BY A NEUTRAL DIPLOMAT.
My work never brought me into intimate contact with court circles in Berlin, but—as the very existence of my country has hung for years on the tenuous thread of the Kaiser’s whim—I have missed no opportunity (during the decade or more in which special missions for my Government have taken me to various foreign capitals) to study the War Lord through those who, in one way or another, had been given opportunities for forming their estimates of him at first hand. My surest and most intimate knowledge of the Kaiser was gained, perhaps, from German and Austrian diplomatic and consular officials who were either included in the inner circle of his personal friends, or whose duties had been of a character to reveal to them the hidden springs and cogs of their master’s intricate machine of welt-politik. But very illuminative, also, I found the after-dinner confidences of several prominent Americans—notably two world-famous ‘kings of industry’ and an almost equally well known ‘intellectual’—through whom the Kaiser had made cleverly calculated efforts to extend his influence in the United States.
The German and Austrian officials alluded to were, for the most part, pre-war acquaintances, but their attitudes toward the Kaiser and his world policies are of pertinent interest at this time as showing that the present apparently unbroken front of German unity is in reality a structure no less artificial and precarious than the tottering ‘paper castle’ of the German scheme of war finance. But two of the Americans—the very ones, too, I found most impressed by Wilhelm’s ‘guide-counsellor-and-friend’ tactics—I have seen since the first of the present year, and it is a significant coincidence that each of them prefaced a scathing denunciation and sweeping repudiation of the Kaiser with the words, ‘He lied to me!’
It is undoubtedly true, as has occasionally been stated in the British press by those intimately acquainted with Germany and the Germans, that the Kaiser was not an ultra-militarist; or rather, that while he might be so rated according to the standard of less ‘organised-for-war’ countries than Germany, he was not so extreme in his views in this regard as many of the leaders of the so-called ‘Military Party,’ the royal member of which was the Crown Prince. But it is true that he was the leader in fact as well as in name—the soul and the mainspring—of what I may call the ‘Deutschland-über-Alles’ movement, which had for its end not only Teutonic ‘kultural’ supremacy, but also Teutonic commercial, financial, and—ultimately—political supremacy. And it is also true that he strove to attain these ends by methods so rough-shod, tactless and cynical that the arbitrament of the sword became the inevitable and only alternative to the national effacement of those countries which stood in Germany’s way.
Let me make myself plain on this point. The Kaiser strove not only to win Germany a place in the sun, but to make Germany the place in the sun, and, in a sense, it is true, as he has so often claimed, that he desired and worked to bring this about by peaceful means. But—he did not follow this course through any inherent love for, or humane predilection toward peace, but only because it was the cheaper way; because it would cost less in treasure and industrial potentiality; because it was calculated to set back Germany less than would the drain of even a victorious war.
He hoped—by building up the most perfect military machine the world had ever known, supplemented by a navy unquestionably designed to equal and ultimately surpass that of Great Britain—to bluff and bully his way through to his goal without paying the price. The principal difference between the Kaiser and the German military party leaders was that the latter proposed to fight first and take what they wanted after all opposition had been crushed, while the former proposed trying to seize what he wanted first and to fight only if some one had the audacity to resist. Both were the schemes of international outlaws, with the militarists comparable to the brigand and the Kaiser to the burglar. That is the most one can say for the Kaiser’s vaunted ‘peacefulness.’
Twice or thrice—notably in the cases of Tsingtau and Bosnia-Herzegovina—the Imperial thief or his accomplices got away, unscathed, with the ‘goods’; but at Agadir his nerve failed him and he was compelled to withdraw with empty pockets. The German military party leaders, knowing his aims and methods rendered ultimate war inevitable, bided their time far more patiently than would have been the case had they not known the Kaiser was no lover of peace for its own sake; that either his bungling or his opportunism must finally make his means, like his end, identical with their own.
It was, therefore, not among even the extremest militarists that one found the deepest distrust of their impetuous emperor, but rather among the members of two other classes (I am not considering the Socialists in this article at all, because the feud between them and the Kaiser was known to all the world), the diplomats and the industrialists. Among German diplomatic and consular officials one met occasional personal favourites of the Kaiser who manifested a kind of sycophantic devotion to him; but the great majority of them—through their broader knowledge of the world, and especially their keener appreciation of the latent might of the British Empire—were restive and apprehensive over the parts they were being compelled to play in a policy which they knew could only lead to a conflict from which the chances of Germany’s emerging victorious were very slender indeed. The most widely informed and most rational of these—and, therefore, the bitterest critics of the Kaiser—were men doing the same character of ‘emergency work’ on which I have so long been engaged myself. Sent on special missions of one kind or another to various parts of the world, they had an appreciation of world ‘values,’ a ‘sense’ for the set of political and racial undercurrents, such as no Prussian Junker ever attained to. Heart and soul in the ‘Deutschland-über-Alles’ crusade though they were, there is scarcely one of these I can recall who was not distrustful of the Kaiser’s way of trying to bring the thing about, and, when opportunity offered for them to speak out, several were frankly condemnatory.
Of such was an unusually level-headed German who was a fellow passenger of mine on the British-India mailboat from Rangoon to Calcutta about five years ago. He claimed to have been on a special tour of investigation of Germany’s Pacific colonies and to be taking advantage of his return trip to see what the Netherlands and England were doing in a colonial way. It was just at the crisis of the Agadir imbroglio, and a wireless message announcing the recall of the gunboat Panther (after Mr. Lloyd George’s ‘Mansion House’ speech had brought home to the Kaiser the disagreeable truth that Great Britain was ready to stand by France) was the direct occasion of the conversation I am about to allude to.