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.

We have suggested that the telegram was partly due to a certain
element of chivalry in the Emperor's character. The Emperor was well
acquainted with other forms of government and other social systems
besides his own, and though a Hohenzollern could put himself in the
position of the chief of the little Boer republic, threatened as he
was with annihilation by a mighty and powerful opponent. Moreover,
there is always to be remembered the sympathy of view, particularly of
religious view, that existed in the two men as regarded their attitude
and duties to their respective "folk." The President had appealed to
the Emperor for help. The Emperor had had to refuse it, but had wired
that he would do all