“On the occasion of my respectful report of the 15th instant your Majesty was pleased to confine me, as regards the extent of my official authority, within limits which do not allow me that degree of participation in the affairs of State, that supervision of the latter, and that freedom in my Ministerial decisions and in my intercourse with the Imperial Diet and its members, which I require if I am to accept constitutional responsibility for my official acts. “But even if it were possible to carry on our foreign policy so independently of our home policy, and our Imperial policy so independently of Prussian policy, as would be the case if the Imperial Chancellor had as little share in the policy of Prussia as in that of Bavaria and Saxony, and had nothing to do in the Imperial Diet with the decision as to the Prussian vote in the Federal Council, it would nevertheless--after your Majesty’s recent decisions on the direction of our foreign policy, as laid down in the confidential letter with which your Majesty yesterday accompanied the report of the Consul at Kieff--be impossible for me to undertake to carry out the instructions respecting foreign affairs contained therein. I should thereby endanger all the important results for the German Empire, which our foreign policy, in agreement with the views of your Majesty’s two predecessors, has for decades past under difficult circumstances secured in our relations with Russia, results that have attained a significance beyond all expectations great for the present and for the future, a circumstance which was confirmed by Count Schuvaloff after his return from St. Petersburg. “Attached as I am to the service of the Royal House and of your Majesty, and accustomed for many years to conditions which I have hitherto regarded as permanent, it is very painful to me to sever my wonted relations with your Majesty, and to break off my connection with the entire policy of the Empire of Prussia. Nevertheless, after conscientiously weighing your Majesty’s intentions, which I should have to be prepared to carry out if I were to remain in office, I have no alternative but most humbly to beg your Majesty graciously to relieve me of the offices of Imperial Chancellor and of Minister President, and Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs, under the usual regulations as to pension. “From my impressions of the last few weeks and the communications made to me yesterday by your Majesty’s Civil and Military Cabinet, I may respectfully take it for granted that I meet your Majesty’s views in thus tendering my resignation, and therefore that I may reckon with certainty upon its being graciously accepted.