about his excited person. Meanwhile the Emperor Alexander III, calm in
the serenity of his nature, takes his rest in the pleasant retreat of
Fredensborg, where he finds contented virtues and the joys of family life.

It really looks as if a certain deviltry were at work against William II.
His splendid statecraft now revolves about questions of rye bread,
Russian geese, and American pork; he struggles amidst a mass of
difficulties more comic than sublime. He has imposed a system of rigid
protection in order to entangle his allies in a net of tariffs favourable
only to Germany, and now behold him, all of a sudden, removing the duties
off diseased pork, all for the profit of the McKinley Bill, the scourge
of Germany. Only the future can say what dangers await a policy of
fierce protection and dangerous favouritism. How much simpler and
cleverer it would have been to remove the duties on cereals! As far as
the people are concerned, cheap pork will never appeal to them as cheap
bread would have done. The progressive party had asked for both; the
satisfaction they have received appeases them for the moment, but the
socialists will still be able to say that William's Government takes off
the duties on foodstuffs that poison the people, and leaves them on those
which would afford them healthy nourishment.



September 27, 1891. [14]

William II has decidedly no luck when he puts the martial trumpet to his
lips. It was at Erfurt that he learned that the tribes of the Wa Héhé
had massacred Zalewski's expedition into East Africa. It is said that,
on hearing this news, the German Emperor, seized with one of those sudden
outbursts of rage which throw him into convulsions, swore to avenge in