The Spell of Flanders

Example in this ebook CHAPTER I.—THE SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS.In June of 1888 an army of workmen were toiling in the Champ de Mars upon the foundations of a noble World’s Exhibition planned to celebrate the centenary of the death by violence of the Divine Right of Kings. Four thousand miles westward in the city of Chicago some seven hundred delegates were assembled in National Convention to select the twenty-third President of a great Republic which also stood upon the threshold of its hundredth birthday. These were both suggestive facts full of hopeful and inspiring thoughts to the serious mind. Considered together by themselves they seemed very eloquent proofs of the progress which Liberty Enlightenment the Rights of Man and other admirable abstractions spelled with capital letters had made during the century.But unfortunately or otherwise history will not take them by themselves. That same June of 1888 witnessed a spectacle of quite another sort in a third large city—a spectacle which gave the lie direct to everything that Paris and Chicago seemed to say. This sharp and clamorous note of contradiction came from Berlin where a helmeted and crimson-cloaked young man still in his thirtieth year stood erect on a throne surrounded by the bowing forms of twenty ruling sovereigns and proclaimed with the harsh peremptory voice of a drill-sergeant that he was a War Lord a Mailed Hand of Providence and a sovereign specially conceived created and invested with power by God for the personal government of some fifty millions of people.It is much to be feared that in the ears of the muse of history the resounding shrillness of this voice drowned alike the noise of the hammers on the banks of the Seine and the cheering of the delegates at Chicago.Any man standing on that throne in the White Saloon of the old Schloss at Berlin would have to be a good deal considered by his fellow-creatures. Even if we put aside the tremendous international importance of the position of a German Emperor in that gravely open question of peace or war he must compel attention as the visible embodiment of a fact the existence of which those who like it least must still recognize. This is the fact: that the Hohenzollerns having done many notable things in other times have in our day revivified and popularized the monarchical idea not only in Germany but to a considerable extent elsewhere throughout Europe. It is too much to say perhaps that they have made it beloved in any quarter which was hostile before. But they have brought it to the front under new conditions and secured for it admiring notice as the mainspring of a most efficient exact vigorous and competent system of government. They have made an Empire with it—a magnificent modern machine in which army and civil service and subsidiary federal administrations all move together like the wheels of a watch. Under the impulse of this idea they have not only brought governmental order out of the old-time chaos of German divisions and dissensions but they have given their subjects a public service which taken all in all is more effective and well-ordered than its equivalent produced by popular institutions in America France or England and they have built up a fighting force for the protection of German frontiers which is at once the marvel and the terror of Europe.Thus they have as has been said rescued the ancient and time-worn function of kingship from the contempt and odium into which it had fallen during the first half of the century and rendered it once more respectable in the eyes of a utilitarian world.To be continue in this ebook...