Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 106, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1910 — WORLD’S ONLY EMPEROR. [ARTICLE]

WORLD’S ONLY EMPEROR.

Mmjr Lay Claim to Title, bat Only to Wilhelm Doea It Belong. If any one of the original Caesars awoke to-day and heard diplomatists talk, about caar, kaiser, imperator, empereur, mikado, etc., he would be sorely perplexed. In his day there was only one emperor. Theoretically, so is there only one to-day—direct heir to Julius himself. And that emperor is none other than William of Hohenzollern, the Scrapbook says. The title of emperor, it is true, has become the badge of every new dynasty. We now have “the egiperor of Bulgaria.” But there was no imaginary grounds necessary for applying the title to*the ruler of the German dmpfre. German kings had been emperors—Roman emperors —for centuries. So Kaiser Wilhelm is to-day. He is not emperor of Germany; there is no such personage. He is the German emperor. When the sovereigns of Russia assumed the imperial title, K was meant to assert tor themselves a claim, hoW* ever shadowy, to represent the emperors of the bast. They were the greatest—indeed, the only independent —princes of the eastern faith, and they claimed a kind of roundabout descent from some of the Byzantine dynasties. But still, throughout the century, the Roman emperor and German king was still “the emperor,” the Russian claimant was merely emperor with a qualification. It is only since 1804 that the title nas been taken up by any one who has chosen. But one at leagt of those who took it up in 1804- had a very distinct meaning in taking it up. When the elder Bonaparte called him■elf ''Emperor of the French,” when

he was very near calling himself “Emperor of the Gauls,” he perhaps did nojt remember “the Empire of the Gauls,” which had been proclaimed so long before by Civflls. But hp certainly meant to proclaim himself as something mpre than a mere local king of France. He meant to set himself up as the successor of the Frankish emperors In the dominion of the. west. He openly gave himself out as the successor of Charlemagne, not as the successor of Louis le Grand. The strange confusion of history does not matter; the object was to go back to the. days when the common ruler of Gaul and Germany was also the Roman Caesar. Then came the assumption of the Imperial title by the sovereign of Austria as the Emperor of Austria. It seems to be commonly thought that when, In 1806, Francis 11. laid aside the titles of Roman emperor and German king and went on reigning as "Emperor of Austria,” he took up this last title for the first time. This would have been intelligible. The motive for taking the new title could have been only to place himself distinctly as an Austrian and not as a Roman or German prince, on a level with the new emperor of the French.