At the beginning of 1909 a cloud came over their happiness, contentment, and sense of security in the future. In the first place the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and its accompanying defiance of Russia by the shining-armoured Kaiser had inspired British statesmen with hand-in-the-breast-of-the-frock-coat speeches of the Pecksniffian brand; the harder to bear since we were engaged about that time in pushing Turkey out of Arabia and manipulating the partition of Persia. This, once again, soured the relations between Englishmen and Germans. Then, the value of the Happy Valley Concession, insisted on by Roger in his despatches to the Directorate in Leipzig, had reached the comprehension of the All-Highest and of the Imperial Cabinet. To these august personages it seemed incongruous and detrimental to German all-self-sufficiency that such an important portion of Germany’s most important colony should be managed by an Englishman, and that an English Industrial Mission should contain a female of such measureless audacity as a certain "Ann Anderson" who had dared to write a letter to the All-Highest, complaining of sexual licence on the part of Germans in East Africa. Let there be an end of this! The Englishman must go, the Industrial Mission must be replaced by some subservient Roman Catholic teaching fraternity from the Rhineland, which would attend to its prescribed functions of instructing the Negroes how to use their hands and in a limited degree their brains, and call nothing German in question, least of all the policy approved by the Kaiser’s Kolonialminister. As to the Schräders: they meant well: they had tried to ride the German and the English horses abreast: a clever circus trick, but one that no longer consorted with Imperial aims. They were worthy financiers, but they had become too international, with their offices in Paris, London, and Johannesburg, as well as in Leipzig and Berlin.... These august decisions had to be conveyed to Roger by the greatly disappointed Schräders, who had sought so perseveringly to co-ordinate the enterprise of the British Empire with that of Germany and France—internationalists before the proper time. They knew, of course, that Major Brentham purposed resigning his local Direction of the Concession in 1909, but they had half hoped he might have continued in Europe much the same function as a member of the Board. As it was, they had to ask him to go, instead of acquiescing reluctantly in his departure. And quite decidedly they had to request that all relations between the Concession and the Stott Mission be severed.