The episode is chiefly interesting now because it seems to have been of great educational value to the young Emperor. It really marked out for him, in a striking object lesson, the grave international limitations by which his position is hemmed in. He has never since made another such false step. Indeed the solitary other cause of friction between France and Germany which has arisen during his reign proceeded from an action of a diametrically opposite nature--to wit, an attempt to conciliate instead of offend.
Of much more permanent importance in the history of William and of his Empire was the great miners’ strike in Westphalia, which may be said to have begun on the 1st of May. This tremendous upheaval of labour at one time involved the idleness of over 100,000 men--by no means all miners or all Westphalians. The shortened coal supply affected industries everywhere, and other trades struck because the spirit of mutiny was in the air. In many districts the military were called out to guard the pits’ mouths, and sanguinary conflicts with the strikers ensued.
Evidently this big convulsion took William completely by surprise. Up to this time he had been deeply engrossed in the spectacular side of his position--the showy and laborious routine of an Emperor who is also a practical working soldier. Such thought as he had given to the great economic problems pressing for solution all about him, seems to have been of the most casual sort and cast wholly in the Bismarckian mould. What Bismarck’s views on this subject were and are, is well known. He believes that over-education has filled the labouring classes of Germany with unnatural and unreasonable discontent, which is sedulously played upon by depraved Socialist agitators, and that the only way to deal with the trouble is to imprison or banish as many of these latter as possible, and crush out the disaffection by physical force wherever it manifests itself. He decorates this position with varying sophistical frills and furbelows from time to time, but in its essence that is what he thinks. And up to May of 1889 that is apparently what William thought, too.
The huge proportions of this sudden revolt of labour made William nervous, however, and in this excited state he was open to new impressions. The anti-Bismarck coalition saw their chance and swiftly utilized it. With all haste they summoned Dr. Hinzpeter from his home at Bielefeld, and persuaded William to confer with his old tutor upon this alarming industrial complication, with which it was clearly enough to be seen his other advisers did not know how to deal. No exact date is given for the interview which William had with Dr. Hinzpeter, but the day upon which it was held should be a memorable one in German history. For then dawned upon the mind of the young Kaiser that dream of Christian Socialism with the influence of which we must always thereafter count.