club; it is now safe to predict that they will henceforward be regarded
with less favour than ever, and that generals, colonels, majors and the
rest will form up into a solid phalanx, to prevent the Emperor's
platonic _protégés_ from getting in.

William II appeals to the higher ranks of officers, who are tradition
personified, to put an end to tradition. It is really wonderful what a
genius he has for exciting cupidity in one class and resistance in the
other. And he has done the same thing with the working class as with
the army.

What a strange riddle his character presents--this quietist, this
worshipper of an angry and a jealous God, with a mania for achieving
the happiness of his people in the twinkling of an eye! A strange
figure, this Emperor of country squires, who despises the bourgeois and
who threatens to despoil the aristocracy of the very privileges which
have been the safeguard of the Hohenzollerns' throne for centuries.

These peculiarities are due to an occult influence which weighs on the
mind of William II, an influence which, while it points the way to
action, blinds him to its consequences. The dead hand is upon him!

Frederick III, that liberal, bourgeois monarch, compels his
reactionary, Old-Prussian-school son, to do those things which he would
have done himself, had he not been victimised by Bismarck and his pupil.

I wonder whether the ever-mystical William II sometimes reflects on the
ways by which God leads men into His appointed ways? Such thoughts
might do more to enlighten him than his way of gazing at the heavens in
the belief that all the stars are his.