Puck's Suggestion for the German Kaiser's Benefit

S. D. Ehrhart's full-color centerspread lampoons Kaiser Wilhelm II as a blustering teetotaler whose banquet speeches alarm his own court. Wilhelm sits slumped at a white-draped table, crown askew, wearing an ermine robe and a ribbon reading 'Sons of Cold Water'—mocking his temperance posturing. Chancellor Count Leo von Caprivi, rendered as a hulking figure in military dress, pointedly pours a pitcher labeled 'Ice Water' into the Kaiser's wine glass. Around the table, exaggeratedly jowled German officers—drawn with the broad ethnic caricature standard to *Puck*'s era, emphasizing mustaches, florid complexions, and comic corpulence—toast merrily with champagne. The caption explains the joke: Wilhelm's *actions* are praiseworthy, but his banquet *speeches* reveal a need for cold water when he dines out. Ehrhart turns the Kaiser's own temperance rhetoric into a rebuke of his diplomatic recklessness.