Emperor was strong enough to impose his will on his advisers, he was
largely at their mercy. Had they been chosen by the people, the people
and not the Emperor would have borne the responsibility, if the views of
these advisers diverged from their own. But they were chosen by the
Emperor, and chosen in varying moods as to policy. The result was that,
excellent as were the departments at their special work in most cases,
on general policy there was no guarantee for unity of mind. The Emperor
lived amid a sea of conflicting opinions. The Chancellor might have one
idea, the Foreign Secretary, a Prussian and not Imperial Minister, a
different one, the Chief of the General Staff a third, the War Minister
a fourth, and the Head of the Admiralty a fifth. Thus the Kaiser was
constantly being pulled at from different sides, and whichever Minister
had the most powerful combination at his back generally got the best of
the argument. Were the Kaiser in an impulsive mood he might side now
with one and again with another, and the result would necessarily be
confusion. Moreover, he had constantly to fix one eye on public opinion
in Germany, and another on public opinion abroad. It is therefore not
surprising that Germany seemed to foreigners a strange and
unintelligible country, and that sudden manifestations of policy were
made which shocked us here, accustomed as we were to something quite
different. Neither our pacifists nor our chauvinists really succeeded in
diagnosing Germany. On the other hand, we ourselves were a standing
puzzle to the Germans. They could not understand how Government could be
conducted in the absence of abstract principles exactly laid down. And
because our democratic system was one of choosing our rulers and
trusting them with a large discretion within limits, the Germans always
suspected that this system, with which they were unfamiliar, covered a
device for concealing hidden policies. I wrote in some detail about this
in an address delivered at Oxford in the autumn of 1911, and afterward
published in a little volume called "Universities and National Life."