'On Wednesday, March 4th, Rosebery wrote to me to ask me to dine with him to meet "Herbert Bismarck," who had suddenly arrived, but I was engaged to the Speaker's dinner, and had to put off seeing young Bismarck till Thursday, the 5th. He had come over to try to force us to dismiss Lord Granville and Lord Derby. I noted in my Diary: [Footnote: Sir Charles's Diaries, to portions of which certain biographers had access, are at this point quoted by Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice in his _Life of Lord Granville_, vol. ii., p. 430. The passage runs: "Negotiations with Germany on the vexed colonial questions were meanwhile proceeding, more particularly with regard to New Guinea. Sir Julian Pauncefote proposed a plan which it was hoped might satisfy the German Chancellor, and Count Herbert Bismarck reappeared as co-negotiator with Count Münster in London. Lord Rosebery, who had just joined the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal, also took part in the negotiations. 'Herbert Bismarck came over again,' Sir Charles Dilke noted; 'if at his former visit he had only tried to get us to dismiss Lord Derby, on this occasion he wanted us to dismiss Lord Granville and Lord Derby.'"] "He puts us in a difficult position as individuals, for how can we say to this personally friendly fellow that we do not think Lord Granville's speech in the Lords on Friday foolish, or how say that we think that the allusion to old Bismarck's dislike of Münster in a recent despatch from Malet ought to have been published." 'On Friday, March 6th, I saw Herbert Bismarck again twice.... I having expressed anxiety about Zanzibar, he told me that his father had directed him to say that he "considered Zanzibar as independent as Turkey or Russia." It is to my mind shameful that, after this, Lord Granville should have begun and Lord Salisbury have rapidly completed arrangements by which the Zanzibar mainland, the whole trade of which was in our hands, was handed over to Germany.' 'On March 7th we discussed Herbert Bismarck's views on the Cameroons, on German claims in New Guinea (on this head we settled with him), and on Pondoland.' While the difficulties with Germany were being discussed, differences as to Egyptian policy and our relations with France continued. On January 20th, Egypt once more threatened to break up the Government. France had proposed an international Commission of Inquiry into the financial situation.