If in 1914 the Emperor Francis Joseph had possessed any glimmer of reason and good sense, he would have taken notice of the formidable uncertainties of the Berlin problems, and maintained peace while refusing to die at the cries of the victims of a war.
Left to himself, William II let loose the worst and most barbarous powers on the nations who were dragged into the horrors of war.
I have said that he lacked depth. He was in reality inconsistent. Although playing a thousand parts, he had no personality.
A man is only "someone" by reason of his personality. Many fools and dishonest men reach their goals in life through intrigue, chance, favouritism and human folly. But they are none the less foolish and dishonest for all that, and this is why the world is so evil.
William II assumed chivalrous airs, but he still remained coarse in his outlook. This was often apparent in his jokes with the officers of the Guards. He had no tact or judgment. His lack of tact was due to his bad Prussian education; to his student days at Bonn, which were given up to drinking bouts; and as a young man, to his taste for frequenting the Berlin casinos. As for his lack of judgment, this was the result of inherent vanity, which everything tended to develop to his own injury and that of Germany. The vain man is the being who is deceived by everyone, because he has begun by deceiving himself. And he is usually a hopeless idiot.
William II once said to me, under the impression that he was paying me a compliment: "You would make a fine Prussian grenadier." The compliment seemed to me "Pomeranian."
If William II had possessed tact and judgment he would have known how to adopt a policy other than threats and violence, and a diplomacy utterly opposed to the trickery with which Germany was so affected during his reign.
Incapable of judging the times in which he lived, weighed down by Prussian tradition, and full of zeal as titular chief of the House of Prussia, descended from a Suabian family which had emigrated to Brandenburg, he persuaded the upper classes of Germany that he had consolidated his prestige. The Middle Ages have had a disastrous effect on him and, through him, on all Germany.
In addition to battlemented railway stations and post offices fortified by machiolated galleries, the influence of mediævalism led the Emperor-King and his people back to the old hates, the old struggles and the old ideas, just as if the world had not changed with the passing of centuries. The result was that science, inventions, and discoveries were first made to serve the industry of war, the continuation of conquests, the mailed fist, and all the follies which soldiers, writers and military journalists applied themselves to serve, finding therein their daily bread.
However, those nations brought into closer contact by means of intercommunication and by exchange of ideas have commenced to find solutions of difficulties in pacific ways—solutions which until now have only been dragged from the path of war. By this I mean the preservation and the development of the human species, its better distribution on the earth, and its rights to greater happiness and justice.