With his damned piggeries!
O. S.
UNWRITTEN LETTERS TO THE KAISER.
No. XXXVII.
(From Dr. Liebknecht.)
If such trifling matters as the meeting of the Reichstag now occupy any portion of your Majesty's attention, it may please you to learn that my membership of that august body has been temporarily suspended. At the same time I should be sorry that your Majesty should labour under any misapprehension as to what happened. No doubt I was forbidden to speak, though I am the representative of people whose voices have a right to be heard even in the unhappy Parliament which is all that the German Empire is allowed to provide for the subjects of the German Kaiser. But I wish you to understand that I was not silenced before I had said aloud nearly everything that I had in my mind to say. It is true that I did not make any formal speech. The bellowing blockheads who now arrogate to themselves the name of patriots and all the virtues of patriotism were easily able to prevent me from doing this, and I was forced, therefore, to confine myself to short and sharp interjections thrown in at appropriate moments while Bethmann-Hollweg, that arch-impostor, was proving to the whole world that even if Germany had a good case he is the last man who would be able to place it in a convincing manner before the judgment of the world.
Your Majesty has had a long practice in the use of words. You pride yourself on the glorious and beneficial effect of such speeches as that in which you condescendingly praised the Almighty for having allied Himself with you, very much, as it appeared, to His own advantage, or that other speech in which you announced to your conscripts their duty to shoot down their parents if in some momentary whim you ordered them to do it, or even that other brave and Imperial harangue in which you declared your humane and merciful designs on the Chinese people. I have no doubt, then, that if you could be induced to speak your opinion fairly and openly you would admit that, though you yourself could, of course, have done better, I did not do so very badly in my little bout with poor Bethmann. At any rate I spoke the truth, which is an inconvenient course of conduct, and made Bethmann look the fool that everybody (except, perhaps, your Majesty) knows him to be.
Indeed, your Majesty, a fool who is also arrogant is a very terrible thing. When Bethmann, for instance, spoke of Germany's love for her neighbours, and in particular for the small nations, he delivered himself into my hands. All I had to do—and I did it—was to remind him that he proved his love by jumping upon them and strangling them. In a moment the whole fabric of his stupid argument was shattered and he was left gaping open-mouthed and without an answer before the whole world. The incident showed the man's mind and his disposition in a lightning flash, and from all countries, even from wretched Belgium and from ruined Serbia, there came a laugh of hatred and contempt. Why are we so hated? Not because we are great and powerful and prosperous, but because we make our greatness an incubus, our power a tyranny and our prosperity an offence.