Page:Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire (1899).djvu/188

146 tions on the quiet time which I was going to enjoy at Reinfeld. Your cry 'to horse' came with a shrill discord. I have grown ill in mind, tired out, and spiritless since I lost the foundation of my health."

And at the end:

Moving, quarrelling, annoyance, the whole slavery day and night form a perspective, which already makes me homesick for Reinfeld or St. Petersburg. I cannot enter the swindle in better company than yours; but both of us were happier on the Sadower Heath behind the partridges."

So he wrote late at night, but the next morning in a postscript he added: "If the King will to some extent meet my views, then I will set to the work with pleasure." In the letter he discusses at length the programme; he does not attach much importance to the homage; it would be much better to come to terms on the military question, break with the Chamber, and dissolve. The real difficulty he sees, however, is foreign policy; only by a change in the management of foreign affairs can the Crown be relieved from a pressure to which it must ultimately give way; he would not himself be inclined to accept the Ministry of the Interior, because no good could be done unless the foreign policy was changed, and that the King himself would probably not wish

"The chief fault of our policy is that we have been Liberal at home and Conservative abroad; we hold the rights of our own King too cheap, and those of foreign princes too high; a natural consequence of the difference between the constitutional tendency of the Minis-