TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR. THE first Hohenzollern Emperor of Germany, the stateliest if not the grandest figure of our time, passed away on Friday morning, not suddenly, but with an unexpectedness which has given to the event something of the aspect of a catastrophe. King or peasant, a man over ninety must always hold his life by a tenure of hours ; but the world is swayed by impressions, and the fixed impression was that the Crown Prince, with his incurable ailment, would precede his father. Happily—we say happily, because the natural sequences must always be the best—it has been decided otherwise, and the modern "Great King" has preceded, instead of following, his son to his last rest. We cannot say, no man will be able to say for fifty years to come, that the Emperor William had had a happy life ; but of all men of his time he had enjoyed the fullest and most varied one. Jena and Sedan were both in his time. He might have sat by his mother's side as she begged Magdeburg from Napoleon, crying as she pleaded, and was refused ; and he lived to enter Paris as the conqueror of France. He could remember well the years of humiliation, when Prussia was hardly a Kingdom, and its Sovereign hardly a Monarch ; and he had himself, by his own capacity for organising armies and choosing men, raised her to the acknowledged and legalised headship of Germany, and to the first position among the European States. He had endured, though he had no share in, the grand humiliation of Olmiitz ; and he had not only struck down Austria on the field of Sadowa, but had bound his hereditary enemy to his side in an enduring alliance in which the Hapsburgs are not the first. He was a man past fifty when he was driven from Berlin by its people, an apparently 'helpless fugitive, with no prospect but a dreary life of exile ; he was an old man when, as King, he quarrelled with his people about the Army ; and he lived to die, mainly because of the deeds of that Army, the idol of the Germanic race, with Berlin assembled round his palace weeping for grief that he should go, and all of his language throughout the world sorrowing as for a friend. There never was such a record even among the caste which for a thousand years has retained in Europe a monopoly of visibleness in suffering and in triumph, and of that record he was in himself and his nature not unworthy. Of the Emperor William's inner history no one knows anything yet, or will know till his letters appear, pro- bably in the next generation, and he has throughout the triumphant section of his life, been overshadowed by a yet loftier figure ; but the few facts that are certain justify all men in believing that the instinct of his people is right, and that he was a great King. He made the Army which made Germany. He chose' often, as in the Moltke case, out of a dim obscurity, the group of Paladins who, by their wisdom, or their energy, or their skill in war, built up the Imperial throne ; and having chosen them, he, through evil report and good report, steadfastly adhered to his choice. To a House like the Hohenzollern, a Minister like Prince Bismarck must often have been insufferable ; but the King without magic had recognised the magical quality in his instrument, and be the strain, or the opposition, or the harass what it might, he stood faithfully to his side. No; that phrase is incorrect. It was the special force of the deceased Monarch that he possessed in the highest degree the faculty of Kingship, that he never was lost in advisers greater than himself, that even with a Minister like Bismarck and a warrior like Moltke, there never was a moment when his judgment had not to be consulted, or -when he had lost for a day his birthright of ultimate command. We think it will be found, when all about him is known, that although his first faculty was insight into the capacities of men—a royal gift which in him must have risen to the height of genius—he had one of those rare and penetrating judgments which pierce through all environments down to the hard reality of facts, and employ means thoroughly weighed for ends at once attainable and possessed of outline. Not to him, nor to any Hohenzollern was given "the wealth to some large natures lent, divinely lavish, though so oft misspent ;" but one cannot think of the Emperor dreaming, or vapouring, or swerving in pursuit of any ideal from a clearly marked-out course. Once, and once only, it is historically recorded of him that he was seized with what might have proved a fatal aspiration. Bohemia lay at his feet, and he so longed for the prize—which would have made of the Hapsburgs sleepless foes—that for some hours it seemed as if he and his great servant must part company ; but after a struggle, so hard that Prince Bismarck spoke of it as his hardest, the cool judgment resumed its sway, and the conqueror left it possible for Austria to become a cordial supporter of her rival's throne. The Imperial Crown never tempted him—the Crown of Prussia, he said, was " more real "—and when he had taken the higher dignity, and stood first among European Sovereigns upon the throne of Charle- magne with its feet of cannon-balls, with an army behind him believed to be irresistible, he calmly renounced all idea of further aggrandisement, asked openly for peace in his time, and set himself, by patient daily labour, to keep up the polish of the bar of steel into which he had welded his dominions. Charlemagne, Charles V., Napoleon, no conqueror who had done so much ever lost so little through overleaping ambition or lack of self-control.
The impact of his death upon all European minds will be profound, for he was a true King, and no King is ever suc- ceeded by his like, and we fear his death will release many ambitions ; but it is too soon yet to speculate on its general results. For the present, all men will continue wrapped in expectation, fascinated by a scene which has no precedent in history, either for its sadness or its dramatic interest. The great King is dead, and his sceptre devolves upon a man so stricken by Providence that it is heroism in him even to appear to grasp it as it falls. Even to reach Berlin, the Crown Prince must risk more than most men risk on the battlefield ; and once there, he will be an Emperor stretched on a sick-bed, nearly voiceless, perhaps knowing that the sands of his life are running low, waiting calmly for the beckon which has but just sum- moned his predecessor. As we understand the Constitutions of Prussia and Germany, the Crown Prince is even now, without formality or proclamation, King of Prussia and Emperor in Germany, in full legal possession of the great pre- rogatives which attach to both positions, and which demand of the man who would use them hours of daily work. The King of Prussia is no mere standard-bearer. The daily reports go to him ; his pencil-notes on their margins are final orders ; his signature alone, or that of his authorised substi- tute—who, by the family law, must be a Prince and not a Minister—can give them full validity. If the new Emperor has the strength for his duties, all is simple, for even a speech- less King may govern ; but if not, it is for him to determine how the government shall be carried on, who shall be his substitute, and what veto upon policy he will himself retain. For a man so stricken, it is the strangest and saddest of positions,—to have lived such a life, to be so prepared for sovereignty even by experience, to attain the Crown, and then in a moment of supreme importance to know that it is all in vain, that he is a prisoner in a resistless grasp, that substantive power must remain with men who may not have either his motives or his ideas. There is nothing like it in history, and it will take all Prince Bis- marck's genius for great decisions, and much more than common self-command among the Hohenzollerns, to avoid a situation which only the enemies of Germany would view with calm. They are very bitter, it must be remembered, these enemies ; and to them every weakness, however temporary, in the great German House, must seem full of hope.
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