A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
AVING been for practical purposes dead for more than 11 'twenty years, the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm is now to be buried. Thzre has, in fact, been something uncanny in reading of the pre-1914 Emperor, with his shining armour, his Tangier land- ing, his Yellow Peril speeches, his Daily Telegraph interview, his protectorship of Islam, and remembering that blood was still pulsing within the same framework of bones and flesh in some Dutch village which nine people out of ten had never hard of till Wilhelm went there. History has not yet passed its verdict on the responsibility the Kaiser must bear personally for the last Great War, but he unquestionably made war in- evitable from the moment he decided that Germany must have a supreme navy as well as a supreme army. He himself, of course, had his own views about war-guilt. The real criminal, he told a visitor at Doom some years ago, was Cecil Rhodes, with his imperialistic Cape-to-Cairo plans. (Yet Rhodes had insisted on including German as well as Dominion students in his scholarship scheme.) His hatred of Britain, and of his uncle Edward VII in particular, was too deep-rooted to be overcome, in spite of his half-sincere claims to be Anglo- phile; his affection for his grandmother, Queen Victoria, did, indeed, seem genuine. He was always ready to take offence at imaginary slights—for example, because some British Minister, like Grey, did not visit Germany. It is odd that his death should come just when all the world is talking of the `Bismarck ' and the Tirpitz.' If the young Kaiser had not "dropped the pilot," as Sir John Tenniel put it in his memor- able cartoon, in 1890, and not given way to von Tirpitz and approved the fatal Navy Law of 190o and its extensions, the two European wars might never have taken place.
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