“He (Emperor William) left Coblenz to ascend the throne as the selected instrument of the Lord he always regarded himself to be.  For us all, and above all for us princes, he raised once more aloft and lent lustrous beams to a jewel which we should hold high and holy—­that is the kingship von Gottes Gnaden, the kingship with its onerous duties, its never-ending, ever-continuing trouble and labour, with its fearful responsibility to the Creator alone, from which no human being, no minister, no parliament, no people can release the prince.”

Here, too, if the words “responsibility to the Creator alone” be taken in their ordinary English sense, the allusion to a divine right may be construed, though it is observable that the word “right” is not actually employed.

In Berlin, when unveiling a monument to the Great Elector, the Emperor was filled with the same idea of the God-given mission of the Hohenzollerns.  After briefly sketching the deeds of the Elector—­how he came young to the throne to find crops down-trodden, villages burnt to the ground, a starved and fallen people, persecuted on every side, his country the arena for barbarous robber-bands who had spread war and devastation throughout Germany for thirty years; how, with “invincible reliance on God” and an iron will, he swept the pieces of the land together, raised trade and commerce, agriculture and industry, in for that period an incredibly short time; how he brought into existence a new army entirely devoted to him; how, in fine, guided by the hope of founding a great northern Empire, which would bring the German peoples together, he became an authority in Europe and laid the corner-stone of the present Empire—­after sketching all this, the Emperor continues: 

“How is this wonderful success of the house of Hohenzollern to be explained?  Solely in this way, that every prince of the House is conscious from the beginning that he is only an earthly vicegerent, who must give an account of his labour to a higher King and Master, and show that he has been a faithful executor of the high commands laid upon him.”

One finds exactly the same idea expressed three months later when talking to his “Men of Brandenburg.”  “You know well,” he reminded them,

“that I regard my whole position and my task as laid on me by Heaven, and that I am appointed by a Higher Power to whom I must later render an account.  Accordingly I can assure you that not a morning or evening passes without a prayer for my people and a special thought for my Mark Brandenburg.”

To the Anglo-Saxon understanding, of course, the theory of divine right has long appeared untenable, obsolete, and, as Macaulay says, absurd.  Many people to-day would go farther and argue that there is no such thing as a divine right at all, since “rights” are a purely human idea, possibly a purely legal one.  But it is at least doubtful that the Emperor uses