Rintelen had, however, the other side of the tiger’s character--its graces. When the ---- made port at New York on April 3, 1915, it bore as passenger one Émil Gasché, a Swiss. The moment Gasché passed the customs officers Gasché ceased to exist, and in his place appeared handsome young Von Rintelen, unexpectedly arrived in America for his fourth visit and renewing pleasant acquaintanceships in society and in Wall Street. He was “the same old chap,” to quote his own description of himself in one of his letters--rich, of a family long accustomed to riches; well-bred, of a family long proud of its aristocratic connection with the Imperial Court at Berlin (his father had long been the equivalent of our Secretary of the Treasury); young, the youngest of the chief bankers of Germany; handsome, with the good looks that come of regular features and of a slender frame hardened by athletics and made distinguished by the bearing of an officer; a sportsman, who raced his yacht in the Emperor’s regattas at Kiel--an affable, cultivated, witty, accomplished man of the world. No wonder he had been popular on his former visits. On one of them he had opened in New York a branch of the Deutsche Bank, one of the greatest of the government-controlled banks of Germany, and on another he had widened these financial relationships with Wall Street. He had travelled the country over and knew people everywhere; and he knew about hundreds more, even to their private affairs in money and politics and those intimate weaknesses that pass into the gossip of the smoking-room. He spoke the language with only the slightest accent but in its purest form, and was adept in our peculiar kind of humour--altogether, a fine and likable fellow, who liked us. Until the war. And until the Germans, stung by the lost illusions of a quick and glorious victory, facing the gray outlook of a long and bitter struggle, looking about for some one to blame for their plight, and wearied of “strafing” England, found a new narcotic in a hatred of America. America, that made the cartridges and shells that patched up the unpreparedness of France and Britain and Russia, which Germany had calculated as one of the factors in the equation of victory. America, that--as their rising rage made their voices shriller--“is murdering our sons and brothers on every battlefield from Switzerland to the sea for the sake of blood-bought gold.” This cry became an article of fanatical faith to the German people. It became likewise a very practical problem to the hard-headed leaders in Berlin. If they could cut off this supply of munitions, the Allies could be beaten. There was no hope of cutting it off at sea--the British Navy would attend to that. It must be stopped at its source: stopped in America, by a made-to-order public opinion, or by corruption, or by violence--but stopped.