“The Kaiser is a man of moods.  He sat down and penned this letter in a fit of despondency and indecision, when the vision of Peace seemed fairer to him than the spectre of War.  God knows what violent emotion impelled him to write this extraordinary appeal to his English friend, an appeal which, if published, would convict him of the deepest treachery to his ally, but he wrote the letter and forthwith dispatched it to London.  He did not make use of the regular courier:  he sent the letter by a man of his own choosing, who had special instructions to hand the letter in person to Prince Lichnowski, the German ambassador.  Lichnowski was to deliver the missive personally to its destined recipient.

“Almost as soon as the letter was away, the Kaiser seems to have realised what he had done, to have repented of his action.  Attempts to stop the messenger before he reached the coast appear to have failed.  At any rate, we know that all through July 31st and August 1st Lichnowski, in London, was bombarded with dispatches ordering him to send the messenger with the letter back to Berlin as soon as he reached the embassy.

“The courier never got as far as Carlton House Terrace.  Someone in the War party at the Court of Berlin got wind of the fateful letter and sent word to someone in the German embassy in London—­the Prussian jingoes were well represented there by Kuehlmann and others of his ilk—­to intercept the letter.

“The letter was intercepted.  How it was done and by whom we have never found out, but Lichnowski never saw that letter.  Nor did the courier leave London.  With the Imperial letter still in possession, apparently, he went to a house at Dalston, where he was arrested on the day after we declared war on Germany.

“This courier went by the name of Schulte.  We did not know him at the time to be travelling on the Emperor’s business, but we knew him very well as one of the most daring and successful spies that Germany had ever employed in this country.  One of our people picked him up quite by chance on his arrival in London, and shadowed him to Dalston, where we promptly laid him by the heels when war broke out.

“Schulte was interned.  You have heard how one of his letters, stopped by the Camp Censor, put us on the track of the intercepted letter, and you know the steps we took to obtain possession of the document.  But we were misled ... not by Schulte, but through the treachery of a man in whom he confided, the interpreter at the internment camp.

“To this man Schulte entrusted the famous letter, telling him to send it by an underground route to a certain address at Cleves, and promising him in return a commission of twenty-five per cent on the price to be paid for the letter.  The interpreter took the letter, but did not do as he was bid.  On the contrary, he wrote to the go-between, with whom Schulte had been in correspondence (probably Clubfoot), and announced that he knew where the letter was and was prepared to sell it, only the purchaser would have to come to England and fetch it.