Whilhelm’s Bouncing Boy.

The Emperor Wilhelm of Germany, better known among his subjects as “der alle Hengst,” has concluded at the ripe age of eighty-five that the modern drift of constitutional liberty is all wrong, and will soon lead his royal son to the regency with the notions of Charles I and Louis XIV in his hands wherewith to guide and rule young Germany.

If we mistake not, this bouncing boy will have a big job on his hands before the socialists get through with him. Already they have captured half the army, and, while Bismarck is at his wits’ end to conciliate the laboring masses), the mercantile and educated classes feel insulted at his protective schemes and absolutist tendencies. As if to maliciously overflow the cup of bitterness, Wilhelm now publishes his “rescript,” affirming the maxims of the old monarchists of the Middle Ages.

Well may the blind and infatuated royal cranks tremble at the approach of the day when these newly educated soldier-socialists shall refuse to shoot their fellow proletaires in the streets. In one hand the soldier holds the bayonet, on which is poised the last argument of kings; in the other, the socialistic manifesto disguised under cover of a patent medicine advertisement for the sure cure of the “king’s evil.” The bayonet will yet succumb to the king’s evil, and then where will be Wilhelm’s bouncing boy with the maxims of the Stuarts pasted upon the throne?

The German emperor, in putting himself on the same plane with the czar, similarly endangers his life. He may possibly succeed in making his ministers and officers alone responsible to him, but every royal imitator of the czar will find himself seriously liable, when it is too late, to be responsible to the first brave man who can reach him with a bomb of dynamite. Wilhelm’s bouncing boy had better bethink himself of these things before the old man dies.