[Illustration:  Gaul to the new Caesar

“Defiance, Emperor, while I have strength to hurl it!”

(Dec. 17, 1870)]

More than forty years followed, years of peace and prosperity for Great Britain, only broken by the South African war, the wounds of which were healed by a generous settlement.  But all the time Germany was preparing for “The Day,” steadily perfecting her war machine, enlarging her armies, creating a great fleet, and piling up colossal supplies of guns and munitions, while her professors and historians, harnessed to the car of militarism, inflamed the people against England as the jealous enemy of Germany’s legitimate expansion.  Abroad, like a great octopus, she was fastening the tentacles of permeation and penetration in every corner of the globe, honeycombing Russia and Belgium, France, England and America with secret agents, spying and intriguing and abusing our hospitality.  For twenty-five years the Kaiser was our frequent and honoured, if somewhat embarrassing, guest, professing friendship for England and admiration of her ways, shooting at Sandringham, competing at Cowes, sending telegrams of congratulation to the University boat-race winners, ingratiating himself with all he met by his social gifts, his vivacious conversation, his prodigious versatility and energy.

[Illustration: 

THE REWARD OF (DE)MERIT

King Punch presenteth Prussia with the Order of “St. Gibbet.”

(May 7, 1864)]

Mr. Punch was no enemy of Germany.  He remembered—­none better—­the debt we owe to her learning and her art; to Bach and Beethoven, to Handel, the “dear Saxon” who adopted our citizenship; to Mendelssohn, who regarded England as his second home; to her fairy tales and folk-lore; to the Brothers Grimm and the Struwwelpeter; to the old kindly Germany which has been driven mad by War Lords and Pan-Germans.  If Mr. Punch’s awakening was gradual he at least recognised the dangerous elements in the Kaiser’s character as far back as October, 1888, when he underlined Bismarck’s warning against Caesarism.  In March, 1890, appeared Tenniel’s famous cartoon “Dropping the Pilot”; in May of the same year the Kaiser appears as the Enfant Terrible of Europe, rocking the boat and alarming his fellow-rulers.  In January, 1892, he is the Imperial Jack-in-the-Box with a finger in every pie; in March, 1892, the modern Alexander, who

  Assumes the God,
  Affects to nod,
  And seems to shake the spheres;

though unfortunately never nodding in the way that Homer did. (This cartoon, by the way, caused Punch to be excluded for a while from the Imperial Palace.)

In February, 1896, Mr. Punch drew the Kaiser as Fidgety Will.  In January, 1897, he was the Imperial actor-manager casting himself for a leading part in Un Voyage en Chine; in October of the same year he was “Cook’s Crusader,” sympathising with the Turk at the time of the Cretan ultimatum; and in April, 1903, the famous visit to Tangier suggested the Moor of Potsdam wooing Morocco to the strains of