After Rutile read this letter, he made inquiries as to the German officers whose names Miss Byrd had added, and found that they had all resigned from the German army about three months before—two days after Ouro Preto’s interview with the Kaiser. Returning to his office after ascertaining this fact, he sought the ambassador and laid the facts before him.
His Excellency was a tall, polished, elderly gentleman, who dressed immaculately and walked very straight. He had been a professor of dead languages in a fresh-water college in early youth, had inherited a fortune, and had used it so shrewdly that a grateful president had selected him as minister to a small European power. After three years in that post, a new president had come into office and was about to dispense with his services, when he calmly requested to be transferred to Berlin as ambassador. Before the President had gotten over his amazement the would-be ambassador brought such influence to bear that the President hastened to make the appointment requested—lest a worse thing befall. Since then His Excellency had let Rutile run the business of the office while he himself had bettered the American record by spending more than ten times his salary and allowance in keeping up the dignity of his office. Rutile knew all this and knew that his Excellency would be the last man in the world to be rude enough to pry unnecessarily into the secrets of the government to which he was commissioned.
But he also felt reasonably sure that if he could convince the ambassador that there was real need of action, His Excellency would revert to the shirt-sleeve methods of the early American representatives, let the consequences to his social standing be what they might. But he would be hard to convince.
Rapidly Rutile recited the facts as he knew them. When he had finished, he paused for an instant.
“Well?” demanded His Excellency, placing his finger tips together and leaning back in the professorial attitude he had never lost. “Well, Mr. Rutile! You have stated your premises clearly. Now draw your deductions.”
Rutile reached out his hand and spun on its axis the great globe that stood by the desk. “Here is the danger spot,” he said, placing his finger on a particular spot.
The ambassador leaned forward. “Brazil?” he inquired.
“Southern Brazil,” corrected the secretary. “To speak exactly, the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The total population of that state is 2,000,000 of whom half are Germans or the children of Germans. Your Excellency understands that Brazil is Wilhelm’s last chance for a great German colony. All the rest of the valuable world had been collected and labelled by one or the other of the other great powers before Germany felt the need of expansion. Think a minute. What has Germany got? She’s got a slice or two of Africa, populated chiefly by niggers, mosquitoes, and soldiers. There aren’t any colonists there! She’s got a few miscellaneous islands about as big as a Kansas kitchen garden and good for nothing but naval stations. She’s got a few square miles of China, good enough for trade but no good at all for settlement. And year after year she sees millions of the best people the Lord made—I’m part German myself and I know—pouring into the United States and into Brazil just because they haven’t got any German colony to go to. Don’t you know it gravels the Kaiser? Wouldn’t it gravel us? Wouldn’t we conspire and work and bluff and fight if need be to get the last piece of territory going before it was too late—But your Excellency knows all this as well as I do.”
The ambassador nodded. “Of course I know Germany needs real colonies,” he agreed. “Everybody knows that. Witness how near she came to fighting France over Morocco. Of course she’d like to have Brazil, or part of it. But she can’t have it. The Monroe Doctrine keeps her out unless she is willing to fight, and it’s too absurd to suppose that the Kaiser would deliberately go to war with the United States. Do you really think he would?” The ambassador’s tones were incredulous.
Rutile shook his head slowly. “I’m not so sure,” he declared. “What is she building all these dreadnoughts for?”