a one-armed man, with an inimitable Broadway flavour, that 'intrigued' a high German official. I did my best to interpret it diplomatically. But, though our Ambassador, the most 'American' of Ambassadors, as my German friends called him, gave out stories at the Foreign Office that seemed irreverent to the Great, there was no assertion that he was not most correct in his relations with the German Emperor. Yet, one had only to hear the rumours current in Copenhagen from the Berlin Court just after the war began, to know that the emperor had dared to show his claws in a manner that revealed his real character. Judge Gerard's book has corroborated these rumours.
The fact that I had served under three administrations gave me an unusual position in the diplomatic corps, irrespective entirely of any personal qualities, and—this is a digression—I was supposed to be able to find in Ambassador Gerard's parables in slang their real menace. A very severe Bavarian count, who deplored the war principally because it prevented him from writing to his relations in France, from paying his tailor's bill in London, and from going for the winter to Rome, where he had once been Chamberlain at the Vatican, said that he had heard a story repeated by an attaché of the Foreign Office and attributed to Ambassador Gerard, a story which contained a disparaging allusion to the Holy Father. As a Catholic, I would perhaps protest to Ambassador Gerard against this irreverence which he understood had given the Foreign Minister great pain, as, I must know, the German Government is most desirous of respecting the feelings of Catholics.
'Impossible,' I said. 'Our Ambassador is a special friend of Cardinal Farley's and he has just sent several thousand prayer-books to the English Catholic prisoners in Germany.' Thus the story was told.[8]
It seemed that among the evil New Yorkers with whom the Ambassador consorted, there was an American, named Michael, whose wife went to the priest and complained that Michael had acquired the habits of drinking and paying attention to other ladies. 'Very well,' said the priest, 'I will call on Thursday night, if he is at home, and I'll take the first chance of remonstrating with him.'
The evening came; the priest presented himself, and entered into a learned conversation on the topics of the hour, while Michael hid himself behind his paper, giving no opportunity for the pastor to address him. However, he knew that his time would come if he did not make a move into the enemy's country.
'Father,' he said, lowering his paper, 'you seem to know the reason for everything that's goin' on to-day; maybe you'll tell me the meanin' of the word "diabetes"?'