DR. WALTHER RATHENAU, whose interesting letter to Colonel House was reprinted some months ago in THE LIVING AGE, has just published a study of the personality of William II. It is called, Der Kaiser: eine Betrachtung. The essay is, of course, not without partiality. On the first page Dr. Rathenau makes it clear that one purpose of his writing is to moderate the passions which he conceives the revolution and the flight of the Kaiser to have aroused. He maintains that in Germany the idea of the dynasty differed widely from that held in this country. "The German ruler is the most intensely German of the Germans (der deutscheste Mann). It is not the Roman, the English idea. This man we have of our own free will placed so high that we reverence in him the expression of our own supreme will. It is rather a childlike feeling of trust. Here we have had given us from heaven an earthly father; he is an example to us and we obey him.'

was

This belief at certain periods in German history a most salutary belief ruined by the too intimate connection of the Imperial dignity with the prosperous bourgeoisie and its tool, the National Liberal party. This was the inner weakness. The Emperor was unconscious of it. His training, the atmosphere of tradition, of the 'divine right of kings,' which enveloped him from his childhood, was a blinding atmosphere. He grew up really to believe that he was called by the Almighty, and that every achievement of dynastic policy was a judgment of God.' There was, Dr. Rathenau asserts, no means of destroying this fatal illusion. A genius would have seen through the sham, but the ex-Emperor was no genius. The nation, consciously or unconsciously, wished him to be as he was and not otherwise.' For the most part it had no experience, no knowledge of other countries with less arbitrary dynastic sovereigns; it accepted the Emperor as it found him, and its occasional protests were

never anything but superficial, leaving untouched the great illusion. 'Not one day could authority have been exercised in Germany as it was without the concurrence of the nation. The nation is innocent, for it lacked the necessary standards of comparison and the impulse of distress, without which there could be no movement.

The conscience which was arising in the country was not known to the Emperor; he was conscious only of agreement wherever he went. He reached the limits of his rights, but he did not overstep them.'

Dr. Rathenau declines to call this condition of affairs a tragedy. The element of Fate is present, but the dénouement is not tragic. And yet here he is surely mistaken. The saying that 'character is fate' was surely never better illustrated in modern history than in the career of the ex-Emperor. Certainly the chapters of this little book read like the material for a drama. The end, perhaps, is not yet.

SIR DOUGLAS HAIG evidently has no sympathy with those who denounce the armistice as a calamity, and will have it that the war should have been fought to the heart of Berlin. Speaking recently at the Mercer's Hall, Sir Douglas said, in regard to his soldiers:

"They rejoiced with their comrades of the sister service in the great and unparalleled triumph that but lately was theirs. If any of them felt regret that the end came, as it did, without a last fight, the army did not share with them that regret; for while there could be no doubt as to the utter completeness of their victory or as to the supreme credit it reflected upon them, the army was glad that they and the country were spared unnecessary loss. After all, with them in the army events at the last followed much the same course, and did so because of their deliberate choice. It would have been possible after the great culminating defeat inflicted on the enemy

BY ALICE MEYNELL

NURSE EDITH CAVELL

(Two o'clock, the morning of October 12, 1915.)

To her accustomed eyes

The midnight morning brought not such a dread

As thrills the chance-awakened head that lies

In trivial sleep on the habitual bed.

'T was yet some hours ere light;

And many, many, many a break of day

Had she outwatched the dying; but this night

Shortened her vigil was, briefer the way.

By dial of the clock

'T was day in the dark above her lonely head.

This day thou shalt be with Me.' Ere the cock

Announced that day she met the Immortal Dead.

IN A TRAIN

BY THOMAS PYM

I am drawn away again

To the land of the green-smirched roofs The pink walls and the clustered villages,

To the long low stretching hills,
And the great long rolling clouds,
The stripped vineyards and the clois-
tered farms.

For I am sped away again

To the land where the hills are

crowned

With the purples, reds, and oranges
Of the sombre winter woods,
Angled with remnants of cloth
Of printed orchards and of emerald
sheets of grass.

To where the sun tears through the clouds,

Heaving their weights from the blue, To the land of the files of trees Searching the ochres of rivers

With delving reflections of deep green