The imputation of malevolence was based on fallacy, as Sir Sidney Lee shows, but the attitude of the German Press ought to have taught a great writer that if highly instructed publicists attached such importance to the King’s participation in affairs, however false might be the motives ascribed, his own appreciation of it might possibly be open to correction, and could not fail to create a wrong impression upon future students of history. The relations between the King and the Emperor of Austria were in the highest degree cordial—and no wonder. For the old Emperor, the venerable man whose life had been so cruelly pursued by the Fates, the King, like everybody who had a heart, felt the most profound sympathy, which in his case amounted to affection. The betrayal of 1908, when Baron Ærenthal annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, making the Treaty of Berlin into “a scrap of paper,” and, borrowing a phrase from Kant, justified his action as a “categorical imperative,” was a violent shock to King Edward. It was on the 8th of October that the King received the news at Balmoral, and no one who was there can forget how terribly he was upset. Never did I see him so moved. He had paid the Emperor of Austria a visit at Ischl less than two months before. The meeting had been friendly and affectionate, ending with a hearty “auf baldiges Wiedersehen.” Baron Ærenthal had been with the Emperor, Sir Charles Hardinge with King Edward. The two Sovereigns and the two statesmen had discussed the Eastern Question—especially the Balkan difficulties—with the utmost apparent intimacy, and the King left Ischl in the full assurance that there was no cloud on the horizon. Now, without a word of warning, all was changed. The King was indignant, for nobody knew better than he did the danger of tampering with the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin, and he saw that to make any change in the Turkish provinces was to light a fuse which, sooner or later, was bound to fire a powder magazine. Personally, the King felt that he had been treacherously deceived. His forecast of the danger, which he communicated at the time to me, showed him to be possessed of that prevision which marks the statesman. Every word that he uttered that day has come true.