Let us bear in mind how often, under Bismarck and William I, the German Press made mock of our fatal French mania for change, pointing out to Europe how the everlasting see-saw of Ministers of War was bound to reduce our national defences to a position of inferiority.  In two years William is at his fourth!

Soon, no doubt, William II will be able to score a personal success in the matter of his intrigues against Count Taaffe.  His benevolence spares not his allies.  We know the measure of his good-will towards Italy.  Lately, it seems, the Emperor, King of Prussia, said to the Count of Launay, King Humbert’s Ambassador at Berlin, “Do not forget that, sooner or later, Trieste is destined to become a German port.”  And it was doubtless with this generous idea in his mind that he had his compliments conveyed to M. Crispi for his anti-irridentist speech at Florence.

That the Triple Alliance is the “safeguard of peace,” has become a catchword that each of the allies repeats with wearisome reiteration.  But there!  It is not that William II does not wish for war:  it is Germany which forbids him to seek it.  It was not M. Crispi who declined to seek a pretext for attacking France:  it was Italy that forbade him to find it.  It is not the Germanised Austrians who hesitate to provoke Russia:  it is the Slavs who threaten that if a provocation takes place they will revolt.

Let me add that the official organs in Germany, Italy and Vienna only raise a smile nowadays when they describe Russia and France as thunderbolts of war.

November 12, 1890. [15]

At the outset of the reign of William II, referring to his father, I spoke of the “dead hand” and its power over the living.  Now, what has the young King of Prussia done since his accession to the Throne?  He, the flatterer of Bismarck, this disciple of Pastor Stoeker, this out-and-out soldier, this hard and haughty personage, who was wont to blame his august parents for their bourgeois amiability and their frequent excursions?  He carries out everything that his father planned, but he does it under impulse from without and he does it badly, without forethought, without the sincerity or the natural quality which is revealed in a man by a course of skilful action legitimate in its methods.

He smashed Von Bismarck in brutal fashion.  His father, on the other hand, was wont to say:  “I will not touch the Chancellor’s statue, but I will remove the stones, one by one, from his pedestal, so that some fine day it will collapse of itself.”

It is a curious thing that these reforms and ideas, not having been applied by the monarch whose character would have harmonised perfectly with their conception and execution, now possess no reversionary value.  They lose it completely by being subjected to a false paternity.