Page:The History of The Great European War Vol 1.pdf/63

 He would appear to be obsessed with the idea of the utility and the necessity of war, and one finds him devoting all his energies to the strengthening and perfecting of his army and navy with the obvious view to war, yet he is found preaching the gospel of peace. He is religious in the sense that he believes in Christianity, at any rate so far as its doctrine supports his own divine right as a monarch. On the other hand he is materialistic in every respect, so far as one can judge from his actions. He is intensely vain and theatrical and is a typical megalomaniac. He is never still, he is always moving, full of energy and never happy unless travelling about and engaged in some engrossing occupation. His talents are various. He loves to do a little bit of everything: war lord on land and on sea, supreme legislator, governor, and diplomatist in, and for his dominions, financier, manufacturer, trader both on his own account and with others, painter, poet, designer, sportsman and bon camarade. In short, the Kaiser may be summed up as an abnormal and pathological type.

Undoubtedly the Kaiser is, first and foremost, Himself and No Other. After that, he is a Hohenzollern, proud beyond measure of his family and race—a firm believer that the Hohenzollerns exist, under Providence, solely and simply to occupy the position of absolute rulers of the greatest Power in the world. No Stuart, Bourbon, oi' Hapsburg has ever more firmly believed in the destiny of his dynasty and in its divine rights than does the Kaiser so believe in his. All that has been done by Prussia and Germany in the Hohenzollerns' time has been done in the Kaiser's view—a view which he requires his subjects to share—by the Hohenzollerns alone, the great men of their time being persons of comparatively no account. Thus is explained the dismissal of Bismarck and the fact that for years afterwards his name was never even allowed to be mentioned in the Kaiser's hearing. And the remarkable thing is that the Hohenzollern family, as has been already pointed out, is but a family of parvenus. They are exactly comparable to the most objectionable and self-made type of family which is occasionally met with in Britain, and perhaps more frequently in the newer commercial countries. Rude, supremely self-confident and always boasting, they believe that their success is due absolutely and entirely to their own remarkable and exceptional personal abilities, that they can do anything they like without the assistance of criticism, and that everything they touch must inevitably turn to gold and result in success.