ABSTRACT
Everyone seems to agree as to who the German emperors were even when they are not so sure as to the nature of the empire which they sought to govern. Historians have been able to catalogue their deeds and accomplishments, but they have not always succeeded in telling why they did what they did. Although we shall mention some of these ‘why’ questions that have baffled historians, we do not pretend to answer them. Yet to exclude them altogether on the grounds that they cannot be answered would be to leave the intellectual mortar out of the historical edifice. 1 It is often the ‘why’ question that attracts the historian to a particular period or problem. Only the unusually detached reader of a mystery novel is content to know how the murderer carried out his crime without also asking why he did it. Likewise, in our courts the question of motive is taken into account in the judging of criminals : it is considered more heinous to premeditate a murder than to run down a man by mistake with an automobile, though the results are the same for the deceased. To be sure, we cannot know with certainty what was in the criminal’s mind at the time of the murder, and still less can we know about the mind of a king who has been dead for a thousand years.
