I said that this was the view held on our side too, and that the only danger lay in trying to force everything at once.  Too great haste was to be deprecated.

He said that he entirely agreed, and quoted Prince Bismarck, who had laid it down that you can not make a flower grow any sooner by putting fire to heat it.

[Illustration:  COUNT PAUL WOLFF METTERNICH

GERMAN AMBASSADOR TO GREAT BRITAIN FROM 1901 TO 1912.]

I said that, none the less, frequent and cordial interchanges of view were very important, and that not even the smallest matters should be neglected.

He alluded with satisfaction to my personal relations with the German
Ambassador in London, Count Metternich.

I begged him, if there were any small matters which were too minute to take up officially, but which seemed unsatisfactory, to let me know of them in a private capacity through Count Metternich.  This I did because I had discovered some soreness at restrictions which had been placed on the attendance of German military officers at maneuvers in England, and I had found that there had been some reprisals.  I did not refer to these, but said that I had the authority of the sovereign to give assistance to German officers who were sent over to the maneuvers to study them.  I added that while our army was small, compared with theirs, it had had great experience in the conduct of small expeditions, and that there were in consequence some things worth seeing.

He then spoke of the navy.  It was natural that with the increase of German commerce Germany should wish to increase her fleet—­from a sea-police point of view—­but that they had neither the wish, nor, having regard to the strain their great army put on their resources, the power to build against Great Britain.

I said that the best opinion in England fully understood this attitude, and that we did not in the least misinterpret their recent progress, nor would he misinterpret our resolve to maintain, for purely defensive purposes, our navy at a Two-Power standard.  Some day, I said, there might be rivalry, but I thought we might assume that, if it ever happened, it would not be for many years, and that our policy for the present was strongly for Free Trade, so that the more Germany exported to Great Britain and British possessions, the more we should export in exchange to them.

He expressed himself pleased that I should say this, and added that he was confident that a couple of years’ interchange of friendly communications in this spirit would produce a great development, and perhaps lead for both of us to pleasant relations with other Powers also.

There were during this visit in 1906 other conversations of which a record was preserved, but I have referred to the most important, and I will only mention, in concluding my account of these days in Berlin in September, 1906, the talk I had with the Foreign Minister, Herr von Tschirsky, afterward the German Ambassador at Vienna before the war, and reported as having been a fomenter of the Austrian outbreak against Serbia.  He may have been anti-Slav and anti-Russian, but I did not find him, in the long conversation we had in 1906, otherwise than sensible as regards France.