The young Emperor’s dislike for the press was indeed a fruitful source of sensational incidents during the first year or two of his reign, and still is uneasily felt to contain the elements of possibly further disturbance. The fault of this attitude is by no means entirely on one side. Both the character of the Kaiser and the character of the German press are in large part what Bismarck has made them, and if their less admirable sides clash and grind into each other with painful friction from time to time, it is only what might be expected. During Bismarck’s twenty-eight years of power in Prussia he so by turns debauched and coerced the press that the adjective “reptile” had to be invented by outsiders properly to describe its venomous cowardice. He openly and contemptuously prostituted it to serve his poorest and pettiest uses, so that it was not possible for any one to think of it with respect; yet, oddly enough, he always showed the keenest and most thin-skinned sensitiveness when its attacks or inuendoes were aimed at himself.

This whimsical susceptibility to affront in the printed word, no matter how mean or trivial the force back of it, is a trait which has often come near making Bismarck ridiculous, and it is not pleasant to note how largely William seems also to be possessed with it. He is as nervous about what the papers will say as a young débutante on the stage. Not only does he keep an anxious watch upon the talk of the German editors, but he ordains a vigilant scrutiny of the articles printed in foreign countries from the pens of correspondents stationed at Berlin. In this he is very German. Nobody in England, for example, ever dreams of caring about, or for the most part of even taking the trouble to learn, what is printed abroad about English personages or politics. The foreign correspondents in London are as free as the wind that blows. But matters were ordered very differently at the beginning of the present reign in Berlin, and to this day journalists pursue their calling there under a sense of espionage hardly to be imagined in Fleet Street. It is true that a change for the better is distinctly visible of late, but it will be the work of many years to eradicate the low views of German journalism which Bismarck instilled, alike, unfortunately, in the royal palaces and the editorial offices of Prussia.

One of the very first acts of William’s reign was the expulsion from Berlin of two French journalists whose sympathetic accounts of his father’s dismissal of Puttkamer had been distasteful to the royal eye. In the following January the correspondents of the Figaro and National of Paris were similarly driven out. In March, 1889, simultaneously with the seizure of the Berlin Volks-Zeitung and the prosecution of the Freisinnige Zeitung, a new Penal Code was presented to the Reichstag which contained such arbitrary provisions for stamping out the remaining liberties of the press that even the Cologne Gazette denounced it as “putting a frightful weapon into the hands of the Government for suppressing freedom of speech and silencing opposition.” This measure did not pass, but the odium of having introduced it remained.

Although in other respects William was already observed to be separating himself from his Chancellor, it is clear that he has a large share in this odium. All his utterances, both at this time and up to the present date, show how thoroughly he believes in editing the editors. This tendency was during the year 1889 to exhibit its comical side.

The special organ of the Waldersee party was the high-and-dry old Tory journal, the Kreuz-Zeitung. Early in the year this mouthpiece of the anti-Bismarck coalition was raided by the Chancellor, and both its offices and the house of its editor, Baron Hammerstein, ransacked for incriminating documents. The Kaiser is believed to have intervened to prevent more serious steps being taken. Later in the year, as the success of the Waldersee combination in weaning the Kaiser away from Bismarck grew more and more marked, the Kreuz-Zeitung foolishly gave voice to its elation, and attacked the “Cartel” coalition of parties which controlled the Reichstag. The Kaiser thereupon printed a personal communique in the official paper saying that he approved of the “Cartel” and was “unable to reconcile the means by which the Kreuz-Zeitung assailed it with respect for his own person.” This warning proved insufficient, for in the following January Baron Hammerstein put up as a candidate for a vacancy at Bielefeld, and talked so openly about being the real nominee of the Kaiser that William caused to be inserted in all the papers a notice of his order that the Kreuz-Zeitung should not henceforth be taken at any of the royal palaces, or allowed in public reading-rooms. It may be imagined how the Liberal editors chuckled over this.

So recently as in May of last year, two months after the retirement of Bismarck, when the regular official deputation from the new Reichstag waited upon William, he pointed out to the Radical members that the Freisinnige press was criticizing the army estimates, which he and his generals had made as low as possible, and sharply warned them to see that a stop was put to such conduct on the part of their friends, the Radical editors. And only last December, in his remarkable speech to the Educational Conference, he lightly grouped journalists with the “hunger candidates” and others who formed an over-educated class “dangerous to society.”

This inability to tolerate the expression of opinions different from his own is very Bismarckian.

The ex-Chancellor, in fact, has for years past acted and talked upon the theory that anybody who did not agree with him must of necessity be unpatriotic, and came at last to hurl the epithet of Reichsfeind—enemy of the Empire—every time any one disputed him on any point whatsoever.

William has roughly shorn away Bismarck’s pretence to infallibility, but about the divine nature of his own claims he has no doubt. Some of his deliverances on questions of morals and ethics, in his capacity as a sort of helmeted Northern Pope, are calculated to bring a smile to the face of the Muse of History. His celebrated harangue to the Rector of the Berlin University, Professor Gebhardt, wherein he complained that, under the lead of democratic professors, the students were filled with destructive political doctrines, and concluded by gruffly saying, “Let your students go more to churches and less to beer cellars and fencing saloons”—was put down to his youth, for it dates from the close of 1888. It is interesting to note, from William’s recent speech at Bonn, that he has decidedly altered his views on both beer-drinking and duelling among students. He began his reign, however, with ultra-puritanical notions on these as well as other subjects.

Long after this early deliverance his confidence in himself, so far from suffering abatement, had so magnified itself that he ............