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But there are enough stalwarts, including the king, Christian, to believe that a country worth living in is worth fighting for!

CHAPTER II
THE MENACE OF 'OUR NEIGHBOUR TO THE SOUTH'

In 1907, Russia seemed to me to be, for Americans, the most important country in Europe. Our Department of State was no doubt informed as to what the other countries would do in certain contingencies, for none of our diplomatic representatives, although always working under disadvantages not experienced by their European colleagues, had been idle persons. But all of us who had even cursorily studied European conditions knew that the actions of Germany would depend largely on the attitude of Russia. It was to the interest of Emperor William to keep Nicholas II. and the Romanoffs on the throne. He saw no other way of dividing and conquering a country which he at once hated and longed to control.

The Balkan situation was always burning; it was the Etna and Vesuvius of the diplomatic world; wise men might predict eruptions, but they were always unexpected. To most people in the United States the Balkans seemed very far off; Bulgaria with her eyes on Macedonia, the Tsar Ferdinand and his attempt to put his son, Boris, under the greater Tsar, him of Russia; Rumania and her ambitions for more freedom and more territory; Serbia, with her fears and aspirations, appeared to be of no importance – of less interest, perhaps, than other petty kingdoms. But at one fatal moment Austria refused to allow Serbia to export her pigs, and we came to pay about two million dollars an hour and to sacrifice most precious lives, much greater things, because of the ferocious growth of this little germ of tyranny and avarice.

Most of us have fixed ideas; if they are the result of prejudice, they are generally bad; if they are the result of principle, that is another question. When I went to Denmark at the request of President Roosevelt, I had several fixed ideas, whether of prejudice or principle I could not always distinguish. I had been brought up in a sentiment of gratitude to Russia – she had behaved well to us in the Civil War – and in a firm belief that her people only needed a fair chance to become our firm friends. We must seek European markets for our capital and our investments, and Russia offered us a free way.

Towards the end of the year 1908, the signs in Russia were more ominous than usual. It had always seemed to me – and the impression had come probably from long and intimate association with some very clever diplomatists – that Russian problems, industrially and economically, were very similar to our own, and that, in the future, her interests would be our interests. She was in evil hands – that was evident; Nicholas II., after the peace of Portsmouth, was not so pleased with the action of President Roosevelt as he ought to have been, and the arrogant clique, the bureaucrats who controlled the Tsar, regarded us with suspicion and dislike.

At the same time, it was plain that a great part of the landed nobility looked with hope to the United States as a nation which ought to understand their problems and assist, with technical advice and capital, in the solving of them. The Baltic Barons, many with German names and not of the orthodox faith, preferred that the United States, by the investments of her citizens in Russia, should hold a balance between the French and the German financial influences, for Germany was slowly beginning to control Russia financially, and French capital meant a competition with the German interests which might eventually mean a conflict and war. The well instructed among the Russian people, including the estate owners whose interests were not bureaucratic, feared war above all things. The Japanese war had given them reason for their fears.

To my mind there were three questions of great importance for us: How could we, with self-respect, keep on good terms with Russia? How could we discover what Germany's intentions were? And how could we strengthen the force of the Monroe Doctrine by acquiring, through legitimate means, certain islands on our coasts, especially the Gallapagos, the Danish West Indies and others which, perhaps, it might not be discreet to mention.

While the United States seemed fixed in her policy of keeping out of foreign entanglements, it seemed to me that the rule of conduct of a nation, like that of an individual, cannot always be consistent with its theories, since all intentions put into action by the party of the first part must depend on the action and point of view of the party of the second part. I had been largely influenced in my views of the value of the Monroe Doctrine by the speeches and writings of ex-President Roosevelt and Senator Lodge. It was a self-evident truth, too, that, for the sake of democracy, for the sake of the future of our country, the autonomy of the small nations must be preserved. This attitude I made plain during my ten years in Denmark; perhaps I over-accentuated it, but to this attitude I owe the regard of the majority of the Danish people and of some of the folk of the other Scandinavian nations.

The position taken by Germany, under Prussian influence, in Brazil and Argentine, certain indications in our own country, which I shall emphasise later, the intrigues as to the Bagdad Railway, and the threats as to what Germany might do in Scandinavia in case Russia attempted to interfere with German plans in the East, were alarming. Then again was the hint that Denmark might be seized if Germany found Russia in an alliance against England.

From my earliest youth, I knew many Germans whom I esteemed and admired; but they were generally descendants of the men of 1848, that year which saw the Hungarians defeated and the German lovers of liberty exiled. There were others of a later time who believed, with the Kaiser, that a German emigrant was simply a German colonist – waiting! These people were so naïve in their Prussianism, in their disdain for everything American, that they scarcely seemed real! When a German waiter looked out of the hotel window in Trafalgar Square and said, waving his napkin at the spectacle of the congested traffic, 'When the day comes, we shall change all this,' we Americans laughed. This was in the eighties. Yet he meant it; and 'we' have not changed all this even for the day!

The alarm was sounded in South America, but few North Americans took it seriously, and we knew how the English accepted the German invasions to the very doors of their homes. However, when I went to Denmark in August 1907, deeply honoured by President Roosevelt's outspoken confidence in me, I became aware that Prussianised Germany might at any moment seize that little country, and that, in that case, the Danish West Indies would be German. A pleasant prospect when we knew that Germany regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the silly figment of a democratic brain unversed in the real meaning of world politics.

Again, I saw exemplified the fact that in the eyes of the Kaiser, a German emigrant was a German colonist. Once a German always a German; the ideas of the Fatherland must follow the blood, and these ideas are one and indivisible. Consequently, no place could have been more interesting than the capital of Denmark. Here diplomatists were taught, made, or unmade.

Until we were forced to join in the European concert by the acquirement of the Philippines, the post did not seem to be important. 'You always send your diplomatists here to learn their art,' the clever queen of Christian IX. had said to an American. It may not have been intended as a compliment!

In the second place, Copenhagen was the centre of those new social and political movements that are affecting the world; Denmark was rapidly becoming Socialistic.

She, one of the oldest kingdoms in the world, presented the paradox of being the spot in which all tendencies supposed to be anti-monarchical were working out. She had already solved problems incidental to the evolution of democratic ideals, which in our own country we have only begun timidly to consider.

In the third place, Copenhagen was near the most potent country in the world – Germany under Prussian domination. I make the distinction between 'potency' and 'greatness.'

And, in the fourth place, it gave anybody who wanted to be 'on his job' a good opportunity of studying the effect of German propinquity on a small nation. Unfortunately, in 1907-8-9-10-11, no experience in watching German methods seemed of much value to our own people or to the English. The English who watched them critically, like Maxse, the editor of the National Review of London, were not listened to. Perhaps these persons were too Radical and intemperate. The English Foreign Office had, after the Vatican, the reputation of having the best system for obtaining information in Europe, but both the English Foreign Office and the Vatican Secretariat seemed to have suddenly become deaf. We Americans were too much taken up with the German gemütlichkeit, or scientific efficiency, to treat the Prussian movements with anything but tolerance. The Germans had won the hearts of some of our best men of science, who believed in them until belief was impossible; and, with most of my countrymen, I held that a breach of the peace in Europe seemed improbable. There was always The Hague! The only thing left for me was to let the Germans be as gemütlich as they liked, and to watch their attitude in Denmark, for on this depended the ownership of the West Indies.

My German colleagues, Henckel-Donnersmarck, von Waldhausen, and Brockdorff-Rantzau, were able men; and, I think, they looked on me as a madman with a fixed idea. Count Rantzau, if he lives, will be heard of later; he is one of the well-balanced among diplomatists. I realised early in the game that my work must be limited to watching Germany in her relations with Denmark. I knew what was expected of me. I had no doubt that the United States was the greatest country in the world in its potentialities, but I had no belief, then, in its power to enforce its high ideals on the politics of the European world.

In fact, it never occurred to me that our country would be called upon to enforce them, for, unless the Imperial German Government should take it into its head to lay hands on a country or two in South America, it seemed to me that we might keep entirely out of such foreign entanglements as concerned Western Europe and Constantinople and the Balkans. If, however, there should be such interference by France and England with the interests of Germany as would warrant her and her active ally in attacking these countries, Denmark and, automatically, her islands would be German. Then, we, in self-defence, must have something to say. Secret diplomacy was flourishing in Europe, and nothing was really clear. After the event it is very easy to take up the rôle of the prophet, but that is not in my line. If a man is not a genius, he cannot have the intuition of a genius, and, while I accepted the opinions of my more experienced colleagues, I imagined that their fears of a probable war were exaggerated. Besides, I had been impressed by the constantly emphasised opinion – part of the German propaganda, I now believe – that our great enemy was Japan.

Since the year 1874, when I had been well introduced into diplomatic circles in Washington, I had known many representatives of foreign powers. Since those days, so well described in Madame de Hegermann-Lindencrone's Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, the German point of view had greatly changed. It was a far cry from the days of the easy-going Herr von Schlözer to Speck von Sternberg and efficient Count Bernstorff, a far cry from the amicable point of view of Mr. Poultney Bigelow taken of the young Kaiser in the eighties, and his revised point of view in 1915. Mr. Poultney Bigelow's change from a certain attitude of admiration, in his case with no taint of snobbishness, was typical of that of many of my own people. I must confess that no instructions from the State Department had prepared me for the German echoes I heard in Denmark; but even if Treitschke had come to the United States to air his views at the University of Chicago, I should probably have considered them merely academic, and have treated them as cavalierly as I had treated the speech of the waiter in the Trafalgar Square hotel about 'changing all that.'

Nietzsche's philosophy seemed so atrocious as to be ineffective. But we Americans, as a rule, take no system of philosophy as having any real connection with the conduct of life, and, except in very learned circles, his was looked on as no more part of the national life of Germany than William James is of ours. In a little while, I discovered that the Kaiser had imposed on the Prussians, at least, a most practical system of philosophy, which our universities had come to admire. I had not been long in Denmark when I realised that Germany, in the three Scandinavian countries, was looked on either as a powerful enemy or as a potential friend, and that she tried, above all, to control the learned classes.

The United States hardly counted; she was too far off and seemed to be hopelessly ignorant of the essential conditions of foreign affairs. Her diplomacy, if it existed at all, was determined by existing political conditions at home.

I visited Holland and Belgium; Germany loomed larger. She was bent on commercial supremacy everywhere. One could not avoid admitting that fact.

As to Denmark, it was piteous to see how the Danes feared the power that never ceased to threaten them. Prussia has made her empire possible by establishing the beginnings, in 1864, of her naval power at the expense of Denmark. The longer I lived in Denmark the more strongly I felt that Germany was getting ready for a short, sharp war in which the United States of America, it seemed to me (as I was no prophet), was not to be a factor, but Russia was.

The members of the German Legation were very sympathetic, especially the Minister, Count Henckel-Donnersmarck. He loved Weimar; he loved the old Germany. It was a delight to hear him talk of the real glories of his country. His family, in the opinion of the Germans, was so great that he could afford to do as he pleased; I rather think he looked on the Hohenzollerns as rather parvenus. He was of the school of Frederick the Noble rather than of William the Conqueror.

'Do you mind talking politics?' I asked him one day.

'It bores me,' he said, 'because there is nothing stable. My country feels that it is being isolated. Since Algeria, in 1906, she stands against Europe, with Austria.'

'Stands against the United States?'

'No, no; we shall always be at peace,' he said. 'Our interests are not dissimilar; our military organisation is almost perfect. Yes, we learned some lessons even from your Civil War, though you are not a military people. Your country is full of our citizens.'

'Your citizens, Count!'

'Ah, yes, – in Brazil and Argentine, everywhere, a German citizen is like a Roman citizen, proud and unchanging, that is the German citizen who understands the aims of modern Germany. Civis Romanus sum! The older ones are different; it is a question of sentiment and memories with them. Your great German population will always keep you out of conflict with us, though even you, who know our literature, are at heart English – I mean politically. You cannot help it. Your Irish blood may count, but the point of view is made by literature. It gets into the blood. See what Homer has done for those old savages of his. Our bankers can always manage the finances of New York, as they manage those of London. It would be a sad day for Germany if we should break with you; some of us know that Frederick the Great saw your future, and believed that we always ought to be friends. But do not imagine that your nation, great as it is, can do anything your people wills to do. Great power, I understand, is hidden in your country; but, as the actors say, you cannot get it across the footlights. It is not, as Gambetta spoke of the Catholic religion in France, a matter for export.'

'Our education,' Count Henckel-Donnersmarck resumed, 'is practical; Goethe and Schiller mean little now to us. Bismarck has made new men of us. I shall not live long, and I cannot say I regret it,' he said; 'and, as the lust of power becomes the rule of the world, my son must be a new German or suffer.'

'Count Henckel,' as he preferred to be called, did not remain long in Copenhagen; he was recalled because, it was reported, he did not provide the Kaiser, who carefully read his ministers' reports, with a sufficient number of details of life in Denmark.

When I took his hint and went to Germany, at Christmas – Christmas was a divine time in the old Germany! – I found that Count Henckel was right. Berlin was hygienic, ugly, and more offensively immoral than Paris was once said to be.

There was an artificial rule of life. Even the lives of the boys and girls seemed to be ordered by some unseen law. You could breathe, but it was necessary not to consume too much oxygen at a time. That was verboten; and there were cannons on the Christmas trees!

CHAPTER III
THE KAISER AND THE KING OF ENGLAND

It was pleasant to renew old memories among diplomatists and ex-diplomatists in Copenhagen. I remembered the old days in Washington, when Sir Edward Thornton's house was far up-town, when the rows between the Chileans and Peruvians – I forget to which party the amiable Ibañez belonged – convulsed the coteries that gathered at Mrs. Dahlgren's, when Bodisco and Aristarchi Bey and Baron de Santa Ana were more than names, and the Hegermann-Lindencrones² were the handsomest couple in Washington. So it was agreeable to find some colleagues with whom one had reminiscences in common. Then there were the Americans married to members of the corps. Lady Johnston, wife of Sir Alan; Madame de Riaño, married to one of the most well-balanced and efficient diplomatists in Europe. These ladies made the way of my wife and my daughters very easy.

An envoy arriving at a new post has one consolation, not an unmitigatedly agreeable one. He is sure of knowing what his colleagues think of him. And for a while they weigh him very carefully. The American can seldom shirk the direct question: 'Is this your first post?' It required great strength of mind not to say: 'I had a special mission to the Indian Reservations, and I have always been, more or less, you know – '

'Ah, I see! Calcutta, Bombay – !'

'Not exactly – Red Lake, you know – the Reservations, wards of our Government.'

'Oh, red Indians! I was not aware that you had diplomatic relations with the old red Indian princes. But this is your first post in Europe?'

You cannot avoid that. However, the longer one is at a post, the more he enjoys it. In the course of nearly eleven years, I never knew one of my colleagues who did not show esprit de corps. They become more and more kindly. You know that they know your faults and your virtues. In the diplomatic service you are like Wolsey, naked, not to your enemies, but to your colleagues. They can help you greatly if they will.

After the peace of Portsmouth, which in the opinion of certain Russians gave all the advantages to Japan, the Emperor of Germany spoke of President Roosevelt with added respect, we were told. The attitude toward Americans on the part of Germans seemed always the reflection of the point of view of the Kaiser. From their point of view, it was only the President who counted; our nation, from the Pan-German point of view seemed not to be of importance.

It was rather hard to find out exactly what the Kaiser's attitude towards us was. Some of the court circle – there were always visitors from Berlin – announced that the Kaiser was greatly pleased by the result of the Portsmouth conference. He knew the weakness of Russia, and though he believed that German interests required that she should not be strong, he feared, above all things, the preponderance of the Yellow Races. I discovered one thing early, that the Pan-German party propagated the idea that the Japanese alliance with England could be used against the United States.

It was vain to argue about this. 'Japan is your enemy; the Philippines will be Japanese, unless you strengthen yourselves by a quasi-alliance with us; then England, tied to Japan, can not oppose you.' One could discover very little from the Kaiser's public utterances; but he indemnified himself for his conventionality in public by his frankness in private.

He described the Danish as the most 'indiscreet of courts.' He forgot that his own indiscretions had become proverbial in Copenhagen. Whether this 'indiscretion' was first submitted to the Foreign Office is a question. His diplomatists were usually miracles of discretion; but the city was full of 'echoes' from Berlin which did not come from the diplomatists or the court. The truth was, the Kaiser looked on the courts of Denmark and Stockholm as dependencies, and he was 'hurt' when any of the court circle seemed to forget this.

In his eyes, a German princess, no matter whom she married, was to remain a German. The present Queen of Denmark, the most discreet of princesses, never forgot that she was a Danish princess and would be in time a Danish queen.

Every German princess was looked upon as a propagator of the views of the Kaiser; – the Queen of the Belgians was a sore disappointment to him; but, then, she was not a Prussian princess. When one of the princesses joined the Catholic Church, there was an explosion of rage on his part.

As far as I could gather, in 1908-9-10, he was chambré, as liberal Germany said, surrounded by people who echoed his opinions, or who, while pretending to accept them, coloured them with their own.

It was surmised that he despised his uncle, King Edward. Evidences of this would leak out.

He admired our material progress, and he was determined to imitate our methods. The loquacity of some of our compatriots amused him.

He understood President Roosevelt so little as to imagine that he could influence him. There was one American he especially disliked, and that was Archbishop Ireland; but the reason for that will form almost a chapter by itself.

As I have said, it seemed to me most important that good feeling in the little countries of Europe should be founded on respect for us.

Somebody, a cynic, once said that the only mortal sin among Americans is to be poor. That may or may not be so. It was, however, the impression in Europe. It was difficult in Denmark to make it understood that we were interested in literature and art, or had any desire to do anything but make money. The attempt to buy the Danish West Indies, made in 1902, was looked on by many of the Danes as the manifestation of a desire on the part of an arrogant and imperial-minded people to take advantage of the poverty of a little country. 'You did not dare to propose to buy an island near your coast from England or France, or even Holland,' they said. This prejudice was encouraged by the German press whenever an opportunity arose. And against this prejudice it was my business to fight.

Until after the war with Spain – unfortunate as it was in some aspects – we were disdained; after that we were supposed to have crude possibilities.

German propagandists took advantage of our seeming 'newness,' forgetting that the new Germany was a parvenu among the nations. Our people en tour in Europe spent money freely and gave opinions with an infallible air almost as freely. They too frequently assumed the air of folk who had 'come abroad' to complete an education never begun at home; or, if they were persons who had 'advantages,' they were too anxious for a court entrée, asking their representative for it as a right, and then acting at court as if it were a divine privilege.

It was necessary in Denmark to accentuate the little things. The Danes love elegant simplicity; they are, above all, aesthetic. My predecessor, who did not remain long enough in Denmark to please his Danish admirers, called the Danes 'the most civilised of peoples.' I found that he was right; but they were full of misconceptions concerning us. We used toothpicks constantly! We did not know how to give a dinner! The values of the wine list (before the war, most important) would always remain a mystery to us. In a word, we were 'Yankees!' To make propaganda – the first duty of a diplomatist – requires thought, time and money. The Germans used all three intelligently.

One cannot travel in the provinces without money. One cannot reach the minds of the people without the distribution of literature. Unhappily, Governments before the war, with the exception of the German Government, took little account of this.

One of the best examples of an effective propaganda, of the most practicable and far-sighted methods, was that of the French Ambassador to the United States, Jusserand. He did not wait to be taught anything by the Germans.

We have two bad habits: we read our psychology as well as our temperament – the result of a unique kind of experience and education – into the minds of other people, and we despise the opinion of nations which are small. The first defect we have suffered from, and the latter we shall suffer from if we are not careful. Who cares whether Bulgaria respects us or not? And yet a diplomatist soon learns that it counts. It is a grave question whether the little countries look with hope towards democracy, or with helpless respect towards autocracy. We see that Bulgaria counted; we shall see that Denmark counted, too, when the moment came for our buying the Virgin Islands.

The German propaganda was incessant. Denmark was in close business relations with England. Denmark furnished the English breakfast table – the inevitable butter, bacon and eggs. But the trade relations between England and Denmark were not cultivated as were those between Denmark and Germany. The German 'drummer' was the rule, the English commercial traveller the exception.

As to the American, he seldom appeared, and when he came he spoke no language but his own. In literature the Germans did all they could to cultivate the interest of the Danish author. He was petted and praised when he went to Berlin – that is, after his books had been translated. Berlin never allowed herself to praise any Scandinavian books in the original. As to music, the best German musicians came to Denmark. Richard Strauss led the Rosenkavalier in person; the Berlin symphony and Rheinhart's plays were announced. Every opportunity was taken to show Denmark Germany's best in music, art and science. 'If you speak the word culture, you must add the word German.' This was a Berlin proverb. 'All good American singers must have my stamp before America will hear them,' the Kaiser said. Danish scientists were always sure of recognition in Germany, but they must be read in German or speak in German when they visited Berlin.

In 1908 King Edward came to Copenhagen. He was regarded principally as the husband of the beloved Princess Alexandra. He did not conceal the fact that Copenhagen bored him, and the Copenhageners knew it. However, they received him with an appearance of amiability they had not shown to the Kaiser on the occasion of his visit.

No Dane who remembered Bismarck and Slesvig and who saw at Kiel the growing German fleet could admire the Emperor William II. Even the most ferocious propagandists demanded too much when they asked that. They looked on the visits of King Frederick VIII. to Germany with suspicion.

When the Crown Prince, the present Christian X., married the daughter of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, they were not altogether pleased. They were reconciled, however, by the fact that the Crown Princess was the daughter of a Russian mother. Besides, the Crown Princess, now Queen Alexandrina, was chosen by Prince Christian because he loved her. 'She is the only woman I will marry,' he had said. And when she married him, she became Danish, unlike her sister-in-law, the Princess Harald, who has always remained German, much to the embarrassment of her husband, and the rumoured annoyance of the present king, who holds that a Danish princess must be a Dane and nothing else.

The Danish queen's mother is the clever Grand Duchess Anastasia Michaelovna,³ who was Russian and Parisian, who loved the Riviera, above all Cannes, and who was the most brilliant of widows. When the sister of Queen Alexandrina married the German Crown Prince in 1905, the Danes were relieved, but not altogether pleased. Those of them who believed that royal alliance counted, hoped that a future German Empress, so nearly akin to their queen, might ward off the ever-threatening danger of Prussian conquest.

The Crown Princess Cecilia became a favourite in Germany; it was rumoured that she was not sufficient of a German housewife to suit the Kaiser.

'The Crown Princess Cecilia is adorable, but she will not permit her august father-in-law to choose her hats,' said a visiting lady of the German autocratic circle; 'she might, at least, follow the example of her mother-in-law, for the Emperor's taste is unimpeachable!' My wife remembered that this serene, well-born lady wore a hat of mustard yellow, then a favourite colour in Berlin!

In April 1908, King Edward VII. and Queen Alexandra made a visit to Copenhagen. It was the custom in Denmark that, when a reigning sovereign came on a gala visit, the Court and the diplomatists were expected to go to the station to meet him. The waiting-room of the station was decorated with palms which had not felt the patter of rain for years, and with rugs evidently trodden to shabbiness by many royal feet. Amid these splendours a cercle was held.

The visiting monarch, fresh from his journey, spoke to each of the diplomatists in turn. He dropped pearls of thought for which one gave equally valuable gems.

'The American Minister, Your Majesty,' said the Chamberlain. 'Glad to see you; where are you from?' 'Washington, the capital.' 'There are more Washingtons?' 'Many, sir.' 'How do you like Copenhagen?' 'Greatly – almost as well as London' (insert Stockholm, Christiania, The Hague, to suit the occasion).