William of Germany

by Stanley Shaw

"No pleasing nor festive cause, no mere fulfilment of a courtly duty, has brought your Imperial Highness to me, but a sad and deeply grave occurrence. My Minister to the Court of his Majesty the Emperor of China, Freiherr von Ketteler, fell in the Chinese capital beneath the murderous weapons of an imperial Chinese soldier, who acted by the orders of a superior, an unheard-of outrage condemned by the law of nations and the moral sense of all countries. From your Imperial Highness I have now heard the expression of the sincere and deep regret of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of China regarding the occurrence. I am glad to believe that your Imperial Highness's royal brother had nothing to do with the crime or with the further acts of violence against inviolable Ministers and peaceful foreigners, but all the greater is the guilt which attaches to his advisers and his Government. Let these not deceive themselves by supposing that they can make atonement and receive pardon for their crime through this mission alone, and not through their subsequent conduct in the light of the prescriptions of international law and the moral principles of civilized peoples. If his Majesty the Emperor of China henceforward directs the government of his great Empire in the spirit of these ordinances, his hope that the sad consequences of the confusion of last year may be overcome, and permanent, peaceful and friendly relations between Germany and China may exist as before, will be realized to the benefit of both peoples and the whole of civilized humanity. In the sincere wish that it may be so, I welcome your Imperial Highness."

The Emperor's other speeches referring to the Boxer movement at this period have been adversely commented on as showing him in the light of a cruel and blood-thirsty seeker after revenge. This is an unjust, at least a hard, judgment. A passage in his address at Bremerhaven to the expeditionary force when setting out for China is the main proof of the charge—in which, after referring to the murder of von Ketteler, he said:

"You know well you will have to fight with a cunning, brave, well-armed, cruel foe. When you come to close quarters with him remember—quarter ('Pardon' is the German word the Emperor used) must not be given: prisoners must not be taken: manage your weapons so that for a thousand years to come no Chinaman will dare to look sideways at a German. Act like men."

It is difficult, of course, to reconcile such an address with Christian humanity practised, so far as humanity can be practised, in modern war, but it should be remembered that the Emperor was speaking in a state of great excitement, and that, according to Chancellor Prince Bülow's statement in the Reichstag subsequently, confirmation of the news of the murder of his Minister to China had only reached the Emperor ten minutes before he delivered the speech.

There is one incident, however, though not a very important one, in connexion with the troubles, which may fairly be made a matter of reproach to the Emperor—the seizure, on his order, of the ancient astronomical instruments at Pekin and their transference to Sans Souci, in Potsdam, where they are to be seen to the present day. The troops of all nations, it is known, looted freely at Pekin; but the Emperor might have spared China and his own fair fame the indignity of such public vandalism.

While writing of China it may not be superfluous to add that the Emperor's foreign policy in the Orient cannot be expected to present exactly the same features, or proceed quite along the same lines, as his foreign policy in Europe. By far the greater part of Europe is now as completely parcelled out and as permanently settled as though it were a huge, well-managed estate. The capacities of its high roads, its railways, its great rivers, with their commercial and strategic values and relations are perfectly ascertained; and the knowledge, it is not too much to say, is the common property of all important Governments. It is not so, or not nearly to the same extent, in the Orient. In Europe there is little or no difficulty in distinguishing between enterprises that are political and those that are commercial, or in recognizing where they are both; and if a difficulty should arise it can be arranged by diplomatic conversations, by a conference of the Powers interested, or in the last resort—short of war—by arbitration. This is not so simple a matter in the Orient, where conditions are at once old and new, where interests of possibly great magnitude are as yet undetermined or unappropriated, where possibly great mineral sources are undeveloped and the capacities of new markets unascertained; where, in short, the decisive factors of the problem are undiscovered, it may be unsuspected.

In such cases there is often no certain and readily recognizable line of demarcation between the two kinds of enterprise; and an undertaking that may present all the appearance of being a purely commercial scheme, and be solemnly asseverated to be such by the Power or Powers promoting it, may turn out on closer examination to be one of great political significance and incalculable political consequence. Of such enterprises two immediately spring to mind, the Cape to Cairo railway and the Baghdad railway, not to mention a score of problematic undertakings in other parts of Africa or Asia. It will be useful to keep this general consideration in view when forming an opinion regarding the Emperor's Oriental policy. That policy is, so far, almost entirely commercial. Long ago wars used to be made for the sake of religion, then for the sake of territory. Now they are made for the sake of new markets.

Yet the Far East is changing with the change in conditions everywhere in modern times, and it is evident that the premises for any conclusion as to German foreign policy there may, at any given moment, be subject to modification. Partly owing to the growth of Germany's European influence, and to the increase in her navy which has helped her to it, she is to be found of recent years playing a role in the Far East which would have been unintelligible to the German of the last generation. There are many Germans to-day, as in Bismarck's time, who ridicule the notion that the possibilities of trade in Oriental countries justify the national risk now run for it and the national expenditure now made upon it; but it is sometimes forgotten that, apart from the chance of obtaining concessions for the building of railways, for the establishment of banks, for the leasing of mines and working of cotton plantations, there is a large German export of beads, cloth, and, in short, of hundreds of articles which appeal to barbarian or only semi-civilized tastes.

Germany, too, looks hopefully forward to a future in which she will be supplied with the raw material of her manufactures by her colonies, or failing that by her subjects trading abroad in the colonies of other nations. This is one of the main objects of her Weltpolitik. As Prince von Bülow said: "The time has passed when the German left the earth to one neighbour and the sea to another, while he reserved heaven, where pure doctrines are enthroned, to himself;" and again: "We don't seek to put anybody in the shade, but we demand our place in the sun;" and the idea finds technical expression in the phrase on which Germany lays so much stress, the "maintenance of the open door." Her policy in the Far East, as in Europe, is thus on the whole a commercial one; she seeks there as elsewhere new markets, not new territory. Accordingly she supports the principle of the status quo in China, and therefore raised no objection to the Anglo-Japanese Agreement of 1902 which, among other objects, secured it.

In January, 1901, the Emperor was called to England by the sudden, and, as it was to prove, fatal illness of his grandmother, Queen Victoria. His journey to Osborne, where he arrived just in time to be recognized by the dying Queen, and his abandonment of the idea, impressive and almost sacred to a Prussian King and the Prussian people, of being present on his birthday, January 27th, at the bicentenary celebration of the foundation of the Prussian Kingdom, made a deep and sympathetic impression on the people of England. Usually on State occasions the Emperor does not display a countenance of good humour, or indeed of any sentiment save perhaps that of a sense of dignity; but on the occasion in question, as he rode in the uniform of a British Field-Marshal beside Edward VII, his looks were those of genuine sorrow. Public sympathy was not lessened when it became known that he had mentioned the pride he felt in being privileged to wear the uniform of two such soldiers of renown as the Duke of Wellington and Lord Roberts; and added that the privilege would be highly estimated by the whole German army. It was a chivalrous remark, the offspring of a chivalrous disposition.