XIII
On the night of the second of October, the German Emperor sat in the Imperial box at the Berlin Schauspielhaus. They were playing Wilhelm Tell. William II looked-on at the mummer portraying the audacious genius who, by skill and courage, delivered a people from tyranny. He looked on the presented incident with a humorous sense of its coincidence with his present intention: for, in the imperial mind—that agile predominant mind at which inferior minds (led by the Pall Mall Gazette) were used to mock—was stored certain knowledge of another scene yet to be enacted in which he himself would play the part of the deliverer. An aide-de-camp entered during the interval, while the house gave itself up to conversation, apples, nuts, pfefferkuchen. He handed a locked portfolio to the Kaiser.
“The papers are all here?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“The manager attends?”
“He is at the door, Sire.”
“He has received my commands?”
“Your Majesty’s commands have been executed.”
“Good. I will follow him. Go now to the newspaper-offices; and bring the specials to me after supper. Mahlzeit!”
The curtain went up for the last act. The audience was stricken with sudden paralyzed amazement. On the stage, actors, scene-shifters, the whole theatre staff, were grouped in an immense semicircle. In the chord of the semicircle, one figure stood alone, grimly dominant. At first, it was taken for a daringly realistic caricature of the Emperor; and fear of the penalties of lèse-majesté dawned in the minds of the beholders. But the figure spoke, and doubt fled. It was the Emperor. Everyone knew that vigorous vocative “Germans!” The said Germans were used to manifestations of their ruler’s omniscience and omnipresence; and they automatically stood to listen. He quoted the assertion of Herr Bebmarck in the Reichstag, that every speech by the Kaiser against Socialists meant a socialist gain of 100,000 votes at the elections. Then he flung out a challenge. He said that the insuing elections meant war to the knife, not between him and his people but, between him and the handful of venal demagogues unworthy to bear the sacred name of Germans who led his people astray. He opened his portfolio. Socialism, he said, commanded four million votes. One-third of the German Army was Socialist. Socialism was the largest political party in the Empire; and increased each year at the expense of every other party. It was a vast and important body. A body needed a brain to direct its functions. Who, after all, was the head? The demagogues, or the Kaiser? At a moment like the present, when the Fatherland was menaced on both sides by anarchy and hereditary enemies, the glorious German nation must not be harassed by intestine feuds. Hitherto, a great part of his people had been taught to obstruct his schemes for German welfare. Thereby they had hurt themselves. They had had the pleasure of opposing him: but they had delayed their own betterment: for his alone was the will which should rule Germany. Yet, he would not blame his people. They had been betrayed by liars, deceived by treacherous pseudophilanthropists. He would not blame the tempted, but the tempters. The names of the tempters, the human Satans, were August Bebmarck, turner: Grillerbergen, locksmith: Raue, Bulermolken, Reistem, saddlers: Varmol, ex-post-official: Steinbern, lawyer: Volkenberg, territorial-magnate: Singenmann, capitalist. He arraigned these men on a charge of having deluded the good heart of four million German people by professions of disinterestedness, of benevolence, by promises of universal betterment. He denounced their professions and their promises as false, and their practices as corrupt enough to have obtained the attention of the police. The socialist demagogues were traitors to the very cause which they professed to serve. Their object was not the improvement of the social conditions of the people: it was personal aggrandisement. He brought proofs from his portfolio. Bebmarck, Grillenberger, Varmol had accepted bribes of M. 100,000, M. 45,000, M. 40,000 respectively from the communist government of France. Raue, Bulermolken, Reistem had accepted the post of saddlery contractors to the French army. Each of the foregoing had given a written promise to influence the Socialist vote. The Kaiser read and exhibited the promises; and continued. Steinbern had sold the minute books of various Socialist committees in Hanover for M. 300,000. (The books were produced by an imperial aide.) Volkenberg had scouted the proposal to municipalize his own vast possessions: Singenmann was proved to have derived his riches from ill-paid sweated labour.
“These be thy gods, O Socialism,” the Emperor cried: “the mere possession of important private property, of what is called a stake in the country, has revealed their brazen faces and feet of clay. The mere offer of the price of blood has revealed the Iscariots of the Fatherland.”
He commanded his hearers to remember that in 1890 he himself had abrogated the laws against socialism and had dismissed the persecutor Bismarck, saying Die Social Democratie überlassen sie mir; mit der werde ich ganz alleine fertig. He said that his method had been to leave them free to work out their own salvation: but in vain. A bad tree does not bring forth good fruit. It had not been socialism, nor parliamentary majorities and resolutions, which had welded together the German Empire: but the army and he, the Emperor, the representative of that power in the state which, not only created German unity in the teeth of those who pretended to represent the people but, thereby carried into every German home the sense of national power. Finally, he demanded, did the innocent industrious greathearted dupes of the socialist demagogues intend in this crisis of German history to follow and obey the behests of lowborn traitors, never-sufficiently-to-be-damned-and-despised sweaters, infamous Rabagases: or would they
