ted by them. In
one word--we desire to put no one in the shade, but we too demand our
place in the sun. In East Asia, as in the West Indies, we shall
endeavour, in accordance with the traditions of German policy, without
unnecessary rigour, but also without weakness, to guard our rights and
our interests."

In mentioning the West Indies the Foreign Secretary was alluding to a
quarrel Germany had at this time with the negro republic of Haiti,
owing to the arrest and imprisonment of a German subject in that
island. Kiautschau is administratively under the German Admiralty.

The Caroline, Marianne, and Palau Islands, including the Marschall
Islands and the islands of the Bismarck archipelago, were bought from
Spain this year for twenty-five million pesetas, or about one million
sterling. The islands are valuable in German eyes, not only for their
fertility and capacity for plantation development, but as affording
good harbourage and coaling stations on the sea-road to China, Japan,
and Central America. By the agreement with England and America, which
in this year also put an end to the thorny question of Samoan
administration, Germany acquired the Samoan islands of Upolu and
Sawaii in the South Sea.

The ten years we are now concerned with were perhaps the most
strenuous and picturesque of the Emperor's life hitherto. He was now
his own Chancellor, though that post was nominally occupied by General
von Caprivi and Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe successively. He was
Chancellor, too, knowing that not a hundred miles off the old pilot of
the ship of State was watching, keenly and not too benevolently, his
every act and word. He was conscious that the eyes of the world were
fixed on him, and that every other Government was waiting with
interest and curiosity to learn what sort of rival in statecraft and
diplomacy it would henceforward have to reckon with. Naturally many
plans coursed through his restlessly active brain, but there were
always, one may imagine, two compelling and ever-present thoughts at
the back of them. One of these was a determination to promote the
moral and material prosperity of his people so as to make them a model
and thoroughly modern commonwealth; the other, the resolve that as
Emperor he would not allow Germany to be overlooked, to be treated as
a _quantite negligeable_, in the discussion or decision of
international affairs.

The Chancellorship of General von Caprivi, who had been successively
Minis