E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
STANLEY SHAW, LL.D. Trinity College Dublin
The Frontispiece is from a photograph by E. Bieber, of Berlin
I. INTRODUCTORY....................................... 1
II. YOUTH (1859-1881).................................. 10
III. PRE-ACCESSION DAYS (1881-1887)..................... 42
IV. "VON GOTTES GNADEN"................................ 56
V. THE ACCESSION (1888-1890).......................... 69
VI. THE COURT OF THE EMPEROR........................... 105
VII. "DROPPING THE PILOT"............................... 125
VIII. SPACIOUS TIMES (1891-1899)......................... 144
IX. THE NEW CENTURY (1900-1901)........................ 189
X. THE EMPEROR AND THE ARTS........................... 205
XI. THE NEW CENTURY--_continued_ (1902-1904)........... 237
XII. MOROCCO (1905)..................................... 255
XIII. BEFORE THE "NOVEMBER STORM" (1906-1907)............ 275
XIV. THE NOVEMBER STORM (1908).......................... 289
XV. AFTER THE STORM (1909-1913)........................ 321
XVI. THE EMPEROR TO-DAY................................. 342
INDEX ................................................... 391
William the Second, German Emperor and King of Prussia, Burgrave of Nürnberg, Margrave of Brandenburg, Landgrave of Hessen and Thuringia, Prince of Orange, Knight of the Garter and Field-Marshal of Great Britain, etc., was born in Berlin on January 27, 1859, and ascended the throne on June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, fifty-four years old in the present year of his Jubilee, 1913, and his reign--happily yet unfinished--has extended over a quarter of a century.
The Englishman who would understand the Emperor and his time must imagine a country with a monarchy, a government, and a people--in short, a political system--almost entirely different from his own. In Germany, paradoxical though it may sound to English ears, there is neither a government nor a people. The word "government" occurs only once in the Imperial Constitution, the Magna Charta of modern Germans, which in 1870 settled the relations between the Emperor and what the Englishman calls the "people," and then only in an unimportant context joined to the word "federal."