It is true that occasionally William II envoys some real satisfaction, such as that which he has derived from the coming of the King of Belgium.  So impatient was His Majesty to return his visit, that he could not wait for the good season and therefore he came in the bad.  At Ostend, Leopold II had caused sand to be strewn at William’s coming (the beach being conveniently handy).  The King of Prussia only spread mud.  Why was the King of Belgium in such a hurry?  After the visit of General Pontus to Berlin and his three days in retirement with the German headquarters staff, people at Brussels are still asking what more King Leopold could possibly have to settle in person with Messrs. Moltke and Waldersee at these same headquarters?

The Courier de Bruxelles informs us that certain proposals for an alliance were made to Leopold II during his stay at Potsdam.  What!  Could Prussia possibly have dared to think of laying an impious hand upon Belgian neutrality!  But if not, why should they have been at such pains formerly to prove to me that the thing was inconceivable?  Prussia wants a Belgian alliance and the King refuses.  Splendid!  But let him tell us so himself!  I confess that such a document would interest me far more than all that I have published on the subject!  May not the explanation of King Leopold’s journey be, that William II would like a mobilisation in Belgium just as he wants one in Italy?  M. Bleichroder will supply the cash.  He has already got his bargain money, viz.  Pastor Stoecker in disgrace, and the repudiation of anti-Semitism by its ex-partisan, William II.

November 27, 1890. [16]

How can one avoid taking an interest in William II of Hohenzollern?  He is one of those people who, by every means and in every way, insist on being noticed.  This up-to-date Emperor is obsessed by the idea of making profit, for purposes of advertisement, out of every sensation; he loves to upset calculations and produce every kind of astonishment.  He believes that he has not fulfilled his part, until he has made a number of people lift their arms to heaven at least once a day and exclaim:  “William is marvellous!” He wants to hear this cry arise from the humblest and the highest, from the miner’s gallery and the palace of his “august confederates,” from the workman’s cottage and the homes of the middle-class, from the officers’ club, from church and chapel, from the Parliament of the Empire and the House of Peers.

Being blase himself, it pleases him to tickle public opinion with spicy fare; his lack of mental balance compels him to these endless and senseless choppings and changes, to all these schemes projected, proclaimed and cast aside.

The former Court of his grandfather is already in ruins, the work of Bismarck crumbling in the dust; in less than no time he has reduced the old aristocratic and feudal Prussian monarchy to the purest kind of democratic Caesarism.