The _Neue Muenchen Tageblatt_ has
been seized at Muenich for having published an attack upon "the mania for
armaments and for military pomp which possesses William II, a mania which
is exhausting Germany and will leave her completely ruined after the next
war."
November 12, 1891. [15]
The unfortunate Constitution of the German Empire, like the Emperor
himself, doesn't know which way to turn. Legislation, administration,
the army; the universities, the Church and the administration of justice:
everything is being passed through a sieve, and transformed, first in
order that it may retransform itself and then become more readily
accessible to the rising generation. Anything that savours of a ripe age
is extremely displeasing to William II. Ripeness is a thing which he
disdains to acquire. All that is youthful finds favour in his eyes, with
the sole exception of a class of youth with which he is disposed to deal
severely, viz. the _souteneurs_. Against them the _summus episcopus_ is
extremely wroth. Here the virtue of chaste Germany is at stake, and he
proposes to cauterise the disease with a red-hot iron. For the future,
the scandalous discussion of these things will be forbidden to the Press,
and thus, even if private morals continue the same, public morality will
not be offended. Hypocrisy, at least, will be saved.
There is much talk at Vienna of a plan whispered at headquarters in
Berlin, which has to do with converting the capital of Austria into an
entrenched camp, so that an army driven back from the Austro-Russian
frontiers might there be re-formed.
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