war against England, when Lloyd George threw
down the gauntlet in his Mansion House speech in the Moroccan crisis.

As preacher, the Kaiser exalted within sight of the Mount of Olives
the precepts of Christian humility, and yet advised his soldiers, on
their departure to China, to "take no prisoners and give no quarter."
The most affable and democratic monarch on occasion will in another
mood assume the outworn toggery of mediaeval absolutism. A democratic
business monarch, and as such the advance agent of German prosperity,
he yet shocks the common sense and awakens the ridicule of the world
by posing as a combination of Caesar and Mahomet.

The avowed champion of Christianity, who has preached with the fervor
of Peter the Hermit against the Yellow Race, he has nevertheless,
since this war began, instigated the Sultan of Turkey to proclaim in
the Moslem world a "holy war" against his Christian enemies.

Pacific and bellicose by turns the monarch, who throughout his whole
reign has hitherto kept the peace of the world, has yet on slight
pretext given utterance to the most warlike and incendiary statements.

How is it possible to draw any inference from such a personality, of
whom it could be said, as Sydney Smith once said of Lord John Russell,
that

there is nothing he would not undertake. I believe he would
perform an operation for stone, build St. Peter's, assume
(with or without ten minutes' notice) the command of the
Channel Fleet, and no one would discover from his manner
that the patient had died, that St. Peter's had tumbled
down, and that the Channel Fleet had been knocked to atoms.

We should therefore dismiss all inferences suggested by his complex
personality and should judge him by what he did from the time that he
suddenly arrived in Berlin on July 26th, until the issuance by his
direct order of the fatal ultimatum to Russia.

Before proceeding to analyze the very interesting and dramatic
correspondence, which passed between the rulers of Germany, England,
and Russia--doubly interesting because of the family relationship and
the unusual personal and cousinly intimacy of these dispatches--it is
well to inquire what the Kaiser could have done that would have
immediately avoided the crisis and saved the situation. So far as the
published record goes, he did not send a single telegram in the
interests of peace to his illustrious ally, the Emperor Francis
Joseph.

Let us