rn his kingdom was tottering. Assisted by the very capable men
he was able to find and to retain, he upheld it, and by means of
Koeniggraetz and Sedan created the great German Empire. William II. came
to the throne when Germany had reached the zenith of her power. He had
not acquired what he possessed by his own work, as his grandfather
had; it came to him without any effort on his part; a fact which had a
great and far from favourable influence on his whole mental
development.

The Emperor William was an entertaining and interesting _causeur_. One
could listen to him for hours without wearying. Emperors usually enjoy
the privilege of finding a ready audience, but even had the Emperor
William been an ordinary citizen he would always have spoken to a
crowded house. He could discourse on art, science, politics, music,
religion, and astronomy in a most animated manner. What he said was
not always quite correct; indeed, he often lost himself in very
questionable conclusions; but the fault of boring others, the greatest
of social faults, was not his.

Although the Emperor was always very powerful in speech and gesture,
still, during the war he was much less independent in his actions than
is usually assumed, and, in my opinion, this is one of the principal
reasons that gave rise to a mistaken understanding of all the
Emperor's administrative activities. Far more than the public imagine
he was a driven rather than a driving factor, and if the Entente
to-day claims the right of being prosecutor and judge combined in
order to bring the Emperor to his trial, it is unjust and an error,
as, both preceding and during the war, the Emperor William never
played the part attributed to him by the Entente.

The unfortunate man has gone through much, and more is, perhaps, in
store for him. He has been carried too high and cannot escape a
terrible fall. Fate seems to have chosen him to expiate a sin which,
if it exists at all, is not so much his as that of his country and his
times. The Byzantine atmosphere in Germany was the ruin of Emperor
William; it enveloped him and clung to him like a creeper to a tree; a
vast crowd of flatterers and fortune-seekers who deserted him in the
hour of trial. The Emperor William was merely a particularly
distinctive representative of his class. All modern monarchs suffer
from the disease; but it was more highly developed in the Emperor
William and, therefore, more obvious than in others. Accustomed fro