Nor has there been any constitutional change in the relations of Crown to Parliament during the present reign.  As a young man, the Emperor had of course nothing to do with Parliament, Prussian or Imperial, and since his accession, though there is always latent antagonism and has been even friction at times, he has, generally speaking, lived on “correct,” if not friendly terms with it.  There is little, if any, of the devoted affection one finds for the monarch in the English Parliament.

And not unnaturally.  Early in his reign, in 1891, he made a reference to Parliament little calculated to evoke affection.  “The soldier and the army,” he said to his generals at a banquet in the palace, “not parliamentary majorities and decisions, have welded together the German Empire.  My confidence is in the army—­as my grandfather said at Coblenz:  ‘These are the gentlemen on whom I can rely.’” Again, a year or two afterwards he dissolved the Reichstag for refusing to accept a military bill and did not conceal his anger with the recalcitrant majority.  In 1895 he telegraphed to Bismarck his indignation with the Reichstag for refusing to vote its congratulations on the old statesman’s eightieth birthday.  In 1897, speaking of the kingship “von Gottes Gnaden” he took occasion to quote his grandfather’s declaration that “it was a kingship with onerous duties from which no man, no Minister, no Parliament, no people” could release the Prince.  In 1903 his Chancellor, Prince Buelow, had to defend in Parliament his action in the case of the Swinemunde despatch already mentioned.  Attention was called to the telegram in the Reichstag and the Chancellor defended the Emperor.  He denied that the telegram was an act of State—­it was a personal matter between two sovereigns, the statement of a friend to a friend.  “The idea,” said the Chancellor, who contended that the Emperor had a right to express his opinions like any citizen,

“that the monarch’s expression of opinion is to be limited by a stipulation that every such expression must be endorsed with the signature of the Chancellor is wholly foreign to the Constitution.”

Next day the Chancellor had again occasion to defend his imperial master against a charge of being “anti-social,” brought by the Socialist von Vollmar, who coupled the charge with insinuations of absolutism and Caesarism.  Prince Buelow said: 

“Absolutism is not a German word, and is not a German institution.  It is an Asiatic plant, and one cannot talk of absolutism in Germany so long as our circumstances develop in an organic and legal manner, respecting the rights of the Crown, which are just as sacred as the rights of the burgher; respecting also law and order, which are not disregarded ‘from above,’ and will not be disregarded.  If ever our circumstances take on an absolute, a Caesarian, form, it will be as the consequence of revolution, of convulsion.  For on revolution follows Caesarism as W follows U—­that