held responsible for such confusion. I wished to be protected from this consequence, and, in any case, to guard against your negotiating elsewhere without my knowledge.

To my Telegram of the 2nd of March, I received the following answer, on the same day:

[Paris. No. 7.]

"Berlin, March 2nd, 1873.

"To Count Arnim.

"The affair must, by no means, be carried on secretly; our proposals are 'à prendre ou à laisser.' I have already informed the French Ambassador of the principal contents, and have also no doubt but that they will be gladly accepted. If not, well and good, we can wait.* "VON BISMARCK.”

(Signed)

* I must here mention a very interesting, though apparently, insignificant fact.

The Public Prosecutor's Bill of Indictment, compiled at your instigation, in order to prove me guilty of high treason, mentions this telegram. But it gives an incorrect quotation from the same. It represents the Telegram as ending with the words: "If not, well and good." This is untrue. It ends with the words, "We can wait." If this alteration be quite unintentional, it is, at least, an inexcusable act of negligence. The Bill of Indictment charges me with having retarded the conclusion of the Convention. Now,

The communication made to the French Ambassador was contrary to the rules laid down for the routine of diplomatic business, and, in the present instance, a blunder was committed in not abiding by these rules.

M. de Gontaut-Biron should have learnt through M. Thiers, and no one else, the proposals submitted by me, in Paris, according to your commands. If, from any motive whatever, your Highness wished to depart from this rule, I ought to have been made acquainted by you, ex motu proprio, with the precise purport of your communication to M. de Gontaut. But if intended to do neither the one nor the you other, the negotiations ought certainly not to have been intrusted to me. In the present instance, however, the violation of the rule was so much the more serious a blunder, in that you were communicating to M. Gontaut-Biron only what was designated to him as the "essence" of our proposals.

it is quite evident that the Public Prosecutor omits from a telegram, quoted verbatim, as he pretends, precisely those inconvenient words tending to prove that, as late as the 2nd of March, the existence of any delay in the progress of negotiations would have been indifferent to you, the director of the policy.

You simply informed him of the communications formulated in the Draft Convention drawn up at Berlin. But not a word was said to him of the fact that I was instructed to demand something more, viz. the neutralisation, up to the 1st of March, 1874, of the departments to be evacuated.

If this "something more " was of no value in your estimation, I ought not to have been commissioned to demand this "something more."

Yet it is evident, from the correspondence between us, that you considered the neutralisation, up to the 1st of March, 1874, to be an essential concession, but one difficult to be obtained. Had your Highness informed the Ambassador that I was enjoined to present this demand, my task would have been facilitated. Instead of so doing you rendered it more difficult by the partial information given to him.

From that moment the latter knew, even before I had received my instructions, the minimum of the demands on which we intended to insist, and M. Thiers might already have heard of this minimum from him on the 4th of March. He was able, therefore, from the outset of the negotiations, to establish the fact of there existing a difference between the proposals

being made to him by me at Versailles, and those indicated by your Highness to the French Ambassador as the essence of our proposals, so that my demand for prolonging the neutralisation must have appeared to him unintelligible and far from important.

The necessary consequence to me of this incident was that, after having learnt that M. de Gontaut was acquainted with the pith of our proposals, I no longer found myself in a position to keep back from M. Thiers the concessions touching the evacuation, and to abstain from acceding to his desires until he had granted the neutralisation up to the 1st of March.

The Draft Convention was communicated by you, not only to the French Ambassador, but also to General Baron von Manteuffel, so that the latter, though not in any way connected with diplomatic negotiations, became informed. of this Convention before I did.

It is natural that, on military questions, your Highness should have consulted the general commanding the army of occupation before gathering up the whole of our proposals into a Draft Convention, and into instructions intended for me.

You probably, likewise, consulted the Minister

of Finance, M. Delbrück, and other persons. But after my instructions had been framed at Berlin as the result of deliberations in common, and I had been delegated to negotiate on the basis of these instructions, neither M. Delbrück nor General von Manteuffel ought to have been called upon to take part in this matter, without my knowledge. At head-quarters the opinion had obtained that General von Manteuffel had not only a military mission, but also a diplomatic one.

It was asserted, at Nancy, that a "diplomatic staff" was attached to the general. This staff consisted, it is true, only of a young official of the Foreign Office, stationed at head-quarters to carry on the French correspondence.

Your Highness has always most strenuously opposed this pretension on the part of the general. I shall revert hereafter to this fact.

And yet, nevertheless, the Draft of the Convention drawn up at Berlin was transmitted to him by you, on the 2nd of March, one day before your instructions were despatched to me.

It does not appear that he was directed, on that occasion, to withhold its contents from Count St. Vallier. For it is well known that