THE KAISER'S HOPEFUL SON.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 20 August 1917, Page 6

THE KAISER'S HOPEFUL SON.

Of all the Hohenzollern rulers, Frederick was the most blameless (says the New York Sun), and by the nobility of his character and the liberality of his political views and principles of* fered a striking contrast to his predecessors on the throne, and also, alas ! to his successor. His death was attended by circumstances calculated to prejudice the entire world, civilised and uncivilised, against his eldest son, the present Kaiser. For when his father, was succumbing to suffocation and gasping out his last breath, he caused the palace to be surrounded by troops, reducing all the Inmates to a state of captivity, and treated his grief-stricken mother with such incredible brutality in his endeavours tO' extort from her his father’s diaries and memoranda that it is amazing that either Queen Victoria or any of the brothers and sisters of the Empress Frederick in England should ever have been willing to hold any inter- ' course with him again. It would require columns, and even .pages, to enumerate the principal and least creditable events of the present Kaiser’s reign. Moreover, it is unnecessary. They are too fresh in the minds and memories of the present generation. To those who -were intimately acquainted with the Emperor and his personal friends prior to his accessiion to the crown, many of his acts and utterances since he has been on the throne appear utterly incomprehensible and attributable to a disordered brain, possibly resulting from physical suf-

fering. While some excuse on this score may be found for him, and while at times he Has had moments when he showed himself in a fascinating light, there is nothing that can be said on behalf of his eldest son, the Crown Prince. The latter is known to have been one of the principal members of the military junta that led the Kaiser into the present war. Abominable in his treatment of his charming wife, disgraceful in his private life, contemptible as a military commander., a mixture of senti mentality and meanness, of extravagant geniality and sinister cruelty, without any reliability or sense of honour, ho is universally detested and despised to such an extent by his fellow countrymen that there is no longer any question of his being permitted to succeed his father in the role of German Emperor, or even in that of ruler of Prussia, The Prussians would not have him as their king, nor the other German States as their Kaiser and generalissimo It looks very much as if the ancinet and popular German prophecy is about to be fulfilled according to-which rmperor William is destined to be the last monarch of his doomed race*