“It is always a pleasure to me when on such occasions I can convince myself of the Christian disposition of the imperial family.  In our for the most part unbelieving age this family seems to me like an oasis in the desert.”

Prince Hohenlohe was succeeded as Chancellor by Prince von Buelow, who had held the office of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs for the preceding two years, and practically conducted the Emperor’s foreign policy during that time.  He had served as Secretary of Embassy in St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Athens, was a Secretary to the Congress of Berlin, fought in the war with France and after seven years as Minister in Bucharest spent four years as Ambassador in Rome.  Here he married a divorced Italian lady, the Countess Minghetti.  After acting as deputy Foreign Secretary for the late Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, he was appointed permanent Foreign Secretary, and on October 17, 1900, was called by the Emperor to the most responsible post in the Empire next to his own, that of Imperial Chancellor.  The Emperor’s choice was fully justified, for the new Chancellor proved himself to be the most brilliant diplomatist and parliamentarian since Bismarck.

IX

THE NEW CENTURY

1900-1901

German writers, commenting on the turn of the century, claim to discover a change in the Emperor’s character about this period.  He has lost much of his imaginative, his Lohengrin, vein, and has become more practical, more prosaic and matter-of-fact.  To use the German word, he is now a Realpolitiker, one who deals in things, not words or theories, and drawing his gaze from the stars makes them dwell more attentively on the immediate practical considerations of the world about him.  His nature has not changed, of course, nor his manner, but he has begun to see that he must employ means and ways different from those he employed previously.  He has not become a Bismarck, for he still pursues his aims more in the spirit of the colonel of a regiment leading his men to the attack with banners flying, drums beating, swords rattling in their scabbards and mailed gauntlets held threateningly aloft, than in that of the cool and calculating politician ruminating in his closet on the tactics of his opponents, and deliberating how best to meet and confound them; but he gives more thought to what is going on about him, to party politics, to the economic necessities of the hour, and to modern science and its inventions.

What strikes the Englishman perhaps as much as anything in the Emperor’s character at this time is the Cromwellian trait in it.  This is a side of his Protean nature which never seems to have been adequately recognized in England, yet in a singularly baffling character-composition it is one of the fundamental elements.  The view of Prussian monarchy, inherited from one Hohenzollern to another for generation after