more inadequate Emperor of Russia at their meeting at Bjorko on the Russian Imperial yacht (July 23, 24, 1005), and the equally characteristic " Willy-Nicky " correspondence (mainly in 1904-5), so-called on account of the signatures which the two Imperial correspondents appended to their letters. Only the Kaiser's share in that correspondence has (1920) been published. The Bjorko Treaty, which was signed by the Tsar without consultation with the minister responsible for the foreign policy of Russia, represented an attempt by William II. to imitate Bismarck's Treaty of Reinsurance with Russia (1887-1890), which the great Chancellor had concluded behind the back of j his ally Austria-Hungary, and which was allowed by his succes- sor, Caprivi, to lapse in 1890 as being " too complicated " i.e. too full of duplicity.
In William II. !s Treaty of Bjorko, Russia and Germany engaged "to make foreign disturbers of the peace quiet, and in case of neces- I sity to stand by one another with their armed strength." Count Lamsdorff, then Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, was i " profoundly excited and upset " when he read the document, since, as it stood, it imposed upon Russia the obligation of fighting on Germany's side if Germany were involved in war with Russia's ally, France. It is true that Russia also pledged herself to make every effort to gain France over to this new alliance, the object of William II. being to organize a continental coalition against Great Britain. When Count Witte, on his return from signing peace with Japan at Portsmouth (U.S.A.), [ was informed by Count Lamsdorff of the terms of the Treaty, he asked: " Does not his Majesty (Nicholas II.) know that we have a treaty with France?" "Of course his Majesty knows that," Count Lamsdorff replied, " but the fact must have slipped from his mind, or, what is more probable, he was be- fogged by William's verbiage, and he failed to grasp the sub- stance of the matter " (Count Witte's Memoirs, English ed. 1921). Count Witte and Count Lamsdorff were afterward able to obtain the abandonment of the Treaty, while Prince BUlow land the German Foreign Office, conscious of the absurdity of their master's achievement, were content to let the Imperial lagreement be treated as non menu. In the Willy-Nicky cor- i responclence, which he conducted in bad English, William had endeavoured to hold Nicholas to the bargain by adjuring him, " God is our testator " (sic). The correspondence represents an mttempt on the part of William to exercise a kind of tutorship lover Nicholas -even in Russian home affairs and to instill into jhis mind suspicions both of France and of Great Britain.
During the years immediately preceding the World War
llWilliam II. was only gradually recovering from the contre-
memps which overtook him in 1908, when Prince Billow, then
[Chancellor, repudiated the utterances published on William's
| behalf in the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 28 1908) and exacted from
him by the threat of resignation a public promise that he would
in future abstain from such personal incursions into the realm
of foreign policy. The Emperor nevertheless continued when he
visited foreign courts to impress upon those with whom he
- ame into contact his conviction that he was an autocrat in the
i conduct of Germany's foreign relations.
At the end of Oct. 1910 he visited the Belgian court, accom- panied by the Empress, and addressing the King of the Belgians said: " May our relations of confidence and friendly neighbour- .iness be drawn ever closer! May welfare and blessing be shed [toy Your Majesty's reign upon your Royal house and upon your i tpeople! That is my desire, which springs from the depths of my aeart." At the Hotel de Ville he addressed the Mayor, M. j Max, who four years later was to be sent to a German prison by [the invaders of his country, and spoke of the " sober and indus- ISrious" Belgian people, expressing at the same time "our pro- [ [round gratitude and our warmest wishes for the prosperity of {Brussels and for a happy future." When the Emperor dehv- Ifered these speeches he knew that Count von Schlieffen's plan for violating Belgian neutrality in the event of war with France I .ay cut and dried in the pigeon-holes of the German General taff, and it was a plan which he himself had endorsed. In lay 1911 he paid his last visit to England, and was present
as the guest of King George V. at the unveiling of the monument to Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace, when the King, whose advisers remained ignorant of certain of the Emper- or's wilder intrigues and schemes, referred to " the strong and living ties of friendship between the thrones and persons of the two sovereigns."
In Feb. 1912 Lord Haldane visited Berlin in order to discuss proposals for a concurrent limitation in the increase of British and German naval armaments. As Lord Haldane slates in his book Before the War, the visit was the sequel of a personal initiative of William II. through the medium of Sir Ernest Cassel. The Emperor had been concerned at the state of tension, dangerous to peace, which had attended the Morocco negotiations with France in the previous year. That critical episode had arisen out of the despatch of the German gunboat Panther on July n 1911 to Agadir, not long after William II. 's return from his visit to England. In the meetings of German ministers with Lord Haldane, at one of which (between Lord Haldane and Adml. von Tirpitz) the Emperor was present in the self-imposed capacity of audience or chorus, he manifestly endeavoured for Lord Haldane's benefit to play for the time being the part of a constitutional monarch, exhibiting the bal- ance of the ministerial advice from one side (Tirpitz) and from the other (Bethmann Hollweg) by which he had to guide his course. Lord Haldane's conclusion was that William II., and with him Germany, suffered from the lack of a constitutional system with a responsible government, the ministers being chosen more or less arbitrarily by the Emperor " and chosen in varying moods as to policy. . . . Thus the Kaiser was constantly being pulled at from different sides, and whichever minister had the most powerful combination at his back generally got the best of the argument. He had constantly to fix one eye on public opinion in Germany, and another on public opinion abroad. It is therefore not surprising that Germany seemed to foreigners a strange and unintelligible country." Lord Hal- dane's opinion gives one aspect of the situation, but hardly takes sufficient account of the wayward personal initiative' of William II., springing either from his own conceptions (as at Bjorko) or from casual outside influences which his ministers were unable to control. Incidentally it may be mentioned that except, perhaps, for the Eulenburg episode in 1005-7 there was no so-called Court party, although military influences were frequently at work. As Prince Billow said, the mischief which was done by sudden personal interventions of the Emperor was manifest, but nothing was known of the mischief which had been prevented.
In home affairs there was a fresh Imperial outburst about Alsace-Lorraine in May 1912, when the Emperor threatened the Burgomaster of Strassburg with the withdrawal of the new con- stitution of the Reichsland, which had been granted in the previous year. The threat was ill-considered, but Bethmann Hollweg defended it in the Reichstag.
In March 1912 William II. paid a visit to the Emperor Francis Joseph at Schonbrunn, and in April he met King Victor Emanuel at Venice by way of preparing for the renewal of the Triple Alliance, which took place on the following Dec. 5. There was a visit of King Ferdinand of Bulgaria to Berlin in June, and in July the Emperor met the Tsar at Baltic Port. An incident which excited considerable attention was the presence of Wil- liam II. for the first time at manoeuvres of the Swiss army, and the favourable popular reception of the Imperial visitor at Berne, Basle and Zurich (Sept. 3-7 1912). A good number of German-Swiss officers had studied military affairs in Germany, and William II., for obvious reasons, seized every opportunity of encouraging the professional sympathies between the two armies, which bore fruit during the World War in the partiality of the Swiss General Staff.
It is noteworthy that during the critical years of the Balkan wars and negotiations, particularly in 1913, William II. kept more than usually in the background. His government was cooperating at the London Ambassedors' Conference for the localization of the conflict and the restoration of peace. He
