the inland Germans to the sea. “I will not rest,” he telegraphed
to his brother, “till I have brought my navy to the same height
at which my army stands.” The development of German
armaments during the next few years (see Navy) showed that
this was no idle boast. But, while it was inevitable that the
inference should be drawn that the increase of the German
navy was directed towards eventual hostilities with Great Britain,
the emperor himself insisted that the real object was the preservation
of peace consistently with the maintenance of Germany's
“place in the sun.” In March 1905, in a speech at Bremen,
he declared the aim of the Hohenzollerns to be “a world-wide
dominion founded upon conquests not gained by the sword,
but by the mutual confidence of nations that press towards
the same goal.” “Every German warship launched,” he said,
“is one guarantee more for peace on earth.” In the same
spirit he protested later, in an “interview” published in the
Daily Telegraph of the 28th of October 1908, that he had always
been actuated by the friendliest feelings towards England, but
that “Germany must be prepared for any eventualities in the
East,” and that, in view of the growing naval power of Japan,
England should welcome the existence of a German fleet “when
they speak together on the same side in the great debates of the
future” For to the emperor, who had published a cartoon,
drawn by himself, representing the European powers in league
against the Yellow Peril, the Anglo-Japanese alliance seemed
a betrayal of the white race, an unnatural league which could
not last. The justification of his naval policy so far as European
affairs were concerned was revealed in the effective intervention
of Germany in regard to France and Morocco in 1905, and
in 1909 in the defiance of British policy when Austria,
backed by Germany, tore up the treaty of Berlin in regard to
Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In numerous rhetorical speeches the emperor had impressed the world with his personal conviction of autocratic sovereignty, and his monarchical activity was certain, sooner or later, to bring him into conflict with the constitutional limitations of his position as king of Prussia and German emperor. His imperial style, constitutionally but the honorary title of the primus inter pares in a free confederation of sovereign princes, was invested by him with something of the glamour of that of the Holy Roman emperors, with their shadowy claim to world-dominion. In speech after speech he proclaimed the world-mission of Germany, of which he himself was the divinely appointed instrument; Germans are “the salt of the earth[1];” they must not “weary in the work of civilization,” and Germanism, like the spirit of imperial Rome, must expand and impose itself.[2] This new imperialism, too, had a religious basis, for “the whole of human life hinges simply and solely on our attitude towards our Lord and Saviour.”[3] The emperor's progresses in the East were conceived in the spirit of the new crusade, at once Christian and German; and a solemn service, to which none but the emperor and his train were admitted, was held on the summit of the Mount of Olives. In the same spirit, too, the emperor dispensed the marks of his approval and disapproval beyond the borders of his own jurisdiction, sometimes with results which were open to criticism. The “Kruger telegram” has been mentioned; scarcely less characteristic was the message despatched by him on the 9th of April 1906. after the Algeciras conference, to Count Goluchowski, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, congratulating him on having proved “a brilliant second on the duelling-ground.” Goluchowski's retirement was mainly due to this compliment. In 1905 he bestowed the order Pour le Mérite not only on the Japanese general Nogi, but also on the Russian general Stössel, the defender of Port Arthur, who was afterwards condemned by a Russian court-martial for dereliction of duty. In 1902 his telegram to the regent of Bavaria condemning the refusal of the clerical majority in the diet to vote £5000 for art purposes, and offering himself to supply the money, was regarded as an unwarrantable interference in the internal affairs of Bavaria and roused strong resentment among the clericals all over Germany.
Owing to the political conditions in Germany it was generally left for the Socialists to attack these excursions on the part of the emperor into fields which lay beyond his strict prerogative. But, apart from the traditional lines of political cleavage, such as the inherited hatred of the Liberal South for the Hohenzollern “corporal's cane,” other centres of dissatisfaction were coming into being. The emperor was isolated in his efforts to impose the old, strenuous, Prussian ideals of “self-denial, discipline, religion, avoidance of foreign contagion.” With the growth of wealth Germany was becoming materialized and to some extent Americanized, partly through the actual reflux of emigrants grown rich in the United States. In this new society, far removed from the days, denounced by the historian Gervinus, when the Germans were content to “fiddle and be slaves,” the phrases which still woke responsive echoes in the squires of the Old Mark of Brandenburg were apt to create surprise, if not indignation; and in the great industrial classes the principles of Social Democracy spread apace. The emperor himself here and there even yielded a little to the new ideas, as when, in the famous “Babel and Bible” controversy of 1903, arising out of lectures in which Professor Delitzsch had derived Jewish monotheism from Babylonian polytheism, he publicly accepted the main conclusion of the “higher criticism” of the Old Testament, while maintaining that the kernel and contents, God and His works, remain always the same; or when on the 17th of November 1906, on the 25th anniversary of William I.'s edict announcing national insurance, he promised further social reforms. But he was impatient of what he considered factious opposition, and was apt to appeal from the nation in parliament to the nation in arms, as when in 1906, at the Silesian manœuvres, he condemned the critical spirit exercised towaids the government, and invoked once more the protection of Germany's “Divine Ally.” Clearly, this was an attitude which was inconsistent with the development of what prided itself on being a constitutional state; but there were obvious difficulties in the way of controlling the utterances of a ruler, vigorous, self-confident and conscious of the best intentions, who was also the master of many legions, whose military spirit he could evoke at will. In October 1906 the publication of Prince Hohenlohe's Memoirs, containing indiscreet revelations of the emperor's action in the dismissal of Bismarck, caused a profound sensation. A few months later, in February 1907, the prestige of the court was further damaged by various unsavoury revelations, made by Herr Harden in the Zukunft, as to the character of the “camarilla” by which the emperor was surrounded, and it was affirmed that a connexion could hers be traced with the fall of Caprivi in 1894. The long-drawn-out trials and counter-trials left the character of the emperor entirely unstained, but they resulted in the disgrace of men who had been his confidants — Prince Philip Eulenburg, Count Kuno Moltke and others. The attitude of the emperor throughout was manly and sensible; and not the least satisfactory outcome of the whole sorry business was the issue, on the 28th of January 1907, of an edict, afterwards embodied in a bill, greatly modifying the law of lèse-majesté, which in the earlier part of the reign had been used to ridiculous excess in the imprisonment of the authors of the slightest reflection on the person of the sovereign.
Anglo-German relations were apparently improved by a visit of the emperor to England in November 1907. But early in 1908 they were again strained by the revelation, made in The Times of the 6th of March, of a correspondence between the emperor and Lord Tweedmouth, the first lord of the admiralty, in which, in answer to friendly assurances on the emperor's part, the British secretary of state had communicated to him an outline of the new naval programme before it had even been laid on the table of the House of Commons. The angry controversy to which this gave rise, and the emperor's attempts to allay it, led at the end of the year to a serious crisis in his relations with his subjects. On the 11th of August he had met Edward VII. at Cronberg; on the 30th, in a speech at Strassburg, he reiterated
