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JOHN CICEROS INEFFICIENCY If blaming an ancestor for lack of foresight will comfort Wilhelm II in this hour of disaster we think it will be easy for him to discover the most culpable of all the Hohenzollerns His name was John and he was the ruler of Brandenburg in the first quarter of the fifteentli century centuryThis This John was a capable sort of person as Ger ¬ man rulers went in that period He knew so much Latin that they called him Cicero It is hard to believe that through his communications with Rome he had not heard of certain contemplated efforts to enlarge the man of the world He knew about gunpowder for there had been a factory of the explosive at Spandau in his own land for more than a hundred years This yearsThis John sat around discussing treaties with the king of Pomerania and listening to the wisdom of scholars from Italy while an expedition doomed to be fatal to the dreams of his descendants set out from Spain Not that he could have brow ¬ beaten Ferdinand out of letting it go for Spain was a giant then But he might have sent a few of the Von Papens of the period to Cadiz armed with clockwork and a bag of the invention of Berthold Schwartz He might have stonped in the Atlantic the beginning of the greatest procession of hu ¬ manity that history has seen If Columbus had failed to return had seemed to have fallen off the edge of the world how long would it have delayed mans courage But John the fourth of historic Hohenzollerns failed to do what might have saved Wilhelm perhaps the last of the family to hold a title The success of the first little westward pro ¬ cession across the sea made possible the great eastward procession that is going on now nowThen Then in 1492 was the time for the Prussian to have SpainAlways blown up the ships of Spain Always let your ancestors know what your plans are New York Sun
