Impressions of the Kaiser
By , Former American Ambassador to Germany. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1918. 8vo. 368 pp. $2.00.
‘I CAME to the throne too young. I found myself surrounded by old men. They regarded me as a boy. It was really insufferable. I determined to assert my power.’ So speaks Herr Hohenzollern at Amerongen. according to Harold Begbie’s recent report. The words might be taken as the text of the first half of Dr. Hill’s admirable volume. As a resident at Berlin in 1888, at the Kaiser’s accession, and twenty years later as American Ambassador to Germany, he was in an excellent position, with his keen insight into constitutional and international questions, to gauge the transformation which came over Germany during the Kaiser’s reign. In the first period he saw William II as his own people saw him. In the second period his personal contacts with the Kaiser were more intimate than those which usually fall to the lot of an ambassador at Berlin. Nowhere have we seen an abler and juster appreciation of the subtle forces by which Germany was being Prussianized. Without the change of a syllable in the Imperial Constitution, constitutional government was nevertheless being altered in the direction of irresponsible personal government. In the Hague Peace Conferences, and in negotiations which Dr. Hill later had to conduct, it became clear that the Kaiser was opposed to any arbitration treaty. It would have based foreign policy on legal principles, and on a reasoned Understanding of mutual interests, instead of leaving it to the Kaiser’s royal visits, afterdinner toasts, and secret intrigues.
The second half of the volume is a very clear, simple, and convincing indictment of the Kaiser’s responsibility for the Great War. By sweeping away all irrelevant matters, and by weaving into his narrative the significant implications of the later revelations of Lichnowsky, Mühlon, Von Jägow, and the Kaiser himself. Dr. Hill convicts the latter out of his own mouth of making flatly contradictory statements during July and August, 1914. He shows how easily William II could have preserved the peace and how willingly he entered upon what he anticipated would be a short, decisive war, with Great Britain neutral.
The volume is of much more real worth than its title might suggest It is in no sense a mere garnering of the personal impressions of an ambassador at court. It is reflective rather than descriptive, solid rather than brilliant. It is all the more convincing because of its moderation. It is perhaps the most fair-minded and discriminating appreciation in English of William II as he was up to August, 1914. S. B, F.