Wilhelm II

Had they the means, doubtless they would purchase meat, not because of any instinctive liking for it, but because of that almost universal trait of human character that causes men to desire to imitate their superiors, without, in most cases, any due consideration as to whether the supposed superiors are worthy of the genuflection they get.

Were King George or Kaiser Wilhelm to become vegetarians and advocate the non-flesh diet, such an occurrence would do far more towards advancing the popularity of this diet than a thousand lectures from mere men of science.

Carlyle was not far wrong when he called men clothes-worshippers.

Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer.

a prophetic witness in his book life on the circuit with lincoln judge whitney comments as early as eighteen fifty six independent of all contemporary opinion i conceived the idea that mr lincoln was a prodigy of intellectual and moral force Others associated with this deemed him superlatively great, but still human.

i went farther my view was definite and pronounced that lincoln was ordained for a greater than a merely human mission and i avowed this belief as early as that time his character as a lawyer was controlled and moulded by his character as a man he understood human nature thoroughly and was an expert in the cross-examination of witnesses if a witness told the truth without evasion lincoln was respectful and patronizing to him but he would score a perjured witness unmercifully he took no notes but remembered everything quite as well as those who did so i remember once we all court and lawyers except lincoln insisted that a witness had sworn so and so but it turned out that lincoln was correct and that he recollected better than the united bench and bar but with all his candour there was a method in shrewdness which leonard swett well understood and which he had thus forcibly expressed as the trial progressed where most lawyers object he would say he reckoned it would be fair to admit this in or that and sometimes when his adversary could not quite prove what lincoln knew to be the truth he would say he reckoned it would be fair to admit the truth to be so and so when he did object to the court when he heard his objections answered he would often say well i reckon i must be wrong he was wise as a serpent in the trial of a case but i have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove when the whole thing is unravelled the adversary begins to see that what he was so blandly giving away was simply what he couldn't get and keep by giving away six points and carrying the seventh he carried his case and the whole case hanging on the seventh he traded everything which would give him the least aid in carrying that any one who took lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up on his back in a ditch lincoln's simplicity there are two kinds of simplicity one is without reason or discrimination that believes all that is seen and heard if presented under the guise of honesty the other is the kind that penetrates beneath manner dress verbiage and meets all subterfuge artifice and sophistry with statements and facts at once logical and irrefutable lincoln was the most simple man in dress in speech in manners in looks that ever stood before the world in so great a role but his intellect was anything but simple he was never deceived by cunning devices and cunning manoeuvres bacon has an essay showing the difference between cunning and wisdom and it may be said that lincoln's knowledge took the form of wisdom as distinguished from cunning his management of a law case was that of a seer the points he made were not made for personal gratification but for love of truth and justice not only he did not want to risk being deceived he took every precaution to insure against deception here is where his welding of reason and logic produced in his marvellous intellect a kind of clairvoyance which his friends at the bar felt but could not analyse the combination was unheard of the lawyers and the judges could only reason from their own experience they could only cite examples in their own lives and this man lincoln was unlike all that had been and all that was lincoln's simplicity seemed to the casual observer of a character so trusting and so naive that it deceived all the members of his cabinet during the first two years of the war they were used to smart men clever men academical men they called for the routine of respectability and official dignity to their minds the president seemed pliable and willing and they set about instructing him in the a b c of high politics and the first principles of statesmanship the president was in no way frustrated he understood them in advance having weighed them in the balance of his own judgment he had found them honest but inexperienced sincere but saucy he knew they were living in an atmosphere of low visibility at the proper moment he would turn on the searchlights and give them their bearings some of them expected to act as the president's pilot while others expected to be captain of the ship of state with the president as pilot it took them more than two years to find out that this pioneer of the west was captain pilot and master of charts on a political sea the like of which they little dreamed existed in one sense he wore out their obstinacy by his patience in another he awaited opportunities to attest their errors and show his judgment but matters proceeded with such calm that they could not understand with what power he acted with what prescience he divined what mystified them was the combination of the practical with the spiritual their clear vision with the maxims of ordinary business affairs the penetration of the future while working in seeming darkness lincoln's clairvoyant wit lincoln was not deceived by an outward show of religion a southern woman begged the president to have her husband released from a northern prison for she said although he is a rebel he is a very religious man lincoln replied i am glad to hear that because any man who wants to disrupt this union needs all the religion in sight to save him he treated with indifference people who commandeered a haughty woman came to lincoln and demanded a colonel's commission for her son i demand it she said not as a favour but as a right sir my grandfather fought at lexington my father fought at new orleans and my husband was killed at monterey i guess madam was lincoln's reply your family has done enough for the country it is time to give someone else a chance when hugh mcculloch secretary of the treasury in lincoln's second term presented a delegation of new york bankers at the white house mcculloch said these gentlemen of new york have come on to see the secretary of the treasury about our new loan as bankers they are obliged to hold our national securities i can vouch for their patriotism and loyalty for as the good book says where the treasury is there will the heart be also to which lincoln replied there is another text mr mcculloch i remember that might equally apply where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together lincoln condemned as tedious a certain greek history when a diplomat present said the author of that history mr president is one of the profoundest scholars of the age no one has plunged more deeply into the sacred fount of learning yes replied lincoln or come up drier when in chicago in eighteen sixty the mayor john wentworth asked lincoln why he did not get some astute politician to run him lincoln replied that events are not a man's own exertions made presidents to henry c whitney lincoln remarked chad and ray and those fellows think i don't see anything but i see all around them i see better what they want to do with me than they do themselves they were deceived not by lincoln who never cared what individuals thought but by nature which often sets a trap for people who live in a world of their own illusions nature the medium through which the divine mind manifests is so to speak a mask through which egoists cannot penetrate and by which the cunning are led to destruction lincoln let them talk and even act knowing that they themselves were the tools for their own undoing while the warred politicians and others who thought themselves far superior laid their plans schemed and intrigued the man of clear vision awaited unperturbed the events which he knew would put them all in their proper places little did they dream that they were mere incidents among the millions of incidents that go to the making of one epoch-making event the practical mystic is little concerned with incidents the multitude do not know in what direction they are going moved and influenced as they are by the incidental the accidental the shifting illusions in which they live but the man who knows why they are influenced also knows why he is influenced lincoln was patient with the men who considered him a sort of political accident he understood their point of view he did not entertain feelings of revenge hundreds of men like john wentworth are only mentioned to-day because of some passing incident which connected them with the man whom they regarded as a failure in politics a prophetic vision of hades that william blake was a mystic of the practical kind there can be no question in art and in poetry he had that illumination which lincoln had in statesmanship the new york times says that a century has fell to heap the dust of oblivion over england's greatest mystic william blake is exemplified by the reproduction in a recent issue of country life of one of blake's engravings for dante's inferno in which four fiends with cruel faces are torturing a soul in hell the face of the chief devil who is not actually engaged in the torture but is an eager and interested spectator might easily be taken for a portrait of the german emperor as suggested by w f boudillon the familiar upturned mustachios must have puzzled blake in his vision he represented them as tusks growing from the corners of the mouth it is to be noted that this fiend alone among the four has the tusks it is recorded of blake as a lad that his father would have apprenticed him to rylands the court engraver a man much liked and in great prosperity at the time but blake objected saying father i do not like his face he looks as if he would live to be hanged twelve years later ryland's committed forgery and the prophecy came true blake's visions startling though they be are not more startling than the prophecies made by lincoln as for instance his prophecy of prohibition women's rights and the end of slavery not to mention his visions concerning himself the practical mystic sees through the scientific materialist sees only the surface eternity is the everlasting now blake drew a faithful portrait of the kaiser wilhelm the second of germany long before the kaiser was born and tycho brahe predicted the birth of a swedish conqueror and what he would accomplish in these things there is no place for chance nor is it true that the practical mystic is limited to poetry or art or to music or to religion politics and philosophy neither is the practical mystic confined to any particular social class or any creed abraham lincoln could not have directed affairs had he been a recluse before he became an adept in the direction of material affairs he had to be familiar with the practical ways of the world and as a lawyer he passed through a school that left no place for vague theories or vain illusions he frequently stripped others of their illusions but being free of illusions himself he had none to lose this made him invulnerable his enemies were swayed by theories nothing short of knowledge sufficed for this man who reduced his adversaries to the position where they were kept constantly on the alert to know what manoeuvre to employ next they moved in a region of guesswork where there was no law except that of their own confusion and discomfiture shakespeare and lincoln lincoln says judge whitney was one of the most heterogeneous characters that ever played a part in the great drama of history and it was for this reason that he was so greatly misjudged and misunderstood that he was on the one hand described as a mere humorist a sort of artemus ward or mark twain that it was thought that by some irony of fate a low comedian had got into the presidential chair and that the nation was being delivered over to conflagration while this modern nero fiddled upon its ruins one of his peculiarities was his inequality of conduct his dignity interspersed with freaks of frivolity and inanity his high aspiration and achievement and his descent into the most primitive veils of listlessness in the chief drawer of his cabinet table all the current joke books of the time were in juxtaposition with official commissions lacking only the final signature applications for pardons from death penalties laws awaiting executive action and orders which when launched would control the fate of a million men and the destinies of unborn generations hence it was that superficial persons who expected great achievements to be ushered in with a prologue could not understand or appreciate that this great man's administration was a succession of acts of grand and heroic statesmanship or that he was a prodigy of intellect and moral force the mystic shakespeare and the mystic lincoln have a connecting link in their wit and humour had shakespeare left us only two dramas macbeth and othello no one would have dreamed of a creation like falstaff emanating from the same mind yet it is because of the union of the tragic and the humorous that shakespeare is universally human worldly wise as well as spiritual and metaphysical shakespeare makes of the grave-digger in hamlet a sort of clown with a spade and throughout all his dramas wit and humour pathos and tragedy go hand in hand without his humour shakespeare would have been little more than an english racine with lincoln humour was made to serve a high psychic purpose by its means he created a new atmosphere and new conditions through which he could all the more freely work and act he brought humour into play for his own good as well as that of others he was not a theorist or a dreamer of dreams he was a practical mystic a prophecy fulfilled In a letter written from Springfield, Illinois, August 15, 1855, to the Honorable George Robertson of Lexington, Kentucky, Lincoln said, The autocrat of all the Russias will proclaim his subjects free sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

On the day before Lincoln's first inauguration as President of the United States, the autocrat of all the Russias, Alexander II, by imperial decree, emancipated his serfs.

while six weeks after the inauguration the american masters headed by jefferson davis began the great war of secession to perpetuate and spread the institution of slavery this is only one of lincoln's prophecies which proved true in stating them he did not pass into an abnormal state he spoke as one would speak of the coming weather he did not consult the stars nor any person before making a prophetic statement seeing clearly was as natural to him as eating or sleeping he was not a psychic machine uttering thoughts which seemed strange and enigmatical to himself because his intellectual and spiritual powers were part of himself men of genius are not instruments in the vulgar meaning of the word they do not act in ignorance of what they are doing and saying lincoln more than any other could give deliberate reasons for what he did and said and it is exceedingly difficult to name another in history who was under such logical and commanding control of all the moral and intellectual faculties when he seemed to the superficial observer to be dreaming he was reasoning calculating comparing analyzing weighing turning things upside down and inside out until he satisfied the dictates of his conscience and his sense of moral responsibility he placed no reliance on half-way measures and palliatives no faith in the workings of chance he therefore was not and could never have been a passive instrument in the hands of some unknown power when it was said of a certain musician that he composed his operas under the direct influence of mozart the answer was then who influenced mozart great originality belongs to the mystical unity of the supreme intelligence had lincoln imitated henry clay whom he so much admired as a statesman and thinker what would have become of lincoln and the country he governed he who originates is authoritative and as carlyle said all authority is mystical in its origin in no single thing of importance did lincoln copy any one's methods or systems his trend of thought was at variance with the prevailing trend even of those who were supposed to know the most Section 4 of Abraham Lincoln, The Practical Mystic by Francis Grissom.

The Goodyear Company has secured a concession of 20,000 acres near Medan in Dutch Sumatra.

While the United States is planning to relinquish its Pacific possessions, the British have more than doubled their holdings in New Guinea by the acquisition of Kaiser Wilhelm's land, good rubber country.

The British Malay States in 1917 exported over $118 million worth of plantation-grown rubber and could have sold more if shipping had not been short and production restricted.

Fully 90% of the cultivated rubber is now grown in British colonies or on British plantations in the Dutch East Indies.

"'I live at West Egg.' "'Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago, at a man named Gatsby's.

Do you know him?' "'I live next door to him.' "'Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's.

That's where all his money comes from.' "'Really?' she nodded.

"'I'm scared of him.

a prophetic witness in his book life on the circuit with lincoln judge whitney comments as early as eighteen fifty six independent of all contemporary opinion i conceived the idea that mr lincoln was a prodigy of intellectual and moral force Others associated with this deemed him superlatively great, but still human.

i went farther my view was definite and pronounced that lincoln was ordained for a greater than a merely human mission and i avowed this belief as early as that time his character as a lawyer was controlled and moulded by his character as a man he understood human nature thoroughly and was an expert in the cross-examination of witnesses if a witness told the truth without evasion lincoln was respectful and patronizing to him but he would score a perjured witness unmercifully he took no notes but remembered everything quite as well as those who did so i remember once we all court and lawyers except lincoln insisted that a witness had sworn so and so but it turned out that lincoln was correct and that he recollected better than the united bench and bar but with all his candour there was a method in shrewdness which leonard swett well understood and which he had thus forcibly expressed as the trial progressed where most lawyers object he would say he reckoned it would be fair to admit this in or that and sometimes when his adversary could not quite prove what lincoln knew to be the truth he would say he reckoned it would be fair to admit the truth to be so and so when he did object to the court when he heard his objections answered he would often say well i reckon i must be wrong he was wise as a serpent in the trial of a case but i have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove when the whole thing is unravelled the adversary begins to see that what he was so blandly giving away was simply what he couldn't get and keep by giving away six points and carrying the seventh he carried his case and the whole case hanging on the seventh he traded everything which would give him the least aid in carrying that any one who took lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up on his back in a ditch lincoln's simplicity there are two kinds of simplicity one is without reason or discrimination that believes all that is seen and heard if presented under the guise of honesty the other is the kind that penetrates beneath manner dress verbiage and meets all subterfuge artifice and sophistry with statements and facts at once logical and irrefutable lincoln was the most simple man in dress in speech in manners in looks that ever stood before the world in so great a role but his intellect was anything but simple he was never deceived by cunning devices and cunning manoeuvres bacon has an essay showing the difference between cunning and wisdom and it may be said that lincoln's knowledge took the form of wisdom as distinguished from cunning his management of a law case was that of a seer the points he made were not made for personal gratification but for love of truth and justice not only he did not want to risk being deceived he took every precaution to insure against deception here is where his welding of reason and logic produced in his marvellous intellect a kind of clairvoyance which his friends at the bar felt but could not analyse the combination was unheard of the lawyers and the judges could only reason from their own experience they could only cite examples in their own lives and this man lincoln was unlike all that had been and all that was lincoln's simplicity seemed to the casual observer of a character so trusting and so naive that it deceived all the members of his cabinet during the first two years of the war they were used to smart men clever men academical men they called for the routine of respectability and official dignity to their minds the president seemed pliable and willing and they set about instructing him in the a b c of high politics and the first principles of statesmanship the president was in no way frustrated he understood them in advance having weighed them in the balance of his own judgment he had found them honest but inexperienced sincere but saucy he knew they were living in an atmosphere of low visibility at the proper moment he would turn on the searchlights and give them their bearings some of them expected to act as the president's pilot while others expected to be captain of the ship of state with the president as pilot it took them more than two years to find out that this pioneer of the west was captain pilot and master of charts on a political sea the like of which they little dreamed existed in one sense he wore out their obstinacy by his patience in another he awaited opportunities to attest their errors and show his judgment but matters proceeded with such calm that they could not understand with what power he acted with what prescience he divined what mystified them was the combination of the practical with the spiritual their clear vision with the maxims of ordinary business affairs the penetration of the future while working in seeming darkness lincoln's clairvoyant wit lincoln was not deceived by an outward show of religion a southern woman begged the president to have her husband released from a northern prison for she said although he is a rebel he is a very religious man lincoln replied i am glad to hear that because any man who wants to disrupt this union needs all the religion in sight to save him he treated with indifference people who commandeered a haughty woman came to lincoln and demanded a colonel's commission for her son i demand it she said not as a favour but as a right sir my grandfather fought at lexington my father fought at new orleans and my husband was killed at monterey i guess madam was lincoln's reply your family has done enough for the country it is time to give some one else a chance when hugh mcculloch secretary of the treasury in lincoln's second term presented a delegation of new york bankers at the white house mcculloch said these gentlemen of new york have come on to see the secretary of the treasury about our new loan as bankers they are obliged to hold our national securities i can vouch for their patriotism and loyalty for as the good book says where the treasury is there will the heart be also to which lincoln replied there is another text mr mcculloch i remember that might equally apply where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together lincoln condemned as tedious a certain greek history when a diplomat present said the author of that history mr president is one of the profoundest scholars of the age no one has plunged more deeply into the sacred fount of learning yes replied lincoln or come up drier when in chicago in eighteen sixty the mayor john wentworth asked lincoln why he did not get some astute politician to run him lincoln replied that events are not a man's own exertions made presidents to henry c whitney lincoln remarked chad and ray and those fellows think i don't see anything but i see all around them i see better what they want to do with me than they do themselves they were deceived not by lincoln who never cared what individuals thought but by nature which often sets a trap for people who live in a world of their own illusions nature the medium through which the divine mind manifests is so to speak a mask through which egoists cannot penetrate and by which the cunning are led to destruction lincoln let them talk and even act knowing that they themselves were the tools for their own undoing while the warred politicians and others who thought themselves far superior laid their plans schemed and intrigued the man of clear vision awaited unperturbed the events which he knew would put them all in their proper places little did they dream that they were mere incidents among the millions of incidents that go to the making of one epoch-making event the practical mystic is little concerned with incidents the multitude do not know in what direction they are going moved and influenced as they are by the incidental the accidental the shifting illusions in which they live but the man who knows why they are influenced also knows why he is influenced lincoln was patient with the men who considered him a sort of political accident he understood their point of view he did not entertain feelings of revenge hundreds of men like john wentworth are only mentioned to-day because of some passing incident which connected them with the man whom they regarded as a failure in politics a prophetic vision of hades that william blake was a mystic of the practical kind there can be no question in art and in poetry he had that illumination which lincoln had in statesmanship the new york times says that a century has fell to heap the dust of oblivion over england's greatest mystic william blake is exemplified by the reproduction in a recent issue of country life of one of blake's engravings for dante's inferno in which four fiends with cruel faces are torturing a soul in hell the face of the chief devil who is not actually engaged in the torture but is an eager and interested spectator might easily be taken for a portrait of the german emperor as suggested by w f boudillon the familiar upturned mustachios must have puzzled blake in his vision he represented them as tusks growing from the corners of the mouth it is to be noted that this fiend alone among the four has the tusks it is recorded of blake as a lad that his father would have apprenticed him to rylands the court engraver a man much liked and in great prosperity at the time but blake objected saying father i do not like his face he looks as if he would live to be hanged twelve years later ryland's committed forgery and the prophecy came true blake's visions startling though they be are not more startling than the prophecies made by lincoln as for instance his prophecy of prohibition women's rights and the end of slavery not to mention his visions concerning himself the practical mystic sees through the scientific materist sees only the surface eternity is the everlasting now blake drew a faithful portrait of the kaiser wilhelm the second of germany long before the kaiser was born and tycho brahe predicted the birth of a swedish conqueror and what he would accomplish in these things there is no place for chance nor is it true that the practical mystic is limited to poetry or art or to music or to religion politics and philosophy neither is the practical mystic confined to any particular social class or any creed abraham lincoln could not have directed affairs had he been a recluse before he became an adept in the direction of material affairs he had to be familiar with the practical ways of the world and as a lawyer he passed through a school that left no place for vague theories or vain illusions he frequently stripped others of their illusions but being free of illusions himself he had none to lose this made him invulnerable his enemies were swayed by theories nothing short of knowledge sufficed for this man who reduced his adversaries to the position where they were kept constantly on the alert to know what manoeuvre to employ next they moved in a region of guesswork where there was no law except that of their own confusion and discomfiture shakespeare and lincoln lincoln says judge whitney was one of the most heterogeneous characters that ever played a part in the great drama of history and it was for this reason that he was so greatly misjudged and misunderstood that he was on the one hand described as a mere humorist a sort of artemus ward or mark twain that it was thought that by some irony of fate a low comedian had got into the presidential chair and that the nation was being delivered over to conflagration while this modern nero fiddled upon its ruins one of his peculiarities was his inequality of conduct his dignity interspersed with freaks of frivolity and inanity his high aspiration and achievement and his descent into the most primitive veils of listlessness in the chief drawer of his cabinet table all the current joke books of the time were in juxtaposition with official commissions lacking only the final signature applications for pardons from death penalties laws awaiting executive action and orders which when launched would control the fate of a million men and the destinies of unborn generations hence it was that superficial persons who expected great achievements to be ushered in with a prologue could not understand or appreciate that this great man's administration was a succession of acts of grand and heroic statesmanship or that he was a prodigy of intellect and moral force The mystic Shakespeare and the mystic Lincoln have a connecting link in their wit and humor.

Had Shakespeare left us only two dramas, Macbeth and Othello, no one would have dreamed of a creation like Falstaff emanating from the same mind.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

On my writing table is the silver and mother-of-pearl ornament that was her wedding present to me.

Everybody respected the old Emperor William, and everybody admired the Crown Prince Frederick.

When he married Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, who became, after the death of Princess Alice, King Edward's favorite sister, the relations between the two courts could hardly have been more amicable.

Queen Victoria loved Germany and the Germans.

The presence of the Princess Royal was resented.

Many people believed or affected to believe that the marriage had been designed to make Germany politically subservient to Great Britain.

As everybody knows, these feelings grew apace as soon as the old Emperor William had breathed his last, and when a few months later Emperor Frederick passed away, the Anglophobia had spread throughout the court circles, and the young Kaiser had been tainted with a court prejudice against his own mother.

He did not treat her well.