‘Yes, Your Excellency.’
‘Well, you certainly did give it me rather hot.’
‘Yes, Your Excellency—that was what you said at the time; but the “duel-book” did not concur in it, and decided you gave as good as you got.’
But those diplomatic studies at Göttingen have borne visible fruits. It is only a pity that the multifarious duties of his threefold office of minister, Chancellor, and brandy-distiller—for he has been a distiller for over twenty years—prevent the Prince from coming forward as the advocate of practical diplomacy. Many a professor’s chair would be open to him.
The theme of the Prince’s diplomatic lecture this evening was ‘the blue-books,’ a subject he had already ventilated the day before in the Diet, urged thereto by Lasker.
‘Well, gentlemen, if you absolutely wish to have a “blue-book,” I will endeavour next year to provide one that will at least be harmless,’ he had said amid the laughter of the House.
Now he gave us an example of the doubtful value of these collective despatches. ‘Say, for example, Lord Augustus Loftus comes to me and asks me whether I am disposed to hear a private letter from his minister, Lord Clarendon. He then reads me a short epistle in the noble lord’s own handwriting, and we talk the matter over quietly for about an hour. Five days after, he is again announced. This time he comes armed with a huge official despatch from the English Foreign Office. He commences to read. “I beg your pardon, Your Excellency!” I interrupt him, “but you told me all that last Monday.”
“Yes, so I did; but now the despatch has to go into the blue-book.”
“Then I suppose I must now repeat my answer all over again, for the benefit of your blue-book?”
“Certainly, if Your Excellency sees no reason against it—that is what is required.”