Among the high German officials whose opinion of William the Second’s foreign policies I quoted in my previous article, I do not recall a single one whose loyalty or sense of propriety did not prevent his offering any personal criticisms of the Emperor to whose service his best efforts were being devoted. An apprehensiveness, bordering on positive dread in many instances, of the ultimate consequences of the Kaiser’s impetuosities was often apparent in the observations of their franker moments, but personal aspersions were never cast. This was, of course, no more than could have been expected from the well-bred men-of-the-world that they were. And in this connection it may be in point to add that not even among the rather gay and not always discreetly reserved officers of the Crown Prince’s suite (with whom I was thrown not a little during their visit to India in 1911) was loose criticism of the Emperor ever heard, either by myself or by others who enjoyed still fuller opportunities than I had for meeting them on intimate and confidential terms. Frederick William himself was, I regret to record, far less discreet than those about him in his references to his imperial progenitor, and I recall very clearly that quick-tongued youth’s sarcastic allusions to certain rulings of the Kaiser in the matter of the treatment of the natives of some of the islands of German Melanesia. The Crown Prince, I should explain, I had found consumed with interest concerning the progress his people were making in several of their Pacific island colonies I had recently visited, and it was to his very palpable desire to ‘pump me dry’ of any information I might have picked up regarding these incipient ‘places in the sun’ that I owed a number of hours of conversation with him the edification of which would hardly otherwise have fallen to my lot. The outburst I had in mind was led up to by my royal inquisitor’s asking me for my views concerning the comparative progress of the three political divisions of the island of New Guinea, and by my replying that, if the criterion of judgment was to be the contentment, physical well-being, and economic usefulness of the native, I should rate British New Guinea first, Dutch New Guinea an indifferent second, and German New Guinea a very poor third. It was anything but a courtier-like speech on my part, but I was not meeting Frederick William in my official capacity, and, moreover, he had made a point of asking that I should give him perfectly frank answers to his questions. (‘None of the “bull con’,” as the Yankees say,’ was the way he put it; ‘give me the “straight goods.”’ Both expressions, as he confessed with a grin, he had picked up from a ‘neat little filly from Kentucky’ he had ‘seen a bit of’ at Ostend the previous summer.)