E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
by
STANLEY SHAW, LL.D.
Trinity College Dublin
1913
The Frontispiece is from a photograph by E. Bieber, of Berlin
XI. THE NEW CENTURY—continued (1902-1904)……….. 237
William the Second, German Emperor and King of Prussia, Burgrave ofNürnberg, Margrave of Brandenburg, Landgrave of Hessen and Thuringia,Prince of Orange, Knight of the Garter and Field-Marshal of GreatBritain, etc., was born in Berlin on January 27, 1859, and ascendedthe throne on June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, fifty-four years oldin the present year of his Jubilee, 1913, and his reign—happily yetunfinished—has extended over a quarter of a century.
The Englishman who would understand the Emperor and his time mustimagine a country with a monarchy, a government, and a people—inshort, a political system—almost entirely different from his own. InGermany, paradoxical though it may sound to English ears, thereis neither a government nor a people. The word "government" occursonly once in the Imperial Constitution, the Magna Charta of modernGermans, which in 1870 settled the relations between the Emperor andwhat the Englishman calls the "people," and then only in anunimportant context joined to the word "federal."
In Germany, instead of "the people" the Englishman speaks of when hetalks politics, and the democratic orator, Mr. Bryan, in America isfond of calling the "peopul," there is a "folk," who neither claimto be, nor apparently wish to be, a "people" in the English sense.The German folk have their traditions as the English people havetraditions, and their place in the political system as the Englishpeople have; but both traditions and place are wholly different fromthose of the English people; indeed, it may be said are just thereverse of them.
The German Emperor believes, and assumes his people to believe, thatthe Hollenzollern monarch is specially chosen by Heaven to guide andgovern a folk entrusted to him as the talent was entrusted to thesteward in Scripture. Until 1848, a little over sixty years ago, theEmperor (at that time only King of Prussia) was an absolute, or almostabsolute, monarch, supp