Again, a man’s character is determined by his motives, if it is not the other way about; in any case, a man’s motives are for the most part inscrutable and can only be deduced from conduct, while the world usually makes the mistake of explaining conduct by attributing its own motives.  Tried, then, by the standard of conduct, the only one available, the Emperor, as a man, shows us a high type of humanity.  It may not, probably does not, appeal to Englishmen wholly, but there are features of it which must command, and do command, the respect of people of all nationalities.  And, first of all, he is a good man; good as a Christian, good as a husband, good as a father, good as a patriot.  With all the power and temptation to gratify his inclinations, he has no personal vices of the baser sort.  He is moderate in the satisfaction of his appetites, whether for food or wine.  He is no debauchee, no voluptuary, no gambler.  He is faithful to old friends and comrades.  He has high ideals, and is not ashamed of them.  He is neither indolent nor fussy; neither a cynic, nor an intriguer, nor a fool; he is neither wrong-headed nor stubborn; he is honest and sincere to a degree that does him honour as a man, if it has sometimes proved perilous and blameworthy in him as a monarch.  He is optimistic, and on good grounds.  He is no physical or intellectual giant, but he is a man of more than average all-round intelligence and capacity.  If this appreciation is correct, or even approximately correct, it is a testimonial, whatever may be its worth, to great merit.

Yet the Emperor as man has his failings and drawbacks, though they are such as time is almost sure to diminish or eradicate.  Notably in his earlier years he lacked judgment, the power of balancing considerations and arriving at conclusions from them which men more gifted with poise would endorse as logical and inevitable.  He does not, like spare Cassius, see quite through the deeds of men, as his friendship for Count Phili Eulenburg and the malodorous “Camarilla” go to show, and his choice of Imperial Chancellors, his grand viziers, has not in every instance been happy.  He has less tact than character, as he showed once in Vienna, where he greatly pained the Foreign Minister, Count Goluchowski, one day at a club by calling to him, “Golu, Golu, come and sit beside your Kaiser.”  He has the German masculine enjoyment in a kind of humour which would have delighted Fox and the three-bottle men, but would sadly shock the susceptibilities of an Oxford aesthete.  He has a share of personal vanity, but it springs from the desire to look the Emperor he is, not because he supposes for a moment that he is an Adonis.  He is theatrical in exactly the same spirit—­the desire imperially to impress his folk in the sense of the German word imponieren, a word that needs no translation.  If he has lost much of Dr. Liman’s “romantik,” he still retains the “scatteredness” of Mr. Sidney Brooks, though the Emperor would rather hear it called “many-sidedness.” En resume he has the defects of his qualities, but to no man or woman’s unmerited loss or injury, and if we weigh the good qualities with the bad, we find a fine balance remaining to his credit as a man.