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No. 50. — Vienna, 16 December 1898. — Second Year.

The German Speech from the Throne.

By O. Erter.

Speeches from the throne move, as experience teaches, in deeply furrowed grooves. Constitutional usage has produced a definite business-like form which as a rule leaves no room for individual peculiarities. The announcement of bills, a brief survey of the budget, a passage upon foreign relations — with that the cliché of a regular speech from the throne is in the main fixed as to content and structure. Only very seldom does it happen that this usage is departed from. Extraordinary events may bring it about, or else the constitutional monarch is a strong, self-righteous, extraordinary individuality which does not let itself be forced into the stereotyped frame of constitutional practice, but at times breaks through it.

The speech from the throne with which Emperor William II greeted the German Reichstag last week bears both marks: that of an extraordinary event, as well as that of an extraordinary personality. Its impression was therefore also stronger than one is otherwise accustomed to receive from speeches from the throne. It has been praised for prudence, moderation, amplitude, and withal for a fine and genuine pathos. And this judgment is well founded.

Emperor William, who, as is known, is his own Chancellor, probably also drafts his speeches from the throne in person. His grandfather once said, with an allusion to Prince Bismarck: “It is very hard to be Emperor under such a Chancellor.” William II, on the other hand, disposed of an objection to his policy with the words: “The new course is the right one, and it will be steered further.” By the great soaring power of his mind, as by the self-certain personality, the speeches from the throne of William II can in the long run remain uninfluenced; it needs but an event of the exceptional significance of the journey to Jerusalem to press for utterance, and at once the message to the representation of the Empire — which by its nature is a message to the whole world — receives a novel and highly individual stamp.

In this speech from the throne one feels the mighty impression which the Emperor himself received from the journey to the Orient, and this impression propagates itself to all who hear it. This is the secret of its effect. It is self-evident that the announcement of bills of domestic policy, however important they may be in themselves, can awaken only a qualified interest beyond the frontiers of Germany. The peace establishment of the army, the term of military service, freedom of combination are very considerable things; in the international ramifications which they possess they may even, according to the circumstances at hand, bear a strong and impassioned emphasis. But no enrapturing impulse proceeds from them. Such an impulse the latest speech from the throne of William II likewise exerts only in the paragraph which is devoted to the journey to the Orient; here one feels immediately the great breath of a historical event in conjunction with the mighty effect of a strong historical personality. The apostrophe to the Mohammedan people is in its way more characteristic of William II and his modern way of thinking than the whole domestic-political content of the speech from the throne, the so-called “penitentiary paragraph” included.

One must only not remain hanging upon details if one would recognise the tremendous reflex of the journey to Jerusalem in the speech from the throne. Objection has been taken in some quarters to the Emperor's having made particular mention in the speech of the gift of the “Dormition de la Sainte Vierge” to the German Catholics. That is the method of those Germanists who go sniffing after full stop and comma in Goethe's works. The journey to Jerusalem had a far grander horizon; one confounds occasion with purpose if one pushes the confessional moments into the foreground and does not value the consecration of the Church of the Redeemer and the gift of the “Dormition” as what they were, namely as episodes. The Protestant territorial bishop, the ruler over twenty millions of Catholics — these stood modestly enough, after all, beside the German Emperor, who had come to represent his great Empire and its world-power before the wide-opened gaze of the Orient, to throw the bridge of modern civilisation between West and East, to anoint the Caliphate, as it were, with a drop of occidental spirit.

Somewhat higher up into world-historical regions must one raise oneself if one would fathom from the latest speech from the throne of William II what this Orient-