So that to me this extraordinary refusal of the allied nations under
conditions that have always hitherto produced a Great Man to produce
anything of the sort, anything that can be used as an effigy and carried
about for the crowd to follow, is a fact of extreme significance and
encouragement. It seems to me that the twilight of the half gods must
have come, that we have reached the end of the age when men needed a
Personal Figure about which they could rally. The Kaiser is perhaps
the last of that long series of crowned and cloaked and semi-divine
personages which has included Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon the
First--and Third. In the light of the new time we see the emperor-god
for the guy he is. In the August of 1914 he set himself up to be the
paramount Lord of the World, and it will seem to the historian to come,
who will know our dates so well and our feelings, our fatigues and
efforts so little, it will seem a short period from that day to this,
when the great figure already sways and staggers towards the bonfire.


5

I had the experience of meeting a contemporary king upon this journey.
He was the first king I had ever met. The Potsdam figure--with perhaps
some local exceptions behind the Gold Coast--is, with its collection of
uniforms and its pomps and splendours, the purest survival of the old
tradition of divine monarchy now that the Emperor at Pekin has followed
the Shogun into the shadows. The modern type of king shows a disposition
to intimate at the outset that he cannot help it, and to justify or at
any rate utilise his exceptional position by sound hard work. It is an
age of working kings, with the manners of private gentlemen. The King
of Italy for example is far more accessible than was the late Pierpont