NO CHANGE TO BERLIN REGIME
YESTERDAY m. Clemenceau, the French Premier, said he believes Prince max’s peace offer does not fulfil President Wilson’s vital point that there can be ‘ no terms with the Hohenzollerns’. He is right to be wary of entering into dealings with the new Chancellor.
Prince maximilian of Baden, appointed on October 3, has been presented as a democratic figure whose leadership is supported by the main parties of the reichstag, a turn away from the autocratic government of old.
However, we must not be taken in. He is as much a Kaiser candidate as any of his predecessors.
Sources within germany believe that Prince max’s government really seeks peace. Yet they have also readily admitted that the power of the Kaiser and the other german nobles remains unbroken.
in a letter to his cousin written in January and obtained by the Daily mail, max wrote: ‘i quite decline to accept any such thing as Western democracy for germany and Baden,’ and described the Peace resolution passed by the reichstag in July 1917 as ‘a disgusting child born of fear’.
He also wrote: ‘i have a very poor opinion of the moral disposition of the rulers of our enemies as well as of the terrible lack of judgment among the people whom they rule. The baseness of their ideas is too shameful for words.’
When William i was proclaimed Emperor at Versailles in 1871, it was the grand Duke of Baden who was the first to salute him. This tradition remains lively in the Baden dynasty.