NOTES 



William II. (Charles Mercier, M.D., F.R.C.P.) 



Prof. Lugaro is well known and highly valued in this country for his work in 

 alienism, and whatever he says about madness is worthy of attention. 1 In the first 

 year or two of the war, people in this and other Allied countries were much 

 inclined to attribute it to the personal ambition of the Kaiser and the Emperor of 

 Austria, and to argue that the first of these was certainly, and the second was 

 probably, mad. I have myself examined in Land and Water the first assertion, 

 and arrived at the same conclusion as Prof. Lugaro, that bombastic, truculent, and 

 ridiculous as William II. has shown himself to be, there is no reason to suppose 

 that he is mad. He is Emperor of the German people, and he displays in the 

 highest degree the qualities that the German people admire and cultivate — that is 

 to say, brutality, treachery, greed, unbounded conceit, and braggadocio. " He 

 is fickle, restless, superficial, vain, and very ambitious ; but he is not a man to 

 impress his personal stamp on history. Mediocre in intelligence, he has never 

 shown any genius for leadership ; infirm of purpose though exuberant in activity, 

 he has always finished by sailing with the current, or at most has allowed himself 

 some impulsive act, some inopportune exploit, for which he has had immediately 

 to make amends." " The Emperor is at bottom a docile, though occasionally 

 maladroit, instrument of the Government." With this judgment I wholly agree. 

 As for Francis Joseph — a dull, stupid, immoral animal, with the intellect of an ox 

 and the heart of a bigot, it is absurd to suppose that his personal influence counted 

 for anything in the "determination of Austria to go to war. No, the war is the 

 natural and inevitable expression of the spirit of the German nation. " It is not 

 an accidental and unexpected catastrophe, but it is the result of a thousand 

 historical forces ; it is not the expression of individual caprice, but.emanates from 

 the will of a nation. The war was prepared for with the long, patient, dogged 

 labour of several generations; it was foreseen and was predicted." The blame 

 rests upon the whole German nation. Germans " do not understand that a people 

 may possess a hundred universities, a thousand laboratories, innumerable perfect 

 workshops, and a flourishing commerce, and, notwithstanding all this, may be 

 barbarians." If the war was due to madness, it was the madness of the whole 

 German nation — a madness that began in megalomania, and is now turning, as 

 megalomania often does, to paranoia — the delusion of persecution. Germany 

 " curses the wrong-headed resistance of ungrateful peoples who do not wish to 

 know happiness under German discipline. Belgium persists in not letting herself 

 be finished off. France will yield neither money, territories, colonies, nor liberty. 

 The English cousins, traitors, will not quietly allow themselves to be bereft of all 

 the means of life and everything that makes life worth living. Italy fancies that 

 she has a personality of her own. Russia, the barbarian, will not let one even 

 strangle little Serbia. It is a downright conspiracy of wilful wickedness." 



1 An Emperor's Madness, or National Aberration, by Ernesto Lugaro. 

 Routledge, 1916. 



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