Accept my warmest thanks for your letter of March 30th, ult. You are right. The hardest thing of all for me is to be obliged to live in foreign parts, to follow, with burning anguish in my soul, the awful fate of our dear fatherland, to which I have devoted the labors of my entire life, and to be barred from co-operation. You stood beside me during the dark, fatal days of November, 1918. As you know, I forced myself to the difficult, terrible decision to leave the country only upon the urgent declaration of yourself and the rest of my counselors who had been summoned that only by my so doing would it be possible to obtain more favorable armistice terms for our people and spare it a bloody civil war. The sacrifice was in vain. Now, as well as before, the enemy wishes to make the German people expiate the alleged guilt of "Imperial Germany." SILENT UNDER ATTACKS In my endeavor to subordinate all personal considerations to the welfare of Germany, I keep myself completely in the background. I am silent in the face of all the lies and slanders which are spread abroad concerning me. I consider it beneath my dignity to defend myself against attacks and abuse. In accordance with this policy of restraint I have also kept the _Historical Tables_ mentioned by you strictly objective and made them accessible only to a narrow circle of acquaintances. I am utterly at a loss to understand how they have now become public through some sort of indiscretion or theft (?). The purpose inspiring me when I prepared the historical tables was this: To bring together strictly historical material by a systematic enumeration of sober facts, such as might enable the reader to form his own judgment of the historical happenings preceding the war. I found my most convincing sources, be it remarked, in the literature which has sprung up after the war, particularly in the works of natives of the enemy countries. Therefore I am glad that you find my modest contribution to history useful. As to your suggestion to make the tables, which have been completed in the meantime, accessible to the German press, I thank you, and will follow it.[11] Truth will hew a way for itself--mightily, irresistibly, like an avalanche. Whoever does not close his ears to it against his better judgment must admit that, during my twenty-six-year reign previous to the war, Germany's foreign policy was directed solely to the maintenance of peace. Its one and only aim was to protect our sacred native soil, threatened from the west and the east, and the peaceful development of our commerce and political economy.