I. INTRODUCTORY.

William the Second, German Emperor and King of Prussia, Burgrave of
Nürnberg, Margrave of Brandenburg, Landgrave of Hessen and Thuringia,
Prince of Orange, Knight of the Garter and Field-Marshal of Great
Britain, etc., was born in Berlin on January 27, 1859, and ascended
the throne on June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, fifty-four years old
in the present year of his Jubilee, 1913, and his reign--happily yet
unfinished--has extended over a quarter of a century.

The Englishman who would understand the Emperor and his time must
imagine a country with a monarchy, a government, and a people--in
short, a political system--almost entirely different from his own. In
Germany, paradoxical though it may sound to English ears, there
is neither a government nor a people. The word "government" occurs
only once in the Imperial Constitution, the Magna Charta of modern
Germans, which in 1870 settled the relations between the Emperor and
what the Englishman calls the "people," and then only in an
unimportant context joined to the word "federal."

In Germany, instead of "the people" the Englishman speaks of when he
talks politics, and the democratic orator, Mr. Bryan, in America is
fond of calling the "peopul," there is a "folk," who neither claim
to be, nor apparently wish to be, a "people" in the English sense.
The German folk have their traditions as the English people have
traditions, and their place in the political system as the English
people have; but both traditions and place are wholly different from
those of the English people; indeed, it may be said are just the