WILLIAM II

MODERN AUTOCRACY

BY POULTNEY BIGELOW

Late Professor of National Expansion, Boston University

CHAPTER I

A

GREAT American Captain of Industry is cred

ited with saying: "All history is bunk!". I do not know what "bunk" means, but it was obviously not used in a complimentary sense and for my part I do not believe it was ever said unless the great manufacturer meant that all things are "bunk". Ford cars-all accessories to the vanity denounced in the Christian bible.

History helps humanity to go forward by the light of past misfortunes. The child listens to the tales of his parents and in turn transmits his own experience to the fruit of his marriage. That is History. Nations prosper when guided by those who know the past and great Empires have rotted and collapsed through the leadership of men whose momentary popularity led them to despise the ways of their fathers

in order to achieve the dangerous glory that "leads but to the grave" or Amerongen!

William II achieved an almost unlimited popularity and power in Germany because he knew his country, its resources, its leading people and its history. He was through and through a Prussian and a Hohenzollern. The traditions of autocracy were bone of his bone-he lived and breathed in the spirit of his grandfather the venerable William I and even more in that of the Great Frederic.

Autocracy like alcohol is good or bad according to him who wields the scepter or the drug. The Prussian autocrats have in the past three centuries given to us examples of hard working and very intelligent public servants who have left their country better than they found it; who have led as a rule exemplary domestic lives; who have shown religious tolerance in days when their brother autocrats roasted heretical subjects and who fostered education when other states regarded ignorance as the mother of true piety. Autocracy in Prussia has been tempered by parliamentary forms and a written constitution; but the spirit of the people is monarchical and the Kings of Prussia accept their crown only from the hand of God. No papal or parliamentary delegate comes between a Hohenzollern and the source of his power. He stalks in full soldier dress to the altar and with

his own hands picks up the emblem of majesty and places it upon his head. Then he draws his long blade from its scabbard and invites the world in general to dispute his title.

These are the outward signs of real government; and they are laughable unless he who stalks to the high altar has at his back the support of his people. And thus we close the circle of autocracy by finding that the autocrat can do little save as he commands the respect if not the love of the masses-the populace, the plebs, the demos. The Prussian autocrat has in the past been fully alive to the loneliness and the danger of his holy estate; he cannot roll off his responsibility upon a parliamentary committee or a council of ministers. It is his own property that he is administering and it is his duty to merit the approval of his "resting-in-God" ancestors and more particularly that of his heirs to the throne. For this reason Prussian princes have ever been trained from childhood in some handicraft by which they might, if need be, earn their living-not forgetting that the first duty of a good man is to fight for his countryand therefor no citizen should be without soldier training.

Frederic the Great was an ideal Monarch as George Washington was an ideal President or Benjamin Franklin an ideal diplomatist. Many mon

archs have grasped at the title of Great, but in the case of the illustrious Fritz, his rank in history can be but more firmly fixed by the study of his life. He loved peace and hated war. Voltaire was a pacifist by profession; but Frederic enforced what a philosopher could but preach. Frederic had to fight for his Peace, and he drew the sword so soon as he had seized the scepter. He fought with few interruptions from the year of his accession in 1740 to the close of the memorable seven years' war in 1763 when he sheathed his blade and became a farmer, a manufacturer, a road builder, an architect, a political economist. He lived nearly a quarter of a century from the date of Peace; he was head and shoulders the greatest general and the strongest monarch of his time and he was offered many opportunities for still further adding to his military laurels. But he was great in peace no less than war; and having secured the respect of his neighbors he gave all his energy to making the people prosperous and contented. It is little exaggeration to say that when the Great Frederic slept his last sleep in his big arm chair at Sans Souci, Prussia was not merely the most humanely and efficiently governed state of Europe she offered the great mass of the people better education, a better administration and more personal liberty than in these United States of today. ⠀⠀⠀