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bouzygesTo the employer this subservience of labour to himself seemed a proper and natural state which nothing in the scheme of things need ever bring to an end. But that was not all. He expected the labourer to be feelingly beholden for the privilege of being allowed to work for his daily bread instead of - what would seem to be the natural alternative - starving with good-natured docility.
William II, when still a Prince of Prussia and apprenticed to Bismarck at the German Foreign Office, was warmly commended by his chief (and future servant) for reporting an occurence that deeply shocked the Iron Chancellor's patriotic feelings. A German shipyard, the Vulcan Company in Stettin, was about to close down for lack of custom, while the 'Hanseatic shopkeepers', as Bismarck called them, no doubt imbued with a fine commercial sense of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market, were ordering their ships from English shipyards.
Bismarck, apparently not in the least restrained in the presence of his future sovereign who was soon to sack him, fumed and stamped about the room, ringing all bells at once, sending Foreign Office dignitaries flying in all directions to countermand these orders. The impression which remained with the future Kaiser - perhaps the only humorous observation in his memoirs so overcharged with self-pity - was that under Bismarck privy councillors were perpetually vanishing in hot haste, with their coat-tails sticking straight out behind them.
The aftermath of the Prince's intervention occured when, after ascending the throne in 1888, William II travelled to Stettin to place honorary insignia on the flags of his Pomeranian Grenadiers, and visited incidentally the Vulcan shipyard. There, instead of the pounding of hammers, he found he had entered into an atmosphere of reverential silence. With bared heads and in a perfect semi-circle, the workmen of the Vulcan works stood before him, headed by the oldest workman with a snow-white beard and a laurel wrath in his hand. In plain, pithy words, as no doubt befits a horny-handed workman, he craved permission of his sovereign, in token of their gratitude to him for being able to eat bread, to hand over the laurel wreath.
"That was in the year 1888!" writes William II. And he adds, fatuously, "In those days the German working classes knew how to appreciate the blessing of labour."
'Ah, those were the days!' is the sigh of nostalgia uttered by those who have savoured the blessing of labour from a becoming distance. It is the transitory, no less than the established, class - the transitory considering itself as already established - who, looking back, sigh for 'those days!'
But why did they not last? The usual answer, "Good enough while they lasted", however sincerely felt to be true by the few, really means, by the test of the happiness of the many, that they were not quite good enough to last.
From God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age 1890-1940 by William Gerhardie
William II, when still a Prince of Prussia and apprenticed to Bismarck at the German Foreign Office, was warmly commended by his chief (and future servant) for reporting an occurence that deeply shocked the Iron Chancellor's patriotic feelings. A German shipyard, the Vulcan Company in Stettin, was about to close down for lack of custom, while the 'Hanseatic shopkeepers', as Bismarck called them, no doubt imbued with a fine commercial sense of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market, were ordering their ships from English shipyards.
Bismarck, apparently not in the least restrained in the presence of his future sovereign who was soon to sack him, fumed and stamped about the room, ringing all bells at once, sending Foreign Office dignitaries flying in all directions to countermand these orders. The impression which remained with the future Kaiser - perhaps the only humorous observation in his memoirs so overcharged with self-pity - was that under Bismarck privy councillors were perpetually vanishing in hot haste, with their coat-tails sticking straight out behind them.
The aftermath of the Prince's intervention occured when, after ascending the throne in 1888, William II travelled to Stettin to place honorary insignia on the flags of his Pomeranian Grenadiers, and visited incidentally the Vulcan shipyard. There, instead of the pounding of hammers, he found he had entered into an atmosphere of reverential silence. With bared heads and in a perfect semi-circle, the workmen of the Vulcan works stood before him, headed by the oldest workman with a snow-white beard and a laurel wrath in his hand. In plain, pithy words, as no doubt befits a horny-handed workman, he craved permission of his sovereign, in token of their gratitude to him for being able to eat bread, to hand over the laurel wreath.
"That was in the year 1888!" writes William II. And he adds, fatuously, "In those days the German working classes knew how to appreciate the blessing of labour."
'Ah, those were the days!' is the sigh of nostalgia uttered by those who have savoured the blessing of labour from a becoming distance. It is the transitory, no less than the established, class - the transitory considering itself as already established - who, looking back, sigh for 'those days!'
But why did they not last? The usual answer, "Good enough while they lasted", however sincerely felt to be true by the few, really means, by the test of the happiness of the many, that they were not quite good enough to last.
From God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age 1890-1940 by William Gerhardie