THE KAISER'S FATE.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 24, 26 March 1915, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE KAISER'S FATE.

HOW HIS CLAWS WILL BJ CLIPPED.

In spite of the warning against dividing the bear's skin before you have caught him, the British public are devoting a great deal of speculation to die fate of the Kaiser. You hear discussions in i ailway-car-riages, clubs, and restaurants; it has become a breakfast-table problem, and is chatted about at five o'clock teas. When the end comes, and the German military machine is broken —as it will be—what will happen to the Kaiser ? The suggestions for dealing with him range from interning him in some peculiarly unpleasant St. Helena to "something lingering with boiling oil in it." It is well, then, writes the correspondent of a London paper, to consider calmly what are the possibilities which the future holds for the War Lord in tho event of the victory of the Allies. First we must recognise that he may never fall into our hands alive. He may be killed in battle; sometimes the bullet finds an unexpected billet. He may be shot by some revolutionist in bis own dominions, excited to frenzy by the ruin of his nation. True, ihe German Socialists have always eschewed violence, but Dr. Nobiling, the Anarchist, fired at Wilhelm T. and wounded him', though not fatally, in June, 1878, and another practitioner might possibly have a better aim. There is also the possibility that the Kaiser might commit suicide rather than survive the fall of his dominions. He is by temperament half-hero and half-actor, and this :Xeronic solution might accord with either phase. Assuming, says the correspondent, that neither of these violent solutions of the riddle takes place, we still come to the question: If we capture the Kaiser, what shall we do with him? So long as the war lasted he would, of course, be a prisoner of war, as Napoleon TTI. was after his surrender at Sedan in September, 1870. But immediately the war was over, Napoleon was released from the castle of Wilhelmshoe, near Cassel, where he had been secluded.

It was not the invading Germans, but the French, who deprived Napoleon 111. of his throne. We shall find that all the monarehs of the nineteenth century were either shot or deposed, suffered from insurrections of their own subjects, or from the annexation of their territories by belligerents. Thus the Emperor Maximilian was shot in Mexico in 18G7, and King Manuel was deposed in Portugal in 1910 from the former cause. The cases of the King of Hanover, the King of Naples, and the Queen of Madagascar will at once occur as those of monarehs who lost their thrones by annexation.

As we have neither the power nor the desire to annex Germany, the correspondent countries, these precedents may he dismissed. So long as the Prussian people want Wilhelm as their King, neither the Allies nor anybody else can iind the slightest legal or moral justification for dethroning him or imprisoning him at St. Helena or anywhere else.

Is it likely, demands the correspondent, that the Tsar and King George, both of them legitimate monarchs, will consent to hold that a legitimate monarch of another country can be treated so cavalu rlv as Napoleon was treated by the kings of 1814? The fact that both the King and the Tsar are cousins of the offender, says the writer, will make it finally impossible that any of these bloodthirsty schemes should be adopted.

"Blood is thicker than water," and kings, after all, have a fellow-feeling for one another, even though they have ceased to exchange telegrams addressed to "My dear Nicholas" and "My dear Wilhelm."

What, then, will happen to the Kaiser? He will, the writer tells us, automatically cease to be an Emperor, because he will have no Empire, hut will be left as King of Prussia so long as the Prussians want him. He will not be deprived of his royal rank, but will bo harmless for mischief, with no seaboard on the North Sea, and with no power to call oil the armies of Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Hanover to fight in his nuarrels.