But this letter is already too long. I will close it by saying that I was charmed with England and sorry to leave it. It is easy to do business there. I carried out all of Your Grace’s instructions, and did it without difficulty. I doubted if it was needful to grease Mr. Cecil Rhodes’s palm any further, for I think he would serve you just for the love of it; still, I obeyed your orders in the matter. I made him Permanent General Agent for South Africa, got him and his South Africa Company whitewashed by the Committee of Inquiry, and promised him a dukedom. I also continued the European Concert in office, without making any change in its material. In my opinion this is the best material for the purpose that exists outside of Your Grace’s own personal Cabinet. It coddles the Sultan, it has defiled and degraded Greece, it has massacred a hundred thousand Christians in Armenia and a splendid multitude of them in Turkey, and has covered civilization and the Christian name with imperishable shame. If Your Grace would instruct me to add the Concert to the list of your publicly acknowledged servants, I think it would have a good effect. The Foreign Offices of the whole European world are now under your sovereignty, and little attentions like this would keep them so. A WORD OF ENCOURAGEMENT FOR OUR BLUSHING EXILES | (1898) ... Well, what do you think of our country _now_? And what do you think of the figure she is cutting before the eyes of the world? For one, I am ashamed--(Extract from a long and heated letter from a Voluntary Exile, Member of the American Colony, Paris.) And so you are ashamed. I am trying to think out what it can have been that has produced this large attitude of mind and this fine flow of sarcasm. Apparently you are ashamed to look Europe in the face; ashamed of the American name; temporarily ashamed of your nationality. By the light of remarks made to me by an American here in Vienna, I judge that you are ashamed because: 1. We are meddling where we have no business and no right; meddling with the private family matters of a sister nation; intruding upon her sacred right to do as she pleases with her own, unquestioned by anybody. 2. We are doing this under a sham humanitarian pretext. 3. Doing it in order to filch Cuba, the formal and distinct disclaimer in the ultimatum being very, very thin humbug, and easily detectable as such by you and virtuous Europe. 4. And finally you are ashamed of all this because it is new, and base, and brutal, and dishonest; and because Europe, having had no previous experience of such things, is horrified by it and can never respect us nor associate with us any more.