rvations on that occasion were a perfect masterpiece of
self-glorification. This is what he said--

"You have just taken the oath of fidelity to myself. From this day
forward there exists for you one order and one order only, that of my
majesty. Henceforth you have only one enemy, mine, and should it be
necessary for me some day (which God forbid) to order you to shoot your
own parents, yes, to fire on your own brothers and sisters, fathers and
mothers, on that day remember your oath."

Those who wish to form an accurate idea of William's loquacity and
self-conceit should read a few passages, selected haphazard from "The
Voice of the Lord upon the waters," a sermon by His Majesty, the
Emperor-King, for use in polar voyages. There they will find a strange
hotch-potch of all sorts of ideas, religious, political and heathen, all
half digested. But the dominant note in the sermons preached by William
II lies in his tendency to diminish the Infinite, to hold it within the
measure of his own mind, to bring down God to his own stature. All his
comparisons tend to show God as an Emperor, built in the image in which
William sees himself. When he draws you a picture, in which he brings
God face to face with himself, there is about him a certain splendour of
pride, something in his utterance that suggests an Imperial Lucifer. But
beyond these relations between God and the German Emperor, his utterances
reveal nothing beyond commonplace self-conceit. In his perpetual and
personal contact with the Divinity, William's morality becomes more
exacting than even that of God Himself towards His saints, who have long
enjoyed His sanction to sin seven times a day. William II will not allow
of a single sin. Everywhere and in everything he must interfere. Well
may his subjects say, who have just received their catechism: "He is on
heaven, on earth, and within us."

January 1, 1892. [18]

I, who have so long been devoted to the Franco-Russian Alliance, have
followed with acute distress the intrigues of Bismarck in Bulgaria
(intrigues of which the _Nouvelle Revue_ revealed one proof in the
letters of Prince Ferdinand of Coburg to the Countess of Flanders). I
have known that William, in spite of his actual dislike for the
proceedings of his ex-Chancellor, is pleased to approve the impertinences
of a Stamboulof. Nevertheless, I confess I am seized with anxiety at
seeing France enter into diplomatic proceedings with the so-cal