William of Germany

by Stanley Shaw

As confirming this version, a little note in Lord Goschen's Biography may be recalled, in which Lord Goschen confides to a friend a few weeks before the Raid that the "Germans were taking the Boers under their wing, as the Americans had done with the Venezuelans."

Enough perhaps has been said to show that the sending of the telegram had nothing to do with the Emperor's "impulsive" character, and it will only be fair to him to let the notion that it had drop finally out of contemporary history. As an act of State it was in consonance with German policy at the time. That policy, if it did not look to acquiring possession of the Transvaal, may very well have looked to enlisting the sympathies and friendship of the Dutch in South Africa, and finding in them and their country a field for German enterprise and a market for German goods; and there was therefore nothing impulsive, however mistaken the act may have been as a matter of foreign policy, in the German Government's congratulating President Kruger on successful resistance to a private raid.

We have suggested that the telegram was partly due to a certain element of chivalry in the Emperor's character. The Emperor was well acquainted with other forms of government and other social systems besides his own, and though a Hohenzollern could put himself in the position of the chief of the little Boer republic, threatened as he was with annihilation by a mighty and powerful opponent. Moreover, there is always to be remembered the sympathy of view, particularly of religious view, that existed in the two men as regarded their attitude and duties to their respective "folk." The President had appealed to the Emperor for help. The Emperor had had to refuse it, but had wired that he would do all he could "diplomatically." He knew that this was but a poor sort of assistance, but it was something, and when the Raid occurred he gave the diplomatic assistance he had promised by sending a telegram of congratulation. In any case—tempi passati. Foreign policy is not concerned with sympathies or antipathies, and the whole episode should be ignored, or, better still, forgotten.

The Kruger telegram, it turned out, was to usher in a long period of tension between two countries of the same race, singularly alike in their ideals of whatever is sound and praiseworthy in Christian civilization, and almost equally mutual admirers of the fundamental features of each other's national character. Unfortunately, along with these fundamental features of the English and German national characters, the love of money, the auri sacra fames, has to be reckoned with, and in the race of nations for wealth and power the fundamental qualities are apt, for a time, to be overborne and cease to act. The rise of the modern German Empire to power and prosperity, and the new world-situation thus created, largely by the Emperor, is at the bottom of Anglo-German tension. As a main contributory cause of both the power and the prosperity, was the creation of the German navy at the period of which we write.

The following is a parable which he who runs may read:—

In a certain town, with a large and heterogeneous population, there was once a "monster" shop. The firm (there were three partners) had been established for hundreds of years, had thrown out several branches, and by hard work, enterprise, and honesty had acquired a leading position in the trade of the town: so much so, indeed, that as time went on it had also come to do the carriage and delivery of goods for most of the smaller shops, though some of these were large houses themselves and the majority of them in a fair way of business. The smaller shops were naturally a little jealous of the "monster," and it was the dream of every owner of them to enlarge his premises and become the proprietor of an equally great emporium as the "monster." One day, therefore, a little cluster of shops, at some distance from the "monster," suddenly resolved to form a combination, and after settling a dispute with a neighbour in consideration of a sum of money and a fruitful tract of land, issued the prospectus of the new company and began to do business on modern lines.

Almost from the very beginning the new company was a great success: its situation was central; the company inspired its members with enterprise and spirit; it was industrious, energetic, and splendidly organized; and at last it began to cut into the trade of the old-established "monster." Competition might have gone on in the ordinary way had not the new company made a departure in business methods that gradually roused special uneasiness among the members of the "monster" firm. Hitherto the latter had its delivery vans travel all over the town, and so well was this part of its system carried on that the firm acquired all but a monopoly of carrying and delivery. The new company, however, now began to do a little in the same line, whereupon the "monster" took to building a superior type of van much more powerful and imposing, if also much more expensive, than the one previously in use. The new company naturally followed suit, and in a surprisingly short time had built, or had under construction, several vans of an exactly similar kind. The "monster" saw the new departure of their rivals at first with curiosity, then with contempt, then with anxiety, and finally with suspicion and alarm. At the time of writing the alarm appears to have abated, but a good deal of the suspicion remains. The town is the world, the "monster" Great Britain, and the rival company the modern German Empire.

It would require the Emperor himself properly to tell the story of his creation of the modern German navy, and if he has a right to call any part of his people's property his own, he is justified in speaking, as he invariably does, of "my navy." As Prince William, his interest in the subject may have been originally due, as has been seen, to his partly English parentage, his frequent visits to England, and the fact that his physical disability threatened to prevent him taking an active part in the more strenuous duties of the soldier. It is very probable that it was in the region that cradled the British navy the idea of a great German navy was conceived by him. We have seen that the Emperor, as Prince William, showed his enthusiasm in the matter by delivering lectures on it in military circles, though it was not his lot, but that of his brother Henry, to be assigned the navy as a profession. In his Order to the Navy on ascending the throne, he spoke of the "lively and warm interest" that bound him to the navy, shortly afterwards issued directions for a new marine uniform on the English model, and caused the introduction into the Lutheran Church service of a special prayer for the arm. He gave a parliamentary soirée at the New Palace in Potsdam, and before allowing his Conservative and National Liberal guests to sit down to supper, made them listen to a lecture which occupied two hours, giving particular attention, with the aid of maps and plans, to the battle of the Yalu between the fleets of China and Japan. He founded the Technical Shipbuilding Society, and took, and takes, an animated part in its proceedings, suggesting positions for the guns, the disposition of armour, the dimensions of submarines, and a hundred other details. In 1908 he delivered an after-dinner lecture at the "Villa Achilleion" in Corfu on Nelson and the battle of Trafalgar, based on the writings of Captain Mark Kerr of the Implacable, at which the situations of the French, English, and Spanish fleets were sketched by the imperial hand. To his admiration for the writings of Captain Mahan his persistence in enlarging the fleet is said largely to be due. He is, of course, assisted by a host of able experts, among whom Admiral von Tirpitz—the ablest German since Bismarck, many Germans say—is the most distinguished; but as he is his own Foreign Minister and own Commander-in-Chief, he is, in the fullest sense, his own First Lord of the Admiralty.

The Emperor closed one of his naval lectures with an anecdote which the papers reported next day as being received with "stormy amusement." It was about the metacentrum, the centre of gravity in ship construction. The Emperor told of his having asked an old sea lieutenant to explain to him the metacentrum. "I received the answer," said the Emperor, "that he did not know very exactly himself—it was a secret. 'All I can say is,' the old seaman went on, 'that if the metacentrum was in the topmast, the ship would over-turn.'" The success of a jest, one is told, lies in the ear of the hearer. Possibly something of the "stormy amusement" may have been called forth by the reflection that the imperial metacentrum had on occasion got misplaced.

In addition to the natural and accidental predispositions of the Emperor, certain general considerations, which imposed themselves irresistibly on all men's attention as the century drew to its close, impelled him to more energetic action. A student of the history of other countries as well as his own, and a watchful observer of the tendencies of the time, he felt that the young Empire was incomplete as long as it was without a navy corresponding in size and power to its army, the organization of which had been completed. With its army alone he regarded the Empire as a colossus, no doubt, but a colossus standing on one leg, and was convinced that if the Empire was to be a success it must have a navy at least able to withstand attack by any of his continental neighbours and potential enemies.