merits. William II looked at me intently and then, as one making up his mind to do his duty at whatever cost, said that it was impossible-that on his death bed, he had received the monition of his venerable grandfather to cultivate at any cost the friendship of Russia. :

And you of self governing ideals may pause to ask why the land of universal education and religious tolerance should so zealously desire unity with an Empire conspicuous for illiteracy and barbaric intolerance! The Kaiser's reason to me was that at that moment there were but two great nations based broadly and solidly on Autocracy, Prussia and Russia!

And now as I gaze at the wreckage of Romanoff and Hohenzollern thrones, those words have a portentous value in explaining many an error in his reign of thirty years.

He was an Autocrat-an avowed one-a benevolent ruler, a deeply religious Christian, and at the same time I venture to think that he was the most universally admired if not the most beloved figure in the whole wide world.

He dismissed Bismarck for two good reasons-and I repeat them as he gave them to me at the time.

The first reason was that Bismarck, whilst professing support of an absolute monarchy, actually had come to regard himself as the ruler of the Empire instead

of the first subject of its Emperor. You may for yourself see that from the accession of Bismarck in 1862 until the close of the French War ten years afterwards, each step of the Iron Chancelor meant an aggrandisement of Prussia, because it was taken hand in hand with a victorious Prussian army. The wars that made of Germany the arbiter of Europe were the three fought within a space of seven years-between 1864 and 1871. Diplomacy is a comparatively simple game when one party is a victorious army and the other must accept whatever terms are offered. The Iron Chancelor stood at the zenith of his fame and power when France lay bruised and bleeding at his feet in 1871. He did not permit her to rise and bind those wounds until she had signed the bond by which her fairest provinces were surrendered and by which a money payment was exacted so heavy that all the world thought the terms ruinous.

Moreover the great diplomatist accepted no promissory notes or promises of any kind. He demanded blood and-coin. And until his demands were met to the uttermost farthing he kept a Prussian army camped on the soil of France and that army lived on the fat of the land.

But after the bruising of Denmark, Austria and France, Germany needed no longer a bruiser, but a statesman; and you who have his life at your elbow

may note therein that from the day when bruising ceased to serve the cause of Germanic reconstruction, the labors of the Iron Chancelor were comparable only to what might be looked for should Vulcan take upon himself the task of Apollo.

The second reason was more intimate. Bismarck had a Prussian contempt for all women, but for the Empress Frederic he had a particularly hostile feeling because she was not merely English but she took no pains to conceal her dislike of the Chancelor's brutal methods. He divined in her a political opponent no less than the representative of a superior set of social ideas. Already he had muzzled her husband, but he was yet to learn that brute force is a poor match against the sex par excellence. William II loved and honored his mother however much he might differ from her in matters of state. He no doubt had many a talk in which harsh words may have been exchanged. But in a family matter, however bitter, the Kaiser never for a moment permitted an outsider to want in respect for her imperial attributes. Now Bismarck not only showed a desire to be the Tycoon of Prussia as against a Wilhelm the Second Mikado; but he even went so far as to treat the mother of his Emperor as target for political inuendo in his officially inspired newspapers-he referred to her insultingly

as: Die Englaenderin; much as the mob of 1792 stigmatized Marie Antoinette as "l' Autrichienne"!

The great Chancelor like the great Napoleon neglected no means however base or however picayune if thereby he could harm an enemy; and in our time few engines of destruction are more easily guided than a press whose purpose is to make money and whose ink is tinctured with poison. Thus one of the noblest characters that ever sat upon a throne was in the press of her adopted country daily treated as a secret enemy and held up to the hatred of a Hun rabble.

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And William II expelled Bismarck in the face of an amazed Europe and an alarmed Germany. It was however a step forced upon him by his minister's arrogance, and it proved what many had suspected, that the greatness of Bismarck reposed more upon brute force and craftiness than upon a broad foundation of spiritual equanimity. A great man is great no less in his home than in a public station. Washington was no less the Father of his country when retired on his Virginia plantation, than when receiv ing the surrender of a British army at Yorktown; Wellington remained great long after Waterloo and Jefferson Davis was no less beloved in his declining years, at Beauvoir, than when Commander-in-Chief of an army dedicated to the cause of an independent Confederacy of Southern States. But Bismarck in retire

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ment shriveled from his former pompous proportions to a querulous and impotent seeker after office. courted interviews in the newspapers he who formerly treated the press of his country as a bag of poison gas. He freely criticized those whom the Kaiser selected for high posts he who formerly prosecuted such as dared to discuss his own actions. But throughout these years of undignified retreat, William II never forgot what Bismarck had accomplished in the past for Prussian autocracy; he never failed to pay all possible honor to his former chief minister and when he died in 1898 I doubt if amongst the mourners was any one who more sincerely appreciated past services than Germany's War Lord.

Bismarck had personally trained his Kaiser, when Prince, in the mysteries of diplomacy; and we must not be surprised if William learned good and bad from this very rugged and yet very wily instructor.

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Germany was alarmed when Bismarck was dismissed, because a whole generation had been educated in a school for which Bismarck had selected the text books. William II however grew in popularity from day to day, for the reasons already indicated. He traveled incessantly; he knew his land and its people as no German ever had since Martin Luther. He came in personal contact with practically every man, woman

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