His pose is always that of the anointed King of My People. He has never given down on that point, however much he has applied State Socialism to appease the Socialistic agitation. He has personified Germany and German ambition with an adroit egoism and the sentiment of his inheritance. Those critics who see the machinery of the throne may say that he has the mind of a journalist, quick of perception, ready of assimilation, knowing many things in their essentials but no one thing thoroughly. But this is the kind of mind that a ruler requires, plus the craft of the politician.
Is he a good man? Is he a great man? Banal questions! He is the Kaiser on the background of the Sièges Allée, who has first promoted himself, then the Hohenzollerns, and then the interests of Germany with all the zest of the foremost shareholder and president of the corporation. No German in the German hothouse of industry has worked harder than he. He has kept himself up to the mark and tried to keep his people up to the mark. It may be the wrong kind of a mark; but we are not discussing that, and we may beg leave to differ without threshing the old straw of argument.
That young private I met in the grounds at Charlottenberg, that wounded man helping with the harvest, that tired hospital director, the small trader in Hamburg, the sturdy Red Cross woman in the station at Hanover, the peasants and the workers throughout Germany, kept unimaginatively at their tasks, do not see the machinery of the throne, only the man in the photograph who supplies them with a national imagination. His indefatigable goings and comings and his poses fill their minds with a personality which typifies the national spirit. Will this change after the war? But that, too, is not a subject for speculation here.
Through the war his pose has met the needs of the hour. An emperor bowed down with the weight of his people’s sacrifice, a grey, determined emperor hastening to honour the victors, covering up defeats, urging his legions on, himself at the front, never seen by the general public in the rear, a mysterious figure, not saying much and that foolish to the Allies but appealing to the Germans, rather appearing to submerge his own personality in the united patriotism of the struggle--such is the picture which the throne machinery has impressed on the German mind. The histrionic gift may be at its best in creating a saga.