The Chancellor struck a serious blow, by his conduct, at the firm confidence and sincere friendship which had bound me before to him. Undoubtedly Prince Bülow thought that, handling the matter as he did both in the Reichstag and with me personally, he could best serve me and the cause, especially as public excitement was running very high at that time. In this I could not agree with him, all the more so since his actions toward me in the _Daily Telegraph_ affair stood out in too sharp contrast to the complaisance and recognition which Bülow had previously manifested toward me. I had become so accustomed to the amiability of the Prince that I found the treatment now accorded me incomprehensible. A BREAK WITH BÜLOW The relationship between Emperor and Chancellor, excellent and amicable up to that time, was, at all events, disturbed. I gave up personal relations with the Chancellor and confined myself to official dealings. After consultation with the Minister of the Royal Household and the chief of the Cabinet, I resolved to follow Prince Fürstenberg's advice as to getting together the Highcliffe dispatches, and charged the Foreign Office with this task. It failed of accomplishment because the dispatches in question were not to be found. Toward the end of the winter the Chancellor requested an audience with me. I walked up and down with him in the picture gallery of the palace, between the pictures of my ancestors, of the battles of the Seven Years' War, of the proclamation of the Empire at Versailles, and was amazed when the Chancellor harked back to the events of the autumn of 1908 and undertook to explain his attitude. Thereupon I took occasion to talk with him about the entire past. The frank talk and the explanations of the Prince satisfied me. The result was that he remained in office. The Chancellor requested that I dine with him that evening, as I had so often done before, in order to show the outer world that all was again well. I did so. A pleasant evening, enlivened by the visibly delighted Princess with charming amiability, and by the Prince with his usual lively, witty talk, closed that memorable day. Alluding to the Prince's audience with me, a wag wrote later in a newspaper, parodying a famous line: "The tear flows, Germania has me again." By this reconciliation I also wished to show that I was in the habit of sacrificing my own sensitiveness to the good of the cause. Despite Prince Bülow's attitude toward me in the Reichstag, which was calculated to pain me, I naturally never forgot his eminent gifts as a statesman and his distinguished services to the fatherland. He succeeded, by his skill, in avoiding a world war at several moments of crisis, during the period indeed, when I, together with Tirpitz, was building our protecting fleet. That was a great achievement.