However the British generally may regard him, it is certain that the German nation accepted him as their acclaimed leader.  Clever, good-looking, versatile, imperious, fond of the romantic pose, Wilhelm was exactly the hero in shining armour that would capture the enthusiasm of this innocent people.  They idolized him.  And it is possible that their quick response confirmed him in his rather generous estimate of his own capabilities.  He dismissed Bismarck and became his own Foreign Secretary, and entered upon a perilous career as Imperial politician, under the aegis of God and the great tradition of the Hohenzollerns, a career made all the more perilous by his constant change of role and his real uncertainty as to his own mind.  His “seven thousand speeches and three hundred uniforms” were only the numerous and really emblematic disguises of a character unable to concentrate persistently and effectively on any one settled object.  With a kind of theatrical sincerity he made successive public appearances as War Lord or William the Peaceful, as Artist, Poet, Architect, Biblical Critic, Preacher, Commercial Magnate, Generalissimo of land forces and Creator of a World Navy; and with Whitman he might well have said, “I can resist anything better than my own diversity.”

If Wilhelm II was popular (as he was) among his own mass-people, it may well be guessed that he was a perfect terror to his own political advisers and generals.  Undoubtedly a large share of responsibility for the failure of German diplomacy before the war, and of German strategy during the war, must be laid to the account of his ever-changing plans and ill-judged interferences.  It is difficult, indeed, to imagine a character more dangerous as a great nation’s leader.  But out of dangers great things do often arise.  A kind of fatality, as I have said, has enveloped the whole situation, and still leads on to new and pregnant evolutions for the German people and for the whole world.  Germany will in the end be justified, but in a way far different from what she imagined.

Up to the period of Germany’s rising commercial prosperity Germany and England had been on fairly friendly terms.  There was no particular cause of difference between them.  But when Commercial and Colonial expansion became a definite and avowed object of the former’s policy, she found, whereso she might look, that Britain was there, in the way—­“everywhere British colonies, British coaling stations, and floating over a fifth of the globe the British flag.”  Could anything be more exasperating?  And these “absent-minded beggars” the English, without any forethought or science or design, without Prussian organization or Prussian bureaucracy and statecraft, had simply walked into this huge inheritance without knowing what they were doing!  It certainly was most provoking.  But what England had done why should not Germany do—­and do it indeed much better, with due science and method?  Britain had shown no scruple in appropriating a fifth part of the globe, and dealing summarily with her opponents, whether savage or civilized; why should Germany show scruple?