For purposes of comparison one may note that our own later national budgets run roughly to $1,000,000,000. The British budget for 1911 was $906,420,000. After the French war, speculation on a large scale ensued. The payment of the $1,000,000,000 indemnity had a bad effect. As has often happened in America, money, or the mere means of exchange, was taken for wealth. The earth will be as cold as the moon before men learn that the only real wealth is health. Many schemes and companies were floated and after 1873 there was a prolonged financial crisis in Germany. It is said that bankruptcy and the liquidation of bubble companies entailed a loss of a round $90,000,000. It was in 1876-7, when Germany was thus suffering, that the policy of protection was mooted and finally put into operation by Bismarck in 1879. Ten years later the laws for accident, old age, and sickness insurance were passed, at the instigation and under the direct influence of the present Emperor.
The tonnage of steam vessels under 4,000 tons in Great Britain (net tons) was, some five years ago, 8,165,527; in Germany (gross tons), 977,410; but the tonnage of steam vessels of 4,000 tons and over was in Great Britain 1,446,486, in Germany 1,119,537! It should be added that no small part of Great Britain’s big ships belong to the American Shipping Trust, sailing under the British flag. Albert Ballin became a director of the Hamburg-American line in 1886, and was made general director in 1900. During his directorship the capital of the line has been increased from 15,000,000 to 125,000,000 of marks, and the number of steamers from 26 to 170.
Germany’s combined export and import trade in 1880 was $1,429,025,000; in 1890, $1,875,050,000; and in 1905 it was $3,324,018,000; in 1910, $4,019,072,250. The German production of coal and coal products in 1910 was the highest in its history, amounting to 265,148,232 metric tons. It would be easy enough to chronicle the commercial and industrial strides of Germany during the last quarter of a century by the compilation of a catalogue of figures. It is not my intention to persuade the reader to believe in any such fantastic theory as that the present Kaiser is entirely responsible for this progress. I am no Pygmalion that I can make an Emperor by breathing prayers before pages of statistics.
It is only fair, however, in any sketch of the Emperor to give this skeleton outline of what has taken place in the empire over which he rules, and which, in certain quarters, it is said, he menaces by his predilection for war. These few figures spell peace, they do not spell war, and the ruler who has some 700,000 armed men at his back, and a navy the second in strength in the world guarding his shores, and a mercantile marine carrying his trade which is hard on the heels of Great Britain as a rival, but who has none the less kept his country at peace with the world for twenty-five years, may be credited at least with good intentions.
It may be said in answer to this same argument that this building and training and enriching of a nation are a threat in themselves. True, a strong man is more dangerous than a weak one; but it is equally true that a strong man is a greater safeguard than a weak one where the question of peace is at stake. It is also true that a rich and powerful man must needs take more precautions against attack and robbery than a tramp. A tramp seldom carries even a bunch of keys, and pays no premium on fire, accident, or burglary insurance.
William the Second knows his history as well as any of his people, and incomparably better than his English, French, or American critics. He knows that only twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great, the Prussian power went down before Napoleon like a house of cards, and that the country’s humiliation was stamped in bold outlines when Napoleon was received in Berlin with the ringing of bells, the firing of cannons, and he himself greeted as a savior and a benefactor. That was only a hundred years ago. Is it an indiscretion, then, when the present ruler, speaking at Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, says: “I look upon the people and nation handed on to me as a responsibility conferred upon me by God, and that it is, as is written in the Bible, my duty to increase this heritage, for which one day I shall be called upon to give an account; those who try to interfere with my task, I shall crush”?
On his accession to the throne his first two proclamations were to the army and the navy, his third to the people. On the 14th of July, 1888, he reviewed the fleet at Kiel, and for the first time an Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia appeared there in the uniform of an admiral. In April, 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth year of her reign, and Prince Henry represented Germany, appearing as admiral of the fleet in an old battle-ship, the King William. On the 24th of April the Emperor telegraphed to his brother: “I regret exceedingly that I cannot put at your disposition for this celebration a better ship, especially when all other countries are appearing with their finest ships of war. It is a sad consequence of the manoeuvring of those unpatriotic persons who have obstructed the construction of even the most necessary war-ships. But I shall know no rest till I have placed our navy on a par for strength with our army.” From that day to this he has gone steadily forward demanding of his people a strong army and a powerful fleet. He now has both. He has pulled Germany out of danger and beyond the reach, for the moment at least, of any repetition of the catastrophe and humiliation of a hundred years ago. This is a solid fact, and for this situation the Emperor is largely, one might almost say wholly, responsible.
One hears and one reads criticisms of the Emperor’s habit of speaking and writing of “my navy.” It is said that the other states of Germany have borne taxation to build the fleet, and that it is no more the Emperor’s than that of the King of Bavaria, or of Würtemberg, or of Saxony. This is the petty, pin-pricking babble of boarding-school girls, or of those official supernumeraries who have turned sour in their retirement. Even the honest democrat is made indignant. If the German navy is not the work of William the Second, then its parentage is far to seek; and if the German navy is not proud to be called “my navy,” it is wofully lacking in gratitude to its creator.
No man who looks back over his own career, say of twenty-five years, but is both chastened and amused. He is chastened by the unforeseen dangers that he has escaped; he is amused by the certificates of failure, and the prophecies of disaster, that always everywhere accompany the man who takes part in the game in preference to sitting in the reserved seats, or peeking through a hole in the fence. I have not been honored with any such intimate association with the German Emperor as would enable me to say whether he has a highly developed sense of humor or not. I can only say for myself, that if I had lived through his Majesty’s last twenty-five years, I should need no other fillip to digestion than my chuckles over the prophecies of my enemies.
It has been said of him that he is volatile; that he flies from one task to another, finishing nothing; that his artistic tastes are the extravagant dreams of a Nero; that he loves publicity as a worn and obese soprano loves the centre of the stage; that his indiscretions would bring about the discharge of the most inconspicuous petty official. Others speak and write of him as a hero of mythology, as a mystic and a dreamer, looking for guidance to the traditions of mediaeval knighthood; while others, again, dub him a modernist, insist that he is a commercial traveller, hawking the wares of his country wherever he goes, and with an eye ever to the interests of Bremen and Hamburg and Essen and Pforzheim. Again, you hear that he is a Prussian junker, or that he is a cavalry officer, with all the prejudices and limitations of such a one; while, on the other hand, he is chided for enlisting the financial help of rich Jews and industrials. He is versatile, but versatility is a virtue so long as it does not extend to one’s principles. Every man who has profoundly influenced the life of the world, from Moses to Lincoln, has been versatile. Carlyle goes so far as to say: “I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.” He speaks French well enough to address the Académie; he speaks English as well as a cultivated American, and no one speaks it more distinctly, more crisply, more trippingly upon the tongue, these days; he preaches a capital sermon; he is an accomplished binder of books; he is a successful and enthusiastic farmer, and he is frankly audacious in his loves and hatreds, his ambitions and his beliefs. He has, in short, no vermin blood in him at any rate. If you do not like him, you know why; and if you do, you know why as easily. He even knows what he believes about woman’s suffrage and about God, a rare conciseness of thinking in these troublous times.