MY RECOLLECTIONS OF WILLIAM 11-1879-1903 221 



Certainly this dismissal must have caused him much 

 regret; all his previous life had shown that he admired 

 Bismarck almost adored him. It gave evidence of a deep 

 purpose and a strong will. Louis XIV had gained great 

 credit after the death of Mazarin by declaring his inten 

 tion of ruling alone of taking into his own hands the 

 vast work begun by Richelieu; but that was the merest 

 nothing compared to this. This was, apparently, as if 

 Louis XIII, immediately after the triumphs of Richelieu, 

 had dismissed him and declared his purpose of hence 

 forth being his own prime minister. The young Emperor 

 had found himself at the parting of the ways, and had 

 deliberately chosen the right path, and this in spite of 

 almost universal outcries at home and abroad. The old 

 Emperor William could let Bismarck have his way to 

 any extent: when his chancellor sulked he could drive 

 to the palace in the Wilhelmstrasse, pat his old servant 

 on the back, chaff him, scold him, laugh at him, and set 

 him going again, and no one thought less of the old mon 

 arch on that account. But for the young Emperor Wil 

 liam to do this would be fatal ; it would class him at once 

 among the rois faineants the mere figureheads &quot; the 

 solemnly constituted impostors, &quot; and in this lay not 

 merely dangers to the young monarch, but to his dynasty 

 and to the empire. 



His recognition of this fact was, and is, to me a proof 

 that the favorable judgments of him which I had heard 

 expressed in Berlin were well founded. 



But this decision did much to render him unpopular in 

 the United States, and various other reports which flitted 

 over increased the unfavorable feeling. There came re 

 ports of his speeches to young recruits, in which, to put 

 it mildly, there was preached a very high theory of the 

 royal and imperial prerogative, and a very exacting the 

 ory of the duty of the subject. Little account was taken 

 by distant observers of the fundamental facts in the case ; 

 namely, that Germany, being a nation with no natural 

 frontiers, with hostile military nations on all sides, and 



