Fate seems to have chosen him to expiate a sin which, if it exists at all, is not so much his as that of his country and his times.

The Byzantine atmosphere in Germany was the ruin of Emperor William; it enveloped him and clung to him like a creeper to a tree; a vast crowd of flatterers and fortune-seekers who deserted him in the hour of trial.

The Emperor William was merely a particularly distinctive representative of his class.

All modern monarchs suffer from the disease; but it was more highly developed in the Emperor William and, therefore, more obvious than in others.

Accustomed from his youth to the subtle poison of flattery, at the head of one of the greatest and mightiest states in the world, possessing almost unlimited power, he succumbed to the fatal lot that awaits men who feel the earth recede from under their feet, and who begin to believe in their Divine semblance.
He is expiating a crime which was not of his making.