William of Germany

by Stanley Shaw

"He (Emperor William) left Coblenz to ascend the throne as the selected instrument of the Lord he always regarded himself to be. For us all, and above all for us princes, he raised once more aloft and lent lustrous beams to a jewel which we should hold high and holy—that is the kingship von Gottes Gnaden, the kingship with its onerous duties, its never-ending, ever-continuing trouble and labour, with its fearful responsibility to the Creator alone, from which no human being, no minister, no parliament, no people can release the prince."

Here, too, if the words "responsibility to the Creator alone" be taken in their ordinary English sense, the allusion to a divine right may be construed, though it is observable that the word "right" is not actually employed.

In Berlin, when unveiling a monument to the Great Elector, the Emperor was filled with the same idea of the God-given mission of the Hohenzollerns. After briefly sketching the deeds of the Elector—how he came young to the throne to find crops down-trodden, villages burnt to the ground, a starved and fallen people, persecuted on every side, his country the arena for barbarous robber-bands who had spread war and devastation throughout Germany for thirty years; how, with "invincible reliance on God" and an iron will, he swept the pieces of the land together, raised trade and commerce, agriculture and industry, in for that period an incredibly short time; how he brought into existence a new army entirely devoted to him; how, in fine, guided by the hope of founding a great northern Empire, which would bring the German peoples together, he became an authority in Europe and laid the corner-stone of the present Empire—after sketching all this, the Emperor continues:

"How is this wonderful success of the house of Hohenzollern to be explained? Solely in this way, that every prince of the House is conscious from the beginning that he is only an earthly vicegerent, who must give an account of his labour to a higher King and Master, and show that he has been a faithful executor of the high commands laid upon him."

One finds exactly the same idea expressed three months later when talking to his "Men of Brandenburg." "You know well," he reminded them,

"that I regard my whole position and my task as laid on me by Heaven, and that I am appointed by a Higher Power to whom I must later render an account. Accordingly I can assure you that not a morning or evening passes without a prayer for my people and a special thought for my Mark Brandenburg."

To the Anglo-Saxon understanding, of course, the theory of divine right has long appeared untenable, obsolete, and, as Macaulay says, absurd. Many people to-day would go farther and argue that there is no such thing as a divine right at all, since "rights" are a purely human idea, possibly a purely legal one. But it is at least doubtful that the Emperor uses the expression "von Gottes Gnaden" in a sense exactly coterminous with that of "divine right" as used by Lord Macaulay and later Anglo-Saxon writers and speakers. The latter, when dealing with things German, not unfrequently fall into the error of mistranslation and are thus at times responsible for national misunderstandings. The Italian saying, "traduttore, tradittore," is the expression of a fact too seldom recognized, especially by those whose business it is to interpret, so to speak, one people to another. Language is as mysterious and elusive a thing as aught connected with humanity, as love, for example, or music; and it may be asserted with some degree of confidence that among every people there are ideas current, and in all departments—in law, society, art—which it is impossible exactly to translate into the speech of other nations. The words used may be the same, but the connotation, all the words imply and suggest, is, perhaps in very important respects, different, and requires a paraphrase, longer or shorter, to explain them. Take the word "false" in English and "falsch" in German. They look alike, yet while the English "false" carries with it a moral reproach, the German word, where the context does not explicitly prove otherwise, means simply "incorrect," "erroneous," without the moral reproach added. Accordingly, when a German Chancellor asserts that the statement of an English Minister is "falsch" he does not necessarily mean anything offensive, but only that the English Minister is mistaken.

From this point of view one may regard the statements of the Emperor concerning his kingly office. He has recently begun to use the expression "German Emperor von Gottes Gnaden," a thing done by none of his imperial predecessors, and certainly a very curious extension of a doctrine which traditionally only applies to wearers of the crown of Prussia. But if he does, it may, it is here suggested, be considered further evidence that he employs the terms "von Gottes Gnaden" in a sense other than that of "divine right" as conceived by the Anglo-Saxon. The German "Gnade" means "favour," "grace," "mercy," "pity," or "blessing," and is at times used in direct contrast with the word "Recht," which means "justice" as well as "right." The point, indeed, need hardly be elaborated, and the Emperor's own explanation of the revelation of God to mankind, with its special reference to his grandfather which we shall find later in the confession of faith to Admiral Hollmann, is highly significant of the sense in which he regards himself and every ruling Hohenzollern as selected for the duties of Prussian kingship. It is the work of the kingship he is divinely appointed to do of which he is always thinking, not the legal right to the kingship vis à vis his people he is mistakenly supposed to claim. He regards himself as a trustee, not as the owner of the property. And is not such a spirit a proper and praiseworthy one? In a sense we Christians, if in a position of responsibility, believe that we are all divinely appointed to the work each of us has to do: instruments of God, who shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may. The Emperor finely says of the Almighty: "He breathed into man His breath, that is a portion of Himself, a soul." Reason is what chiefly distinguishes man from the brute, though there are those who hold that reason is but a higher form of brutish instinct, which again has its degree among the brutes; but, assuming that reason is of divine origin, enabling us to receive, by one means or another, the dictates of the Almighty, it seems clear that there must be channels through which these dictates become known to us.

This conveyance, this making plain is, as many people, and the Emperor among them, believe, performed by God through the agency of those whom mankind agree to call "great." For the last nineteen centuries a large part of civilized mankind is at one in the belief that Christ was such an agency, while millions again agree to call the agency Buddha, Mahomet, Confucius, or Zoroaster. In the creed of Islam Christ, as a prophet, comes fifth from Adam. In America there are thousands who believe, or did believe, in the agency of a Mrs. Eddy or a Dr. Dowie. And if this is so in matters of religion, itself only a form of the reasoning soul, why should it not be the same in morals or philosophy, art or science, government or administration: why should we not all accept, as many still do, the sayings and writings of the Hebrew prophets (as does the Emperor), of Plato and Aristotle, of Bacon and Hobbes, of Milton and Shakespeare and Goethe, of Kepler and Galileo, or Charlemagne and Napoleon, as divinely intended to convey and make plain to us the dictates of Heaven until such time as yet greater souls shall instruct us afresh and still more fully?

It may be that the Emperor thinks in some such way; his speeches and edicts at least suggest it. Certainly, as already mentioned, he did on one occasion, when speaking of his kingship, employ the word "right" as descriptive of the nature of his appointment by God. But that was early in his reign, and at no time since has he insisted on a Heaven-granted right to rule. It was, no doubt, different with some of his absolute predecessors, but it was not the view of Frederick the Great, who declared himself "the first servant of the State." Moreover, it is hardly conceivable that the Emperor, who is acquainted with the facts of history and is a man of practical common sense besides, does not know that the doctrine of "divine right" has long been rejected by people of intelligence in every civilized country, including his own.