Shamefully Maligned

Friedrich Wilhelm, sometime German Crown Prince, received a tribute of esteem last week from pre-War U. S. Ambassador to Germany James Watson Gerard. Said Mr. Gerard, speaking at the Lawyers Club, Manhattan: "The Crown Prince is a man of far greater ability, to my mind, than his father, and I think he is one of the most shamefully maligned individuals in the civilized world. Possibly on that account he will not be called to the throne; but the chances are that his eldest son Wilhelm, who is quite a fine young man, will be. Politically, of course, anything may happen; but I doubt that the Kaiser will ever resume a position of authority. . . . When the great War lord turned tail and hid behind the skirts of the Queen of Holland that absolutely finished him in Germany. If any of you have seen the Queen of Holland you know that she has quite ample skirts. . . ."

Some who heard Mr. Gerard last week may have wondered why he chose to utter even the most guarded praise of Wilhelm, who, in 1914-18, was introduced to the U. S. as a rat-faced youth, leering synthesis of cowardice and cruelty. They forgot that Ambassador Gerard looked occasionally for several years upon the actual face of Crown Prince Wilhelm. What does he look like anyway?

Ruthless, caustic German Editor Maximilian Harden, tooth-and-nail foe of the Kaiser, described the onetime Crown Prince after the War, as "a good fellow, very popular with the people, brave and personable." Something like this may have been in Mr. Gerard's mind last week when he called Wilhelm "most shamefully maligned." But to Allied peoples "The Crown Prince" will always be rat-faced', and probably for long detestable.

"When I arrived in Holland," writes Wilhelm in his memoirs, "a crowd at Enkhuizen ... by an unmistakable gesture toward the neck followed by an upward movement of the hand . . . made clear to me how thoroughly the caricature of my person produced and disseminated by Entente propaganda had fixed itself in their minds. . . . Like a prisoner, like an outlaw, I move among these Hollanders who turn away their lowering, shy visages as they pass, or, at most, look askance at me with half-closed eyes. I am the bloodthirsty babykiller ; people are embittered against the Dutch Government . . . for letting me roam about untrammeled."

Today, of course, all this is altered. Wilhelm lives in Germany at his ancestral castle, at Oels. Occasionally he is seen in Berlin, and sometimes cheered or booed rather half-heartedly by Monarchists or Republicans.