“It requires that complete ignorance of the customs prevailing in the service of the State, and particularly in diplomacy, and of the habits of the higher circles which distinguishes Progressist writers, for any one to imagine that an Ambassador’s position could ever be endangered by a matter of such trifling importance as the circumstance that he had been nominated an honorary member of the Cobden Club six or more years ago. We are in a position to assure our readers that the matter has never been taken into consideration either officially or confidentially at the Foreign Office, nor has it ever called for any inquiry or exchange of views. The whole story as to the position of Herr von Keudell being in the least affected by that circumstance is simply an invention of Progressist writers, suffering from a dearth of ‘copy.’ “We are not aware whether Herr von Keudell has resigned his honorary membership. If such be the case he will probably have been led to take that step by recent disclosures respecting the Cobden Club. So far as his relations to the Imperial service and the Imperial Chancellor are concerned, however, it is a matter of indifference whether this purely private step has been taken or not. That Progressist journalists believe the contrary is the consequence in part of their ignorance as to the relations existing between respectable people, and in part of their own sentiments, _i.e._, of the furious rancour with which these partisan writers exaggerate and garble the most insignificant incidents. They assume that an equal degree of malice and violence prevails in circles to which they have no access. In short, they are partisans who are accustomed to treat with hatred and contempt every shade of difference from the party standard. In their eyes whoever is not a free-trader is either a knave or a fool. This is natural enough in those whose sole claim to honesty and intelligence is that they are free-traders. It is not so in higher circles, where there is more toleration, and less time for matters of secondary importance. “The Imperial Ambassador, moreover, can hardly care, we believe, to find unauthorised representatives and advocates in just such papers as the _Berliner Tageblatt_ and the _Vossische Zeitung_. No one who does not belong to the political and social circles represented by these papers would willingly be credited with any connections with them, and this is doubtless sufficiently well-known in Rome for any such connection to be shunned, and for such damaging advocacy to be duly repudiated.”