To the very end the visit went off well, and the inhabitants of London, of all social strata, expressed their good will every time the guests of their King showed themselves.
Thus the German Imperial couple was enabled to return home with the best of impressions. When I informed the Chancellor of these, he expressed great satisfaction. From the remarks of King George he drew the inference that England considered the Algeciras Agreement no longer valid and would not place any obstacles in the way of the French occupation of Morocco.
From this the policy followed by him and the Foreign Office arose which led to the Agadir case, the last and equally unsuccessful attempt to maintain our influence in Morocco. The situation became more serious during the Kiel regatta week. The Foreign Office informed me of its intention to send the Panther to Agadir. I gave expression to strong misgivings as to this step, but had to drop them in view of the urgent representations of the Foreign Office.
In the first half of 1912 came the sending of Sir Ernest Cassel with a verbal note in which England offered to remain neutral in case of an "unprovoked" attack upon Germany, provided Germany agreed to limit her naval construction program and to drop her new Naval bill, the latter being darkly hinted at. Owing to our favorable answer to this Lord Haldane was intrusted with the negotiations and sent to Berlin. The negotiations finally fell through, owing to the constantly more uncompromising attitude of England (Sir E. Grey), who finally disavowed Lord Haldane and withdrew his own verbal note, because Grey was afraid to offend the French by a German-English agreement and jeopardize the Anglo-French-Russian understanding.
Here are the details of the case:
On the morning of January 29, 1912, Herr Ballin had himself announced to me at the palace in Berlin and asked for an audience. I assumed that it was a case of a belated birthday greeting, therefore I was not a little astonished when Ballin, after a short speech of congratulation, said that he had come as an emissary of Sir Ernest Cassel, who had just arrived in Berlin on a special mission and wished to be received.
I asked whether it was a political matter, and why, if so, the meeting had not been arranged through the English ambassador. Ballin's answer was to the effect that, from hints dropped by Cassel, he knew the matter to be of great importance, and the explanation for Cassel's acting without the intervention of the ambassador was because the earnest desire had been expressed in London that the official diplomatic representatives, both the English and the German, should not be apprised of the affair.
I declared that I was ready to receive Cassel at once, but added that, should his mission have to do with political questions, I should immediately summon the Chancellor, since I was a constitutional monarch and not in a position to deal with the representative of a foreign power alone without the Chancellor.
Ballin fetched Cassel, who handed me a document which, he stated, had been prepared with the "approval and knowledge of the English Government." I read the short note through and was not a little surprised to see that I was holding in my hand a formal offer of neutrality in case Germany became involved in future warlike complications, conditioned upon certain limitations in the carrying out of our program of naval construction, which were to be the subject of mutual conferences and agreements. Walking with Ballin into the next room, I handed over the document for him to read. After he had done so both of us exclaimed in the same breath: "A verbal note!"
It was plainly apparent that this "verbal note" was aimed at the forthcoming addition to our Naval law and designed in some way to delay or frustrate it. No matter how the matter was interpreted, I found myself confronted with a peculiar situation, which also amazed Ballin. It reminded me of the situation at Cronberg-Friedrichshof in 1905, when I was obliged to decline the demand, made to me personally by the English Under Secretary, Hardinge, that we should forego our naval construction.