hesitate to provoke Russia: it is the Slavs who threaten that if a
provocation takes place they will revolt.

Let me add that the official organs in Germany, Italy and Vienna only
raise a smile nowadays when they describe Russia and France as
thunderbolts of war.



November 12, 1890. [15]

At the outset of the reign of William II, referring to his father, I
spoke of the "dead hand" and its power over the living. Now, what has
the young King of Prussia done since his accession to the Throne? He,
the flatterer of Bismarck, this disciple of Pastor Stöker, this
out-and-out soldier, this hard and haughty personage, who was wont to
blame his august parents for their bourgeois amiability and their
frequent excursions? He carries out everything that his father
planned, but he does it under impulse from without and he does it
badly, without forethought, without the sincerity or the natural
quality which is revealed in a man by a course of skilful action
legitimate in its methods.

He smashed Von Bismarck in brutal fashion. His father, on the other
hand, was wont to say: "I will not touch the Chancellor's statue, but I
will remove the stones, one by one, from his pedestal, so that some
fine day it will collapse of itself."

It is a curious thing that these reforms and ideas, not having been
applied by the monarch whose character would have harmonised perfectly