In this dogmatic phase of his character William is much more like Frederic William I than like any of his nearer ancestors in the Hohenzollern line. These later monarchs, beginning with Frederic the Great and following his luminous example, were habitually chary about bothering themselves with their subjects’ opinions. William at one time thought a good deal upon the fact that he was a successor of Frederic the Great, and by fits and starts set himself to imitate the earlier acts of that sovereign. His restless flying about from place to place, and, even more clearly, his edicts rebuking the army officers for gambling and for harshness to their men, were copied from that illustrious original. But in his attitude toward the mental and moral liberty of his subjects he goes back a generation to Frederic’s father--and suggests to us also the reflection that he is a grandson of that highly self-confident gentleman whom English-speaking people knew as the Prince Consort.
Frederic the Great had so little of this spirit in him that he made himself memorably unique among eighteenth-century sovereigns by allowing such freedom to the press that liberty sank into license, and the most scandalous and mendacious attacks upon his personal life were printed in and hawked about Berlin to the end of his days. As for his refusal to interfere in the alleged perversion of Protestant children by Catholic teachers, his comment on the margin of the ministerial complaint, “In this country every man must get to heaven in his own way,” is justly cherished to this day as worth all his other writings put together.
William’s spasms, so to speak, of imitative loyalty to the memories of his ancestors have been productive of many curious, not to say diverting, results. Their progressive consecutiveness is not always easy to make out, but they afford, as a whole, very interesting insights into the young man’s temperament.
When tragic chance thrust him forward and upon the throne, his youthful imagination happened to be in some mysterious way under the spell of that most astounding of all his forefathers, Frederic William I. He spoke frequently with enthusiasm of the character of this rude, choleric barbarian, and even brought himself to believe that there was something fine in that strange creature’s inability to speak any language but German. It was under the sway of this admiration for the second Prussian King that William, in January of 1889, had all the French cooks in his palaces discharged, and ordered that hereafter the royal bill of fare should be a _Speisekarte_, with the names of dishes in German, instead of the accustomed _menu_ in French. It will not, however, have escaped notice that William is a changeable young man, and this ultra-Teutonic mood did not last very long. In the following autumn he had so far recovered from it that his visit to Constantinople was reported to have been marred by the Sultan’s mistaken hospitality in giving him nothing but German champagnes to drink. It must be admitted, however, that scarcely the most robust prejudice could stand out long under such a test.
