"that the monarch's expression of opinion is to be limited by a stipulation that every such expression must be endorsed with the signature of the Chancellor is wholly foreign to the Constitution."
Next day the Chancellor had again occasion to defend his imperial master against a charge of being "anti-social," brought by the Socialist von Vollmar, who coupled the charge with insinuations of absolutism and Cæsarism. Prince Bülow said:
"Absolutism is not a German word, and is not a German institution. It is an Asiatic plant, and one cannot talk of absolutism in Germany so long as our circumstances develop in an organic and legal manner, respecting the rights of the Crown, which are just as sacred as the rights of the burgher; respecting also law and order, which are not disregarded 'from above,' and will not be disregarded. If ever our circumstances take on an absolute, a Cæsarian, form, it will be as the consequence of revolution, of convulsion. For on revolution follows Cæsarism as W follows U--that is the rule in the A B C of the world's history."
There is no harm in reminding Prince Bülow that the letter V--which may be a very important link in the chain of events--comes between U and W. It is clear also that the Chancellor must have forgotten his English history for the moment, for though Cromwell's rule may be called Cæsarism of a kind, the reign of William III, of "glorious, pious, and immortal memory," which followed the revolution of 1688, could not fairly be so named.
Three years later, in 1906, Prince Bülow found it necessary to defend the Emperor on the score of the "personal regiment." "The view," Prince Bülow said,
"that the monarch should have no individual thoughts of his own about State and government, but should only think with the heads of his Ministers and only say what they tell him to say, is fundamentally wrong--is inconsistent with State rights and with the wish of the German people";
and he concluded by challenging the House to mention a single case in which the Emperor had acted unconstitutionally. None of these bickerings between Crown and Parliament went to the root of the constitutional relations between them, but they betrayed the existence of popular dissatisfaction with the Emperor, which in a couple of years was to culminate in an outbreak of national anger.
