effectively on any one settled object. With a kind of theatrical
sincerity he made successive public appearances as War Lord or William
the Peaceful, as Artist, Poet, Architect, Biblical Critic, Preacher,
Commercial Magnate, Generalissimo of land forces and Creator of a World
Navy; and with Whitman he might well have said, "I can resist anything
better than my own diversity."

If Wilhelm II was popular (as he was) among his own mass-people, it may
well be guessed that he was a perfect terror to his own political
advisers and generals. Undoubtedly a large share of responsibility for
the failure of German diplomacy before the war, and of German strategy
during the war, must be laid to the account of his ever-changing plans
and ill-judged interferences. It is difficult, indeed, to imagine a
character more dangerous as a great nation's leader. But out of dangers
great things do often arise. A kind of fatality, as I have said, has
enveloped the whole situation, and still leads on to new and pregnant
evolutions for the German people and for the whole world. Germany will
in the end be justified, but in a way far different from what she
imagined.

Up to the period of Germany's rising commercial prosperity Germany and
England had been on fairly friendly terms. There was no particular cause
of difference between them. But when Commercial and Colonial expansion
became a definite and avowed object of the former's policy, she found,
whereso she might look, that Britain was there, in the way--"everywhere
British colonies, British coaling stations, and floating over a fifth of
the globe the British flag." Could anything be more exasperating? And
these "absent-minded beggars" the English, without any forethought or
science or design, without Prussian organization or Prussian bureaucracy
and statecraft, had simply walked into this huge inheritance without