As regards the visit of the President to Berlin and the Emperor’s refusal to receive him, the Chancellor asked would a reception have done any good either to the President or to Germany, and he answered his own question with an emphatic negative.  To the President an audience would have been of no more use than the ovations and demonstrations he was greeted with in Paris.  To Germany a reception would have meant a shifting of international relations to the disadvantage of the country:  in other words, would have meant the risk, almost the certainty, of war.  “Wars,” said the Chancellor in this connexion,

“are much more easily unchained through elementary popular passions, through the passionate excitation of public opinion, than in the old days through the ambitions of monarchs or through the jealousies of Ministers.”

And he concluded: 

“With regard to England we stand entirely independent of her:  we are not a hair’s-breadth more dependent on England than England is on us.  But we are ready on the basis of mutual consideration and complete equality—­about this obvious preliminary condition for a proper relation between two Great Powers we have never left any Power in doubt:  I say, we are ready on this basis to live with England in peace, friendship, and harmony.  To play the Don Quixote and to lay the lance in rest and attack wherever in the world English windmills are to be found, for that we are not called upon.”

But just then there was little prospect of “peace friendship, and harmony” with England.  The world remembers, and unfortunately the English people do not forget, that they had nowhere more bitter and offensive critics than in Germany.  One refined method of opprobrium was the unprohibited sale in the main streets of Berlin of spittoons bearing the countenance of the English Colonial Minister, Mr. Chamberlain.  A war with England would at that moment have been highly popular in Germany, but as the Chancellor wisely reminded the Parliament, it was the duty of the statesman to protect international relations from disturbance by intrigue or by popular demonstration.

Finally the Chancellor dealt with a report widely current in England and Germany at the time, to the effect that the Emperor’s refusal to receive President Kruger was due to the influence of his uncle, King Edward.  The Chancellor emphatically denied that any pressure of the kind from the English Court, or from any other source, had been employed, and ended by saying: 

“To suppose that his Majesty the Kaiser could allow himself to be influenced by family relations shows little understanding of his character, or of his love of country.  For his Majesty solely the national standpoint is decisive, and if it were otherwise, and family relations or dynastic considerations determined our foreign policy, I would not remain Minister a day longer.”

A precisely similar and unfounded charge, it will be remembered, was made against King Edward VII in 1902, to the effect that it was Court influence, not the deliberate judgment of the Cabinet, that was the efficient cause of the co-operation of the British with the German fleet in the demonstration off the coast of Venezuela.