In recent times, Dr. Paul Liman, in an excellent character sketch of the Emperor, devotes his first chapter to the subject, thus recognizing the important place it occupies in the Emperor’s mentality.  Dr. Liman, like all German writers who have dealt with the topic, animadverts on the Hohenzollern obsession by the theory and attributes it chiefly to the romantic side of the Emperor’s nature which was strongly influenced in youth by the “wonderful events” of 1870, by the national outburst of thanks to God at the time, and by the return from victorious war of his father, his grandfather, and other heroes, as they must have appeared to him, like Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon.

It is worth noting that Prince von Buelow, during the ten years of his Chancellorship, made no parliamentary or other specific and public allusion to the doctrine.

Before, however, attempting to offer a somewhat different explanation of the Emperor’s attitude in the matter from those just cited, let us see what statements he has himself made publicly about it and how the doctrine has been interpreted by his contemporaries.  He made no reference to it in his declarations to the army, the navy, and the people when he ascended the throne.  His first allusion to it was in March, 1890, at the annual meeting of the Brandenburg provincial Diet at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin, and then the allusion was not explicit.  “I see,” said the Emperor,

“in the folk and land which have descended to me a talent entrusted to me by God, which it is my task to increase, and I intend with all my power so to administer this talent that I hope to be able to add much to it.  Those who are willing to help me I heartily welcome whoever they may be:  those who oppose me in this task I will crush.”

His next allusion, at Bremen in April of the same year, when he was laying the foundation-stone of a statue to his grandfather, King William, a few months subsequent to Bismarck’s retirement, was more explicit, yet not completely so.

“It is a tradition of our House,” so ran his speech,

“that we, the Hohenzollerns, regard ourselves as appointed by God to govern and to lead the people, whom it is given us to rule, for their well-being and the advancement of their material and intellectual interests.”

The next reference, and the only one in which a divine “right” to rule in Prussia is formally claimed, occurs four years later at Koenigsberg, the ancient crowning-place of Prussian kings.  Here he said:—­

“The successor (namely himself) of him who of his own right was sovereign prince in Prussia will follow the same path as his great ancestor; as formerly the first King (of Prussia, Frederick I.) said, ‘My crown is born with me,’ and as his greater son (the Great Elector) gave his authority the stability of a rock of bronze, so I too, like my imperial grandfather, represent the kingship ’von Gottes Gnaden.’”

At Coblenz in 1897, in reference to the first Emperor William’s labours for the army and people:—­