Revelation Falls Flat.

New York Times 100 years ago today, June 22, 1913:
But Kaiser's Jubilee Shows Affection in Which People Hold Him.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
    BERLIN, June 21.— If the dramatic revelation of the Kaiser's action in burning up the reactionary political testament of his great-uncle, Frederick William IV. of Prussia, was intended to create a deep public impression, it cannot be averred that the plan has been marked with conspicuous success.
    It was by far the most significant single event of the jubilee programme but it must be confessed that the announcement has fallen, on the whole somewhat flat in Liberal, Radical, and Socialist quarters, where the revelation was designed to have the most effect, and left the German mind entirely cold by the disclosure of the Emperor's refusal to execute a coup d'état.
    Journals of the ultra-loyalist hue, like the Lokalanzeiger, indulge, of course, in veritable paroxysyms of eulogy of the Kaiser and declare that he has now obliterated forever the slander occasionally leveled at him, both at home and abroad, that he aspires to wild autocratic power.
    The view held by the Democratic press of the calibre of the Berliner Tageblatt and the Socialist Vorwärts is that the Kaiser deserves no encomiums for doing a perfectly obvious thing in tearing up and consigning to the flames "the revolutionary ukase of his half-crazy ancestor." Radicals and Social Democrats say that the time to throw up hats over the "constitutionalism" of the Kaiser will be when he reforms Prussia's archaic electoral system, so that the masses may no longer be disfranchised, and reorganizes the Imperial Government on a parliamentary basis by which the Ministers shall be responsible to the people and not to the monarch.
    Looking back on the jubilee festivities, it can be confidently asserted that the Kaiser enters upon the second quarter century of his reign with his hold on the public affection and imagination more strongly fortified than ever.
    The spontaneously enthusiastic cheers given him on Tuesday, when he drove through the crowds unannounced and unescorted, showed more than anything else the real state of popular feeling toward William II.