Before this interview took place, the French Ambassador had called at the German Foreign Office on a similar errand and urged the English suggestion that action should at once be taken by England, Germany, Russia, and France at St. Petersburg and Vienna, to the effect that Austria and Servia should abstain from any act which might aggravate the situation at the present hour. By this was meant that there should be, pending further parleys, no invasion of Servia by Austria and none of Austria by Russia. _To this the German Foreign Minister opposed a categorical refusal._ On the same day the Russian Ambassador at Vienna had "a long and earnest conversation" with the Austrian Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He expressed the earnest hope that something would be done before Servia was actually invaded. Baron Macchio replied that this would now be difficult, as a skirmish had already taken place on the Danube, in which the Servians had been aggressors. The Russian Ambassador then said that his country would do all it could to keep the Servians quiet, "and even to fall back before an Austrian advance in order to gain time." He urged that the Austrian Ambassador at St. Petersburg should be furnished with full powers to continue discussions with the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, who was very willing to advise Servia to yield all that could be fairly asked of her as an independent Power. The only reply to this reasonable suggestion was that it would be submitted to the Minister for Foreign Affairs.[33] [Footnote 33: English _White Paper_, No. 56.] On the same day the German Ambassador at Paris called upon the French Foreign Office and "_strongly insisted on the exclusion of all possibility of mediation or a conference_"[34]; and yet contemporaneously the Imperial German Chancellor was advising London that he had started the efforts towards mediation in Vienna, immediately in the way desired by Sir Edward Grey, and had further communicated to the Austrian Foreign Minister the wish of the Russian Foreign Minister for a direct talk in Vienna. [Footnote 34: Russian _Orange Paper_, No. 34.] What hypocrisy! In the formal German defense, the German Foreign Office, after stating its conviction that an act of mediation could not take into consideration the Austro-Servian conflict, which was purely an Austro-Hungarian affair, claimed that Germany had transmitted Sir Edward Grey's further suggestion to Vienna, in which Austro-Hungary was urged either to agree to accept the Servian answer as sufficient or to look upon it as a basis for further conversations;