Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1890-07-03
CERMANY'S MAD RULERS.
CASTELAR, Declares the Reigning
Kaiser to be Insane.
The Teutonic Emperor Has Lost His
Head Through Greatness
Like the Roman.

HEAD through Greatness
Like the Roman.
EMILE CASTELAR,.
The recent acts of the young Emperor of
Germany are those of a downright mad
man. Nowadays one dares not express
himself too strongly, for every act out of
the common is straightway attributed
| alike by medical men and the public gen.
orally to nervous affection. According
to the new physiological psychology every
great poet, scientist, artist or orator is a
mailman. | do not think that that is so.
But do think that the position of an alb
:, solute monarch is calculated to induce
madness. In medicine, the vertigo caused
by great heights is well known 1t re-
quires a strong head to look down from on
high without turning giddy. Among the
Austrians the eccentricity of Macmillan
was put down to weak head The avowed
madness of Charles the Bold. that of Don
ma Juana, of CASTLE, Don Juan, of Portu-
gal, and Don Sebastian are cases in point.
1t explains alike the retirement to Juste
'of the great Spanish Emperor and the re-
cent tragic death of Archduke Rudolph in
his castle at Meyerling. But the enemies
and rivals of the Austrians, the princes of
the House of Brandenburg, have little to
envy them. We except the marvellous
genius of Frederick the Great, acknowiAg-
ed by all men, But his father, when he
prosecuted him despite his genius, and
when he coupled the Pomeranian Gren-
adiers with robust countrywomen in order
to obtain a generation of gigantic soldiers,
was he not mad?
And mad, too, was the great grandfather
of the present German Emperor, Frederick
William Ill. who insisted ON uniting the
Protestant churches and celebrating the
union, then called the Evangelical Union.
A man of greater learning than talent.
richer in religious ideas than in political
aptitude, theological writer devoted to
publishing works ON transcendental prob
lens of theogony, proud of his absolute
authority and bent on turning it into
spiritual instrument. he worked incessant-
ly for the prosperity of the traditional re-
ligion. and Cor the Union of the two
Protestant churches, divided by an un-
fathomable gulf of enmity. Inconsiderate.
like all demented persons, he rejected as
worthless the natural scruples of the
clergy and the faith of the believers, in
sisting foolishly on a close bond between
the churches, drawing up codes and
liturgies which he first essayed in private
synods and afterwards introduced into the
central synods, but without reflection
without sense or judgment. He even
composed sort of religious programme
called by him the royal liturgy and made
up of scraps from the old church litera-
ture.
But a step further went Frederick Will
liam VI, brother of the late William |.
This was positive case of atavism, when
he tried to win over the minds. of the
rational pantheistical school, represented
by Hegel, to the mystical school represented
by Schelling; having recourse to rescripts,
pensions, persecution of some and protec-
ton of others, as if he were back in the
times in which a rescri pit of Julian Con-
stantine and Theodosius suficed to change
the religious creeds of the entire universe.
Now, in the same way that King of
Prussia coupled his grenadiers with the
country girls, and a another Prussia
the philosophy of Hegel with that of
Schelling-the reigning Emperor wants to
marry the socialism of the chair with the
!: socialism of revolution. Such an under
taking is simply the result of the madness
inspired by a throne Proof enough, and
to spare has the Emperor given during
his short lifetime of d1sordered intellect.
Bear in mind the cruelty of his conduct
towards his illustrious and unhappy father;
his mania of rushing hither and thither;
his love of medieval, warlike religious
ceremonies, resembling those that the
Bavarian King, Louis, engaged IN to the
sound of Wagner's music; the lncoherent
speeches in which eccentricity is combined
with vulgarity, the fits of frenzy in the
starlight nights or on the sparkling
ocean; the propensity for mysticism
mixed with his prediction for Russian
nihilism; the habit of donning hundred
different uniforms, affecting as many
shapes and forms as the antique gods In
their metamorphoses.
All this explains the recent Labor Con-
ference in search of a social uniformity in
compatible with laws which regulate the
universe Easier would it be to give a
uniformly mild climate to all countries, to
concentrate all zones in one and the same
spot, than to render uniform the conditions
of work in the burning tropics and the
polar circles; to impose the same condi-
lions on labor; to confound the workman
of Valencia, bathed in ether and the scent
of orange blossoms, with the Westphallan
miner, stepped in the black and chilly
bowels of the earth This sort economic
Volapuk is conceivable in the apostles of
perpetual peace, corrollary of the dogma
of international arbitrage, of the abolition
of despotism; but spoken by those who
have waged the most destructive war of
our age; who retain Alsace and Lorraine;
who maintain general armament under
whose weight the whole of Europe bends,
it appears to me a blasphemy and a
mockery.
| remember how one day Napoleon the
Little, who agitated Europe with his So
cial and military innovations, convoked
Congress to establish the foundations of the
future peace of Europe, and how nobody
took any notice of it. A similar rebuke
were we'll merited at this hour by the
C@sarism, Pratoriansim, Anti Semitism,
Socialism, and Materialism spread over our
continent, thanks to the hateful and hated
German hegemony.
The excessive disproportion between the
young Emperor's intellectual faculties and
the functions he is called upon to perform
in the Empire has acted upon his nerves
and accounts for the inconsistency of his
conduct Compare his military utterances
in his interviews with puissant of the earth
and in his own conversations with General
/ Waldersea to the mystic speeches in Bran