to other news and only the initiated realized that the Kaiser' meant from now on to speak not merely for Germany but for the whole of Europe.

This January of 1896 may be taken as the moment when the Kaiser lost his balance; when the example of the Great Frederic ceased to influence him and when he succumbed to a disease called megalomania.

But he was to me only a sincere lover of Peace; an eager student in every department of human science; an admirer of England; a conscientious public servant after the pattern of the great sage of Sans Souci.

In 1888 he became Emperor, and each year I was his guest for every one of his corps inspections; which meant visiting each province of the Empire and seeing the country at first hand; for we were in the saddle and riding across country from before sunrise until close of day. He gave me many occasions for conversation and could listen as well as talk. His reading was extensive and his memory magnificent; he knew personally every important person in every town of Germany and those who deal in politics know how much that means in the making of popularity.

One day when on horseback near him, he called my attention to the venerable Field Marshal von Blumenthal, then upwards of 80 years of age. It was a raw, sleety and windy day in September, but the old general wore no overcoat. The Emperor sent

an aide de camp to beg von Blumenthal to dơn his great coat, but the answer came back that he felt very comfortable.

At this the Emperor proceeded to put on his own warm cloak, saying to me: "I must do it--otherwise the old general will get a chill on my account!" Of course, so soon as Blumenthal saw the Emperor cover himself he lost no time in following suit-as did the rest of his suite. Endless were the tales I heard of the Kaiser's thoughtfulness for others; and interest in anything that meant a betterment of social conditions. He frequently asked me about problems of government in England and America-and expressed himself with severity regarding the worldly life of his uncle the late Edward VII and the apparently harmful effect of his example upon an aristocracy much given to mere amusement. He was deeply religious and regarded the building of churches as a very essential part of his political work.

These pages are necessarily personal, for I pretend to know no more than a witness in court giving evidence regarding one whom the world now is judging as another Genseric.

In his home life William was a model husband and father. He was married so soon as he came of age; and whilst scores of professional dancers and singers claimed through their press agents that they had en

joyed in Berlin more than platonic handling in the Palace, the prosaic truth is that we can find no substance for these pleasing dreams. He loved his wife and home after the most approved puritan pattern and marvelled that his anacreontic uncle could preserve his popularity in the land of Queen Victoria. The Kaiser smoked very little; drank light wine moderately; was up and at work amongst the earliest in his Capital and took regular out-door exercise. He had no fear for his life. Any one could have shot him as he rode on horseback the whole length of the broad Linden Avenue, under the Brandenburg Arch of Triumph and so on through the great park. All the world knew the hour of his ride and the route. No secret service men accompanied him as they do our Presidents; his two equerries rode far behind out of ear shot and could not have saved him had a furibund Guiteau or Czolgosz attacked him with a pistol or even a knife.

One day he asked me to walk with him from the Neues Palais to the so-called Holy Pond and thus to the Havel-about three miles in each direction. It was a drizzly November day and he walked briskly through the long Sans Souci Avenue and then the whole extent of Potsdam itself. The town was alive with peasants who crowded the sidewalks in eager chaffering or gazing into shop windows. The two

equerries were behind; but so far, that a stranger would not have thought them of our party. The Emperor was then 33 years old, wearing a military grey overcoat and cap and looking much like any one of the hundreds of his age amongst the officers of his garrison. On that whole walk through Potsdam I recall but three civilians who recognized him—on the contrary, we had constantly to turn out into the street in favor of deep chested and vigorously gesticulating women who at that moment were absorbed in settling the price of a kilo of butter and had no eyes for any Kaiser save on a silver coin. We had been commenting on the law governing political assassination, for in those days the royal sport of Muscovy seemed to be one in which the Czar traveled by one train whilst he dispatched the others as decoys for nihilist bombs. I had referred to the unsatisfactory nature of a Russian Emperor's job and the precautions he had to take against attacks upon his person. were approaching a cellar hole covered by an iron lid. and I said: "Now if this were St. Petersburg you would suspect a bomb under that cellar lid." He laughed; walked straight at the supposititious engine of destruction and gave it a resounding bang with his foot. Then turning to me he said seriously: "If I had to think of my life, I could not possibly do my day's work." William II, like Frederic the Great,

We

was born a very frail thing; and performed his enormous daily task only by the most conscientious control of his appetites and his out-door exercise. He had a very wise medical mentor in the late Dr. Leuthold of blessed memory who doctored in the spirit of "old Fritz" who once wrote to Voltaire: “I have as little faith in doctors of medicine as in those of theology"-another form of an English proverb: "A man at forty is either a fool or his own physician. Dr. Leuthold gave no drugs, but prescribed very strict regimen and enforced it.

Let us now look at the Kaiser politically and search for the explanation of his later policies those of the mailed fist and the war lord and the jingling of his mighty sword in its loose and far too easily worked scabbard.

He entered the army at the age of ten; was a lieutenant when he entered Bonn University as a duelling corps student and was made a major general at 28. His early life was calculated to stir in him admiration for military achievement; particularly so as the Prussian army was in his eyes idealized in the persons of such grand veterans as Moltke and his contemporaries to whom Germany owed her extraordinary expansion through the three wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870.