ii2       PRINCE BttLOW AND HIS MEMOIRS
speech which he knew himself to possess. On accompanying
his master to Vienna shortly after his appointment, the new
Foreign Secretary urged him to adapt his Toast to the prosaic
temperament of Francis Joseph, "My dear Bernhard,"
replied the Kaiser in the friendliest tone, " you are, of course,
much cleverer than I, but I know more about speaking than
you. I believe you have never made a public speech. I have
made plenty, and I can say without vanity that they were not
bad. So let me speak in my own way." He proceeded to
deliver a dithyrambic harangue which obviously displeased
the old host, to whom over-emphasis and gush were anathema.
Worse was to follow, and it was one of Billow's constant cares
to avert, conceal or explain away rhetorical kpses which
sometimes echoed round the world.
" Perhaps the most detrimental speech he ever made " is
the comment on the " Hunnenrede " of 1900. The Kaiser's
equilibrium was always disturbed when his vivid imagination
turned to the Far East. His famous picture-of the Yellow
Peril, with the inscription " Peoples of Europe, preserve your
holiest possessions," was a nightmare to his Ministers, and is '
rightly described by Bulow as grotesque ; yet reproductions
were hung by his orders in the ships of the Hamburg-Amerika
and the Norddeutscher Lloyd bound for the East, " to the
delight of the English who sucked no small advantage from
this offence to Japanese feeling." His aversion to the Japanese
as a race extended to individuals, and we are assured that he
treated their diplomats and officers badly, despite the remon-
strances of his advisers.
If the Japanese were not to his taste, how much greater was
his horror of the Chinese! Never did Bulow find him in a
state of such excitement as during the opening phases of the
Boxer revolt, and the overstrained nerves found expression in
the historic words to the departing troops at Bremerhafen on
June 27, 1900. " Pardon will not be granted, prisoners will
not be made. As a thousand years ago the Huns of Attila
made themselves a name which lives in story and legend, so let
the German name be impressed on China by you in such a way
that no Chinaman ever again dares to look askance at a
German." Before the speech was finished the agitated
Foreign Secretary issued instructions that it was not to be
published till it had been corrected by himself. The j outnalists
loyally obeyed, but the reporter of a local paper, perched on a
neighbouring roof, had caught the fatal phrase and given it to