To most people in England it means simply “compulsory military service.”  It is important to note the difference, as it explains the German national idea, and the Emperor’s idea, that all military and naval forces are primarily for defence, not offence.  This is, indeed, equally true of the British, or perhaps any other, army and navy; but how many Englishmen, when they think of Germany, can get the idea into the foreground of their thoughts or accustom themselves to it?

However, we have not yet done with the Emperor’s baffling character.  There was a third element that now developed in it—­the modern, the twentieth-century, the American, the Rockefeller element.  It is intimately connected with his Weltpolitik, as his Weltpolitik is with his foreign policy in general—­indeed one might say his Weltpolitik is his foreign policy—­a policy of economic expansion, with a desperate apprehension of losing any of the Empire’s property, and a determination to have a voice in the matter when there is any loose property anywhere in the world to be disposed of.  To the Hebraic element and the warrior element (an entirely un-Christlike combination, as the Emperor must be aware) there now began to be added the mercantile, the modern, the American element—­the interest in all the concerns of national material prosperity, in the national accumulation of wealth, the interest in inventions, in commercial science, in labour-saving machinery, the effort to win American favour, to facilitate intercourse and establish close and profitable relations with that wealthy land and people.

We know that the Emperor has English blood in him, greatly admires England, and is immensely proud of being a British admiral.  We have seen him exhibiting traits of character that remind one of Lohengrin or Tancred.  He has played many parts in the spirit of a Hebrew prophet and patriarch, of a Frederick the Great, a Cromwell, a Nelson, a Theodore Roosevelt.  Preacher, teacher, soldier, sailor, he has been all four, now at one moment, now at another.  We shall find him anon as art and dramatic critic, to end—­so far as we are concerned with him—­as farmer.  Is it any wonder if such a man, mediaeval in his nature and modern in his character, defies clear and definite portrayal by his contemporaries?

Taking the year 1900 as the first year of the new century, not as some calculators, and the Emperor among them, take it, as the last year of the old, the twentieth century may be said to have opened with a dramatic historical episode in which the Emperor and his Empire took very prominent parts—­the Boxer movement.