It is not easy for the American to put side by side the attitudes of a man, who is the autocratic master and at the same time declares himself to be the first servant of his people. Perhaps if it is phrased differently it will not seem so contradictory. What this Emperor means, and what all princes who have believed in their right to rule meant, was not that they were the servants of their people, but the servants of their own obligations to their people, and of the duties that followed therefrom. If in addition to this the claim is made by the sovereign, that his right to rule is of divine origin, then his service to his obligations becomes of the highest and most sacred importance.
We should not allow our democratic prejudices to stifle our understanding in such matters. We are trying to get clearly in perspective a ruler, who claims to rule in obedience to no mandates from the people, but in obedience to God. We could not be ruled by such a one in America; and in England such a ruler would be deemed unconstitutional. It is elementary, but necessary to repeat, that we are writing of Germany and the Germans, and of their history, traditions, and political methods. We are making no defence of either the German Emperor or the German people; neither are we occupying an American pulpit to preach to them the superiority of other methods than their own. My sole task is to make clear the German situation, and not by any means to set up my own or my countrymen's standards for their adoption. I am not searching for that paltry and ephemeral profit that comes from finding opportunities to laugh or to sneer. I am seeking for the German successes, and they are many, and for the reasons for them, and for the lessons that we may learn from them. Any other aim in writing of another people is ignoble.
This attitude of the ruler will be as incomprehensible to the democratic citizen as alchemy, but, in order to draw anything like true inferences or useful deductions, in order to understand the situation and to get a true likeness of the ruler, one must take this utterly unfamiliar and to us incomprehensible claim into consideration, and acknowledge its existence whether we admit the claim as justifiable or not. The relation of such a ruler to his people is like that of a Catholic bishop to his flock. The contract is not one made with hands, but is an inalienable right on the one hand, and an undisseverable tie upon the other. Bismarck wrote on this subject: "Für mich sind die Worte, 'von Gottes Gnaden,' welche christliche Herrscher ihrem Namen beifügen, kein leerer Schall, sondern ich sehe darin das Bekenntniss, des Fürsten das Scepter was ihnen Gott verliehen hat, nur nach Gottes Willen auf Erden führen wollen."