I had the temerity to reply that, from what I had seen, the more ‘old X----’ continued to forget of what he thought he knew about handling Papuans, the better it would be for German colonial prospects in New Guinea, and as a consequence threw my royal interrogator into another fit of sulks. It is only fair to say that the ‘interference’ of which the Crown Prince waxed so unfilially censorious really consisted of measures calculated slightly--but only slightly--to mitigate the brutal repressiveness toward the natives which had characterised the German administration of New Guinea from the outset. The one bright spot in the brief but bloody annals of German overseas colonisation was the six or eight years’ régime of the broad-minded and humane Dr. Solf--the present Colonial Secretary--in Samoa. This tiny and comparatively unimportant Pacific outpost was the single Teutonic colony in which I found the natives treated with anything approaching the humanitarian consideration extended to them so universally by the English and the French. Dr. Solf may well be, as has been occasionally hinted from Holland, the hope of those conservative and intelligent Germans who are known to be silently working for a reborn and ‘de-Prussified’ Fatherland after the war. As I have said, the Crown Prince was the only highly placed German whom I ever heard speak slightingly in a personal way of the Kaiser, and that impetuous youth was--as he still is--a law unto himself. Such loyalty and discretion, however, did not characterize all prominent Germans in private life, and it is to several of these I am indebted for the illuminating sidelights their observations and anecdotes threw on the human side of William II. Of such, I fancy the Baron Y----, who voyaged on the same steamer with me from Zanzibar to Port Said several years ago, had enjoyed perhaps the most intimate opportunities for an intelligent appraisal of his Emperor. The Baron was a scion of one of the oldest and wealthiest of Bavarian noble families, a graduate of the École des Beaux Arts as well as Heidelberg, and to the fact that several years of his boyhood were spent at Harrow owed an English accent in speaking that language which betrayed no trace of Teutonic gutturality. He was returning from an extended hunting trip in British and German East Africa at the time I made his acquaintance, and was nursing a light grievance against his own Government from the fact that he had been rather better treated in the former than the latter. His attitude toward the Kaiser was somewhat different from that of any other German I have ever met, this, doubtless, being due to his own great wealth and assured position. There was little of the ‘loyal and devoted subject’ in this attitude, to which no better comparison suggests itself to me than that of a very heavy stock-holder in a corporation toward a general manager who is in no respect his social superior.