Читать книгу The German Emperor as Shown in His Public Utterances - German Emperor William II - Страница 6

	1871	1881	1893	1907	1912
Right, or Conservative	895,000	1,210,000	1,806,000	2,151,000	1,149,916
Liberal	1,884,000	1,948,000	2,102,000	3,078,000	3,227,846
Clerical	973,000	1,618,000	1,920,000	2,779,000	2,012,990
Social Democrats	124,000	312,000	1,787,000	3,259,000	4,238,919

In spite of this representation in the Reichstag, the power of the German political parties is slight. The power lies far more with the Emperor and the Bundesrat. According to Article II of the Constitution, the Emperor represents the empire internationally and can declare war if defensive (in German eyes the present is a defensive war), can make peace as well as enter into treaties with other nations, and appoint and receive ambassadors. When treaties are related to matters regulated by imperial legislation, and when war is not merely defensive, the Emperor must have the consent of the Bundesrat, in which, together with the Reichstag, are vested the legislative functions of the empire. But de facto, and through her power of veto, Prussia controls the Bundesrat, and as King of Prussia the Emperor controls Prussia.

That, even so, the Constitution is not the real and final source of political power, but a convenient political instrument, which in the mind of so great an authority as Bismarck might still easily be changed without consulting the people, we may gather from the fact that the Great Chancellor frequently debated the question of limiting the suffrage. “The blind Hödhur[1] [the German elector] does not know how to manipulate in his coarse hands the Nuremberg toy [the Reichstag] which I gave him, and through his voting he is ruining the Fatherland.” According to Hohenlohe, Bismarck considered setting aside the Reichstag and returning to the old Bundestag.

[1] In Norse mythology Hödhur was the powerful blind god who slew Balder.

The late Price Collier, an enthusiastic admirer of Germany, is therefore quite justified in saying: “This Reichstag is really only nominally a portion of the governing body. It has the right to refuse a bill presented by the government, but if it does so it may be summarily dismissed, as has happened several times, and another election usually provides a more amenable body.” And if the following judgment seems somewhat downright, it is none the less substantially true:

“The fact that the members of the Reichstag are not in the saddle but are used unwillingly and often contemptuously as a necessary and often stubborn and unruly pack-animal by the Kaiser-appointed ministers, the fact that they are pricked forward or induced to move by a tempting feed held just beyond the nose has something to do, no doubt, with the lack of unanimity which exists. The diverse elements debate with one another and waste their energy in rebukes and recriminations which lead nowhere and result in nothing. I have listened to many debates in the Reichstag where the one aim of the speeches seemed to be merely to unburden the soul of the speaker. He had no plan, no proposal, no solution, merely a confession to make. After forty-odd years the Germans, in many ways the most cultivated nation in the world, are still without real representative government.”

History, to be sure, may be read in many ways, but from one standpoint it is perfectly possible to regard the framing of the present Constitution and the building up of the present German Empire not as the last stage in the attempt to give freedom and self-government to the German people, but to guarantee and maintain the supremacy of Prussia. Whether or not this is a possible view, it is, in any case, one occasionally to be found implied in the speeches of the Emperor, and it came to open expression in the statement of William I that the empire was merely a “greater Prussia.” So, too, when a few years ago Alsace-Lorraine proved itself recalcitrant to the wishes of its imperial master, he threatened that he would make of it a “Prussian province.”[2]

[2] On this occasion a Socialist orator declared in the Reichstag: “We salute the imperial words as the confession, full of weight and coming from a competent source, that annexation to Prussia is the heaviest punishment that one can threaten to impose upon a people for its resistance against Germany. It is a punishment like hard labor in the penitentiary, with loss of civil rights.”

It need, therefore, not appear as startling as would otherwise be the case if on occasions which to us would seem peculiarly appropriate (as, for instance, the famous Königsberg speech, August 25, 1910) the Emperor makes no mention whatever of the Constitution. The sources of his power and the sanction for his authority he finds not in this instrument but in the history of his ancestors.

To understand the personality and the speeches of the Emperor it is, therefore, necessary to recall that he is also King of Prussia and that the foundation of his ancestors’ rule was laid in the province of Brandenburg, of which they became some centuries ago the margraves and electors. In 1300 Prussia was a wilderness inhabited by savages who were ruthlessly massacred by the Teutonic knights. It was looked upon as lying outside the German Empire. Through the knights the country was converted to Christianity, and the reduced native population was largely augmented by immigration from other German states.

Although the Emperor is not slow to accept traditions with regard to his house, he never mentions the old shoot in the genealogical tree of an elector which carries us back to one of the fugitives who fled from Troy with Æneas. For our purposes, it was not until 1273 that a count of Hohenzollern first came into prominence, when, after a fortunate marriage, he became burgrave of Nuremberg and prince of the Holy Roman Empire. With the exception of Frederick William II, they have been a thrifty race. A little more than a century later there appears in history that one of the Emperor’s ancestors to whom he frequently refers as the founder of his house and that one who began to acquire for it divine right.

Frederick VI of Hohenzollern had already come into prominence through the fact that he had cast in his lot with King Sigismund of Hungary. The services which he rendered the King, however valuable, were not altogether disinterested, and it is said that he largely increased his fortune thereby. He seems not to have been content with mere promises, and it is a matter of record that Sigismund pledged to him certain districts in Hungary as security for 40,000 gulden. As Frederick was to lay the foundation for the greatness of the house of Hohenzollern and as Emperor William is fond of repeating that he came to Brandenburg in obedience to a summons from on high, this chapter in the history of the Emperor’s house is particularly significant and interesting.

For some time previously Brandenburg had been unfortunate in its rulers and had frequently changed hands. In 1373 it had been sold for 500,000 gulden to Emperor Charles IV, who turned it over to his son Wenceslaus. In 1378 it passed to Wenceslaus’ half brother, the Sigismund mentioned above. Sigismund was in financial difficulty. A few years later, therefore, he pledged the mark of Brandenburg to his cousins Jobst and Procop of Moravia as security for a loan of 500,000 gulden. Sigismund defaulted payment in 1393, so that the margraviate passed to them. In 1410 Sigismund eagerly desired to be elected Emperor of Germany. He entrusted the management of what might quite properly be called his “campaign” to Frederick of Hohenzollern. Jobst of Moravia, who, as we have seen, now had claims to Brandenburg was a rival candidate. Sigismund, without deigning to make repayment, coolly declared that the transaction with Jobst concerning Brandenburg was null and void and instructed Frederick to cast the vote for the mark. To this vote Frederick clearly (if anything in these complicated proceedings is clear) had no right. He none the less managed the campaign and in a “snap” election cast the vote of Brandenburg with assurance. This at least was the view of other electors, and this high-handed performance did not meet with their approval. They called a rival council and elected Jobst to the imperial dignity. For both Sigismund and Frederick it was “fortunate” (we take the word from the Prussian historian Eberty) that Jobst died shortly after. It is perhaps unfortunate that it should have been suspected ever since that he died of poison.

Sigismund himself seems to have been somewhat doubtful about the validity of that election which Frederick had compassed and after the death of Jobst had himself re-elected and was finally acknowledged as Emperor. If the times were bad, Sigismund and Jobst were no better than their times. It was this same Sigismund who, after having granted a safe conduct to the great reformer John Huss, allowed him to be judicially murdered, a proceeding which made even Charles V blush for the empire.

For the purpose of electing Sigismund, Frederick had incurred considerable expense, amounting to some hundred thousand gulden. It is perhaps again fortunate for all concerned and for the honor of the venal empire that no bill of particulars specifying the uses of this fund is now available, if any was ever rendered. That Frederick, however, had not served Sigismund “pour l’amour de Dieu” is plain from the fact that he again took security for his advances. This time he was given the unhappy mark of Brandenburg which, as we have seen, had belonged to Jobst by virtue of a mortgage which Sigismund had never taken the trouble to discharge.

If, then, the law of God is at all similar to the law recognized by men, Sigismund had no right to give and the ancestor of William II no legal right to accept that province. The right by which Frederick came into possession of this first state of the later German Empire was, consequently, a right quite different from rights generally recognized. This, therefore, must be that “divine right” which William II is so fond of proclaiming. At its best, the document of June 7, 1411, which gave the Hohenzollerns their first claim to their first province was in reality a mortgage to a piece of property of doubtful title, and if the rather florid style of that document seems to bring in the business transaction as something quite incidental, it is altogether similar to the forms in which other mortgages were couched in those days. That this was so is further evidenced by the fact that the Brandenburg cities looked upon Frederick as the holder of a mortgage and did homage to him “zu seinem Gelde”—“for his money”; that is, they recognized that they were bound to him only until he should be paid. The nobles did not do homage to him at all. After “the rain of margraves” of the previous decades, it is not strange that they should have been slow to recognize their latest overlord. Emperor William II is, therefore, quite right when he describes the mark of May, 1412, as devastated, unruly, and altogether unpromising. It could hardly have been otherwise. Before Frederick was invested with Brandenburg (and he was formally invested only after a further payment of 400,000 gulden), in 1417, his princely possessions included merely partial claims to smaller districts like Ansbach and Bayreuth, which he shared with his brother John. In spite of Frederick of Hohenzollern’s devotion to the cause of religion, the Shakespearean motto, “Thrift, thrift, Horatio,” may be taken to explain satisfactorily his conduct in this regard. That the nobles would be unruly he must have expected. His own activities and his acceptance of the mark had helped to make them so. Frederick’s later service consisted in dispelling a confusion which he had helped to create.

In these larger transactions the first great Hohenzollern does not seem to have been given to listening to the still small voice. Incidentally, he was later to turn against Sigismund. The assumption, therefore, that he left his southern home for the mark out of heed for a divine call, as Emperor William in his speech of February 3, 1899, tells us that he did, is historically, like Laplace’s God, a useless hypothesis. Self-interest, for which he seems to have had a fairly keen sense, would have impelled him to do no less. Yet it is upon the faits et gestes of Frederick of Hohenzollern that Emperor William II bases his claims to rule Germany by divine right.

As we have seen, the mortgage was not discharged, and Frederick had been formally invested with the margraviate and electorship in 1417. He lifted the mark out of the deplorable condition in which he found it, compelled obedience, and during the period of his rule—he died in 1440—its lot was much improved and the power of the house of Hohenzollern much strengthened. History must give him credit for his ability and his difficult achievement if not for his motives.

In the process of establishing himself, his rule, like that of his successors was the rule of the sword and his policy the Machtpolitik, or policy of force. In spite of her comparative poverty, therefore, Prussia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries maintained an army larger than that of Austria or France. The connection between the ruler and the army in a state which was founded and maintained by force of arms was, therefore, and remains in modern Prussia so close that the Emperor is from the standpoint of tradition justified in repeating that “the only pillar on which the empire rests is the army.” It was literally ein Volk in Waffen, a people in arms. The first really outstanding ruler of the province was the Great Elector (1620–88), who has always been cited by William II as his model and of whom he speaks with a respect that amounts to veneration.

He was born in Berlin and, after passing part of his youth in the Netherlands, became ruler of Brandenburg and Prussia in 1640, before the close of the Thirty Years’ War. He restored the prestige of the army and centralized the government and, we are informed by recognized authorities, by a clever but unscrupulous use of his intermediate position between Sweden and Poland, procured his recognition as an independent Duke of Prussia by both powers and eventually succeeded in crushing the stubborn and protracted opposition which was offered to his authority by the estates of the duchy. His success in organizing the army was proved by his great victory over the Swedes at Fehrbellin, 1675.

From childhood the Emperor has worshipped the Great Elector as his favorite hero. In their policies there is a striking similarity, for the elector was the first to recognize the importance of sea power and is praised by William II for having founded the Prussian navy and for having encouraged commerce. He built the first great German canal, from the Oder to the Spree (another lead which the present Emperor was to follow), and he inaugurated the colonial policy by founding a settlement on the west African coast. This, likewise, was to be revived by the present Emperor, for it was allowed to lapse even under Frederick the Great, who considered a “village on the frontier” a much greater asset than a state oversea. The aim of the Great Elector was to make himself an absolute ruler, as he regarded this best for the internal and external welfare of the state. But he raised Brandenburg and Prussia to a high place and laid the basis of their later power.

Under these lords and their followers the progress of Prussia was amazingly rapid. In 1650, when London and Paris were cities of a little more or less than half a million inhabitants and Amsterdam counted 300,000, Berlin was a village of 10,000. The population of Prussia itself, which, to be sure, had been more than doubled in size, increased from 1,500,000 in 1688 to 19,000,000 in 1865. It was in the time of Frederick the Great, however, that her power as a state was first firmly established. His military genius (he is usually said to have originated “the oblique order” of battle) and his policy of dissimulation here stood him in good stead. He sowed discord among his neighbors and awaited the favorable opportunity to attack even on very slight pretexts and in the case of Silesia without the formality of a declaration of war. Like William II, he was a patron of the arts and sciences and invited noted littérateurs and scientists, especially Frenchmen, to his court. The scientist Maupertuis and Voltaire were his protégés, and the exiled Rousseau for a time found refuge in his domains. He himself wrote in French. It is probably because of his French sympathies and the fact that he was, in this regard, not a kerndeutscher Mann that William II rarely speaks of him personally and mentions usually only his services to his country.

Frederick died in 1786. He had raised Prussia to the position of a first-rate power and, in Disraeli’s phrase, left it “regarded if not respected.” His successor, Frederick William II, is remembered mostly because of the scandalous character of his life, and he showed none of the characteristics of the energetic Hohenzollerns. A contemporary says of him: “He bears the greatest resemblance to an Asiatic prince, who, living within his harem with his slaves of both sexes, leaves the business of the state to his viziers. The wall, twelve feet in height, by which the new garden at Potsdam is enclosed, reminds one of the enclosure of a seraglio.” He was succeeded by his son, Frederick William III, in 1797. This conscientious but ill-starred ruler was to be rendered famous through his misfortunes in the time of Napoleon and has been overshadowed somewhat in history by his beautiful, devoted, and heroic wife Louise. They stand closer to modern history than is generally realized. The present Emperor often mentions them for their heroism and the brave part they played in the War of Liberation and in freeing their country from the incubus of the Napoleonic Empire. They were the parents of Emperor William I, the illustrious grandfather of the present sovereign. If, then, Emperor William II frequently takes occasion to recall the memory of 1813 it should be remembered that in his own family these events were very near to him, since his grandfather had spent his childhood in those years of humiliation and had served in the allied armies in the time of Napoleon. The man who was to become Emperor William I had been born as the second son of Frederick William III in 1797. He was to be preceded on the throne by his elder brother, Frederick William IV, who, like the present Emperor and like Frederick the Great, was an accomplished lover of the arts, but who lacked the strength to guide his country with a sure hand through the troubled years of the forties. He became afflicted in his last years with hopeless mental disease, and his brother, after having served as regent, became King of Prussia as William I in 1861.

The idea of uniting Germany into a single empire had already been seriously agitated in the time of Frederick William IV, but it was under his brother, largely through the tireless activity and wonderfully successful diplomacy of Bismarck, that this great aim was to be achieved in the lifetime of the present Emperor. It was in the chapel at Königsberg that William I arranged for and held his coronation. He cannot be said to have been crowned; for although his brother had granted Prussia a constitution William himself raised the crown from the altar, set it on his own head, and announced in a loud voice: “I receive this crown from God’s hand and from none other.”

It was such a legacy that the present Emperor inherited when, after the few months’ reign of his father, he succeeded to the imperial office; and it is this legacy and this tradition which, in fairness to the Emperor, we must remember in reading such seemingly strange pronouncements as his own address at Königsberg in 1910.

The later events in German history and the subsequent policies of the empire are touched upon in such detail that further preamble is hardly necessary. That the Emperor has everywhere energetically taken the lead is undoubted. That he should be held responsible in general for German diplomacy is implied in his position. That he has urged and directed the movement in nearly every field of endeavor is plain from the varied character of his addresses. No one can doubt after reading him that he desired peace, in the sense that he preferred peace to war. The question that will undoubtedly interest the reader most is the problem of the consistency of his various policies; whether, for instance, the exaggerated worship of the army, the devout desire for peace, and the insistent imperialism of his later years can be brought into harmony; whether they can be reduced to any common denominator. However that may be, that he has been one of the most devoted and conscientious servants of the German cause as he sees it cannot possibly be denied.