A recent writer, Dr. Adolf Stein, gives an account of the sending of the famous telegram which corroborates that of Prince von Buelow.  The telegram, according to this version, was a well-considered answer to a question from the Transvaal Government put to the German Government a month before the Raid occurred, and when the Transvaal Government got the first inkling of the preparations being made for it.  President Kruger asked what attitude Germany would adopt in case of a war between England and the Boer republics.  The answer given to the person who made the inquiry on behalf of the Transvaal Government was that President Kruger might rest assured of Germany’s

“diplomatic support in so far as it was also Germany’s interest that the independence of the Boer States should be maintained, but that for anything beyond this he should not reckon on Germany’s assistance or that of any Great Power.”

This answer, Dr. Stein says, was in course of transmission by the post when the Raid occurred.

The Raid was made on January 1st.  The event was at once telegraphed to Berlin, where Prince Hohenlohe was Chancellor, with Freiherr Marschall von Bieberstein, afterwards German Ambassador in Constantinople and London, as his Foreign Secretary.  According to Dr. Stein, they drew up a telegram to President Kruger, and on the morning of the 3rd laid it before the Emperor, who had come early from Potsdam for consultation on the matter.  The Chancellor, it should be mentioned, had been at Potsdam the day previous, but at that time the news of the Raid had not reached the Emperor.  The Emperor, Chancellor, and Foreign Secretary now decided that a telegram congratulating President Kruger for having repulsed the Raid “without foreign aid” was the best non-committal form to adopt.  The Emperor, Dr. Stein continues, raised some objections, but was over-persuaded by Prince Hohenlohe and von Bieberstein.

As confirming this version, a little note in Lord Goschen’s Biography may be recalled, in which Lord Goschen confides to a friend a few weeks before the Raid that the “Germans were taking the Boers under their wing, as the Americans had done with the Venezuelans.”

Enough perhaps has been said to show that the sending of the telegram had nothing to do with the Emperor’s “impulsive” character, and it will only be fair to him to let the notion that it had drop finally out of contemporary history.  As an act of State it was in consonance with German policy at the time.  That policy, if it did not look to acquiring possession of the Transvaal, may very well have looked to enlisting the sympathies and friendship of the Dutch in South Africa, and finding in them and their country a field for German enterprise and a market for German goods; and there was therefore nothing impulsive, however mistaken the act may have been as a matter of foreign policy, in the German Government’s congratulating President Kruger on successful resistance to a private raid.