There is one more thing to be said. Let us
hope that the cheers and sympathy of the mass of his people will finally put an end to the insidious, nay, malignant, gossip of a tiny handful who have set going a whisper that the King has some sort of family or dynastic sympathy with the Kaiser, and would like to shelter him from the worst consequences of his crimes because he was a brother-monarch, and because of some imaginary freemasonry of Sovereigns. That is pure nonsense. In the first place, the King in all probability had and has a greater personal antipathy to the German Emperor than any of his subjects. He knew him better than they, having seen him so often at close quarters. Unquestionably before the war he judged his cousin more severely than the British people, as severely as a sincere, honourable, and straightforward man judges a faithless, theatrical intriguer. It is only the ignorant who imagine some sort of freemasonry among monarchs. That has never existed, and no one who reflects upon the nature of their situation, or who considers the history of the past, will ever believe in such a legend. The Kaiser will never find a protector in King George, though King George, like the rest of the British people, will, we hope and believe, desire justice, even if stern justice, but not revenge, for the crimes of the Kaiser.
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