The Kaiser’s fortune has been mainly built up by investments in many businesses. He has some very large holdings in the big German steamship lines, is extensively interested in the diamond-mine enterprises of German West Africa, owns forests and lands to the value of seventeen and a half millions, carries on a large lumber business, and has a horse-breeding establishment in Western Prussia which brings him in a handsome revenue. Furthermore, he has great financial interests in a municipal lager-beer brewery at Hanover, and founded an extensive pottery factory on his private estates at Cadinen.
Altogether the Kaiser owns about forty castles and country houses, valued at $10,000,000, and various property in Berlin, approximately worth $5,000,000. In seven different provinces he owns seventy-four estates, comprising close on half a million acres.
It is interesting to note that ever since Germany began to make preparations for a great war the Kaiser has been investing immense sums of money on the other side of the Atlantic. He is one of the largest landowners in the Western United States—not in his own name, of course—and owns a considerable section of property in the West of Canada. So notorious is the fact that it was at one time a standing joke at Vancouver that, although the Kaiser was a large owner of property in a certain district, he declined to join the local ratepayers’ association, which would have been materially assisted in its propaganda by the use of his name.
SOMETHING REPOSEFUL
Soldiers were called for, owing to the scarcity of civilians, to work the railway. The weary “Tommies” were lying in camp one night after a hard day’s work, when a sergeant called out:
“Any of you men want to put your names down as railway porters, drivers, stokers, half-boiled clerks, or for any other appointments connected with the railway?”
Silence, broken only by snores. Then one “Tommy” slowly raised his head and drowsily muttered:
“Put me down as a sleeper, sergeant.”