The cardinal principle of Bismarck's policy as everybody knows was to keep Great Britain from being drawn into the circle of France and Russia. But it will be news to many people to learn, as they may from these pages, how many and very nearly successful attempts were made to bring about an entente between Britain and Germany. The years 1875, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1887, 1890, 1899 and 1901 are specially notable in this respect. The last attempt, 1901, when the Kaiser had created a good impression in England by his behaviour in connexion with the death of his grandmother Queen Victoria and was on good terms again with his uncle King Edward, very nearly Succeeded. But at the last the scheme wag shattered by the stupidity of "the Central Cattle Market," which worked on the Kaiser and swung him round again to their own Anglophobia.
While efforts to promote friendship between England and Germany thus narrowly failed, few people realize how nearly the Bundesrat incident, during the Boor War, brought the two countries to war. The Bundesrat was a German ship brought into Durban by British cruisers on suspicion of carrying contraband for the Boers. Nothing was found in her, and there is ttle doubt that the story of contraband was deliberately spread by Boer agents to embroil Britain with Germany.
The story of how a breach was avoided, for von LEckardstein's cleverness was \Jargely responsible, is one of the best in the book.
Nepew anp Uncwe.
That William LI was constantly irritating King Edward is commonly known. Von Eckardstein relates that he himself once heard the Kaiser speak of his uncle as an old peacock." He once in writing to King Edward permitted himself to describe all British Ministers as "unmitigated noodles." And apron pos of the Kaiser's frequent visits to Cowes—where he "interfered in everything and treated his uncle he, Sometimes as a quantity neglige-
2 able and sometimes as a subject for schoolboy jokes'"—the then Prince of Wales said, "The regatta Was once a pleasant holiday for me, but, now that the Kaiser has taken command there, it is nothing but a nuisance. Perhaps I shan't come "at all next year."
And yet on other occasions, as at Queen Victoria's death, or again after the attempt made at Brussels by Sipido to shoot King Edward, nobody could have been more charming than the Kaiser. One gathers that he is the kind of man who expects to be judged by his best moods and that his rudenesses shall all be forgotten. It is interesting to learn that not he but Von Marschall, afterwards Ambassador at Constantinople, was really responsible for the drafting and publication of the famous Kruger telegram, to which the Kaiser actually demurred: and one may believe that the Kaiser was not, at the last moment, responsible for tha war in 1914. How far his earlier policy and infatuation were to blame for the strength of the war party which then got beyond his control, it is not our business to adjudge.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.