William of Germany

by Stanley Shaw

The German Emperor believes, and assumes his people to believe, that the Hollenzollern monarch is specially chosen by Heaven to guide and govern a folk entrusted to him as the talent was entrusted to the steward in Scripture. Until 1848, a little over sixty years ago, the Emperor (at that time only King of Prussia) was an absolute, or almost absolute, monarch, supported by soldiers and police, and his wishes were practically law to the folk. In that year, however, owing to the influence of the French Revolution, the King by the gift of a Constitution, abandoned part of his powers, but not any governing powers, to the folk in the form of a parliament, with permission to make laws for itself, though not for him. To pass them, that is; for they were not to carry the laws into execution—that was a matter the King kept, as the Emperor does still, in his own hands.

The business of making laws being, as experience shows, provocative of discussion, discussion of argument, and argument of controversy, there now arose a dozen or more parties in the Parliament, each with its own set of controversial opinions, and these the parties applied to the novel and interesting occupation of law-making.

However, it did not matter much to the King, so long as the folk did not ask for further, or worse still, as occurred in England, for all his powers; and accordingly the parties continued their discussions, as they do to-day, sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting their own or the King's suggestions about law-making. Generally speaking, the relation is not unlike that established by the dame who said to her husband, "When we are of the same opinion, you are right, but when we are of different opinions, I am right." If the Parliament does not agree with the Emperor, the Emperor dissolves it.

These parties, from the situation of their seats in a parliament of 397 deputies, became known as the parties of the Right, or Conservative parties, and the parties of the Left, or Liberal parties. Between them sat the members of the Centre, who, as representing the Catholic populations of Germany—roughly, twenty-two millions out of sixty-six—became a powerful and unchanging phalanx of a hundred deputies, which had interests and tactics of its own independently of Right or Left.

By and by, one of the parties of the Left, representing the classes who work with their hands as distinguished from the classes who work with their heads, thought they would like to live under a political system of their own making and began to show a strong desire to take all power from the King and from the Parliament too. They agitated and organized, and organized and agitated, until at length, having settled on what was found to be an attractive theory, they made a wholly separate party, almost a people and parliament of their own. This is known as the Social Democracy, with, at present, no deputies.

Such, in a comparatively few sentences, is the political state of things in Germany. It might indeed be expressed in still fewer words, as follows: Heaven gave the royal house of Hohenzollern, as a present, a folk. The Hohenzollerns gave the folk, as a present, a parliament, a power to make laws without the power of executing them. The Social Democrats broke off from the folk and took an anti-Hohenzollern and anti-popular attitude, and the folk in their Parliament divided into parties to pass the time, and—of course—make laws.

This may seem to be treating an important subject with levity. It is intended merely as a statement of the facts. The system in Germany works well, to an Englishman indeed surprisingly so. In England there is no Heaven-appointed king; all the powers of the King, both that of making laws and of administering them, have long ago been taken by the people from the King and entrusted by them to a parliament, the majority of whom, called the Government, represent the majority of the electing voters. In the case of Germany the folk have surrendered some of what an Englishman would term their "liberties," for example, the right to govern, to the King, to be used for the common good; whereas in the case of England, the people do not think it needful to surrender any of their liberties, least of all the government of their country, in order to attain the same end.

Thus, while the German Emperor and the German folk have the same aims as the English King and the English people, the common weal and the fair fame of their respective countries, the two monarchs and the two peoples have agreed on almost contrary ways of trying to secure them.

The political system of Germany has had to be sketched introductorily as for the Englishman, a necessary preliminary to an understanding of the German Emperor's character and policy. One of the most important results of the character and policy is the state of Anglo-German relations; and the writer is convinced that if the character and policy were better and more generally known there would be no estrangement between the two countries, but, much more probably, mutual respect and mutual good-will.

With the growth of this knowledge, the writer is tempted to believe, would cease a delusion that appears to exist in the minds, or rather the imaginations, of two great peoples, the delusion that the highest national interests of both are fundamentally irreconcilable, and that the policies of their Governments are fundamentally opposed.