The quality that makes him most misunderstood, both in Germany and abroad, is his religiosity. He has an intimate sense of the constant direction of a personal God--how intimate no one will believe who has not seen the expression of his face when he is silently praying. Since he believes that God directs every incident of the life of the world, he believes that he has been divinely appointed to rule over Germany, as every one else has been divinely appointed to the station he occupies and the work he has to do. He rules, therefore, under God, responsible only to God, and going chiefly to prayer for direction. This conviction is so profound and moving in him that I believe if he had not been born a king, he would have become a religious leader whose energy would have made him as compelling as one of the old prophets. And it is a conviction that governs him in the most unexpected ways. For example, he has often spoken publicly of the responsibility of the ruler who involves his people in a war in which so many men may be killed, when he cannot be sure that their consciences will be in a state to meet death.
Hitherto the intelligence of his rule in many directions has been beyond all question. The immense industrial expansion of the country has not been made at the expense of the lower classes. During the Boer War a shameful percentage of the recruits in England had to be rejected as physically unfit for service; the recruits for the German army have always been healthy. The foundations of the nation have not been rotted away by poverty and exploitation. It has not been wealth that has ruled here.
The German royal family is of the blood of the nation; it always had the picturesque qualities of military leadership; and it represented, even more than in England, the magnificence of national success and the new unity of German patriotism. Although the growth of the Socialist party has gone on surely, inside these very evident aspects of loyalty, it would seem that so long as Germany had to be organised on a war basis it would accept a dictatorship that is intelligent. Only when the Throne became stupid, the trouble would begin.
Meanwhile, the German Emperor was the boast and the model of certain sections of modern royalty. Many of the young kings who should be attending to the arts of peace were imagining themselves little “War Lords” and strutting about in uniforms that made them ridiculous. The lesser royalties saw themselves as divinely ordained to their conspicuous idleness as he to his work. Those qualities in the Kaiser which King Edward quarrelled with--because they appeared mediæval to a man of his type of mind--were parodied in imitation by princelings who had not the Kaiser’s brains and force of personality. I once had such a sovereign send an aide to order me to put down my parasol in a royal procession, for no reason except to exercise a petty authority; and I started a warm enmity by sending back word, through the aide, that the control of my parasol was not within the power of the Crown.