Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 172, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 August 1917 — Kaiser’s Power Broken, Says Historian Reinach. [ARTICLE]

Kaiser’s Power Broken, Says Historian Reinach.

(By Joseph Reinach, the Famous French Military Historian.) Paris, Aug. 6.—Bethmann-Hollweg, the fallen German chancellor, finished by uniting every party against himstlf. The socialists and liberals judged him too weak to put through the parliamentary reforms for the reasons, perhaps, that, like Zimmerman, he would prefer to serve one difficult master to five hundred fools. The military chiefs, the pan-Ger-manists and the agrarians opposed him because he had adopted the formula of peace without annexations or indemnities. Bethmann was the shadow of a man walking in the shadow of a crime. Alone favoring lim stood the Kaiser.

There can be no doubt about the sincerity of the Kaiser in regretting the necessity of throwing away this old shoe, which, though worn out, was comfortable. The/imperial regret was only the more sharpened because the two men he hates the most, his own son, the Crown Prince, and Von Hindenburg, helped to get rid of the favorite.

The military dictatorship of the trio, Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Von Tirpits, to whcih the Kaiser had to consent a year ago, was a first capitulation for the monarch. He still struts the stage, but with the instinct of an eld actor who can sense the spirit of his audience, he makes no mistakes. He feels that he is in the way. Last December he vainly tried to return to favor with a sudden peace offensive. For the historian who cares nothing about leses majeste, the July political crisis in Germany did not concern the chancellorship, but the ruling sovereign. The Kaiser question has been debated in whispers in Germany for a long time. When Dr. Spahn, the leader of the Center party, goes about proclaiming that “the people are unshakably devoted to the Emperor,” you can be quit esure there is something wrong. Such proclamations mean the same thing in political strategy as “we retired to stronger positions prepared in advance” means in military strategy. ’ ... The only thing we can say with certainty today about the new chancellor, Michaelis, the first commoner to succeed Bismarck, a kind of Prussian Roland, with no buckles to his shoes —itself a sure sign of the decline of the regime—is that he will not be the Kaiser’s telephone. He cannot go back on the royal and imperial grant to Prussia of universal, direct and secret suffrage in the place of what Bismarck called the most foolish voting system that ever existed. Neither can he go back on the infamous royal and imperial lie of August, 1914, that Germany had not embarked on a war of conquest, but on a defensive war. The former of these questions, important though it may be in the future, does not yet interest us. For two reasons it is, doubtless, of capital importance. The granting of universal suffrage to Prussia smashes the instrument of domination in the hands of the old Prussions, feudal lords and pan-Germanists. Also the universal suffrage will bring to the Prussian parliaments an imposing minority of Poles whn win claim the linking of the cradle of Poland to the renascent Polish republic. On the other hand, the latter of the two questions mentioned above forms the whole kernel of the war, because I shall never tire of repeating that the question! of war objects is also the question of the origin of the war. Nothing wilt have been done until Germany herself thrusts down the Emperor’s defensive war of which he was at one and the same time the dupe and the aC Th^ P secret is out that Bethmann. said recently to Dr. Harnack, the theologian, that “the best Germany can now hope for is a drawn war. Why is it that apparently the majority in Germany is demanding a peace without annexations and indemnities. because Germany feels she is beaten. Next because the acceptance by the entente of this truce disguised under the name of peace would be in the eyes of Germany a recognition by the * entente that the war was a defensive war for Germany and was not begun by her. That is precisely the meaning of the German effort to obtain such a “white peace.” To such insolence we can only reply with victories.