HERE, with a vengeance, is majesty shorn of its externals. Although in this cartoon we get Raemaekers in lighter vein, yet the irony and force of the artist are as fully expressed as in those grimmer studies from which he who runs may read the fate of Belgium, of Serbia, and of the many non-combatants who have found death at sea through Germany’s mad dream of conquest.

The elder Willie, obviously, does not like the set of his coat, after the glory of his many uniforms; the younger Willie, apparently, has finished his trying on, and from his expression the result is as much as he could expect, and no more. In both there is that suggestion of posturing, of playing to the gallery and being determined that the clothes shall be suited to the part, for which William Hohenzollern was noted before ever this war showed him as the most infamous ruler of modern time.

There is a certain bitter correctness in Raemaekers’ estimate of these exalted personages. Shorn of their uniforms, posturing before a mirror in a slightly Parisian (using the adjective in the pre-war, foppish sense) garb, they show as very little men—rather contemptible, in fact, as, of course, they are. For it is open to any man to dream of ruling the world, and of setting nations by the throat for the sake of an ambition that civilization cannot tolerate; it is open to any head of a government to set the machinery in motion which might gratify that ambition—but it is open only to a man, in the very best of that one syllable, to bring his ambition to fruition, and even then only by strict adherence to natural law. And these two, posturing as Raemaekers makes them posture here, have ignored law; they had the wit to dream, but not the brain to make reality of dream, nor the moral sense through which they might have made the world acknowledge the dream as worth while translating into actualities. Probably, if they were set in a St. Helena of to-day, they would fold their arms and try on cocked hats, as once they tried on uniforms. But though the clothes declare the man, they cannot make of him other than he is, and these two are mere posturers, whatever may be their attitudes.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.