But, as I have already hinted, there was one thing which was especially vexatious to him; and this was the evasion, as he considered it, of duty to the German Fatherland by sundry German-Americans. One day I received a letter from a young man who stated his case as follows:
He had left his native town in Alsace-Lorraine just before arriving at the military age; had gone to the United States; had remained there, not long enough to learn English, but just long enough to obtain naturalization; and had then lost no time in returning to his native town. He had been immediately thrown into prison; and thence he wrote me, expressing his devotion to the American flag, his pride in his American citizenship,--and his desire to live in Germany. I immediately wrote to the minister of foreign affairs, stating the man's case, and showing that it came under the Bancroft treaties, or at least under the construction of them which the German Government up to that time had freely allowed. To this I received an answer that the Bancroft treaties, having been made before Alsace-Lorraine was annexed to the empire, did not apply to these new provinces, and that the youth was detained as a deserter. To this I replied that, although the minister's statement was strictly true, the point had been waived long before in our favor; that in no less than eight cases the German Government had extended the benefit of the Bancroft treaties over Alsace-Lorraine; and that in one of these cases the acting minister of foreign affairs had declared the intention of the government to make this extension permanent.
But just at this period, after the death of Baron von Blow, who had been most kindly in all such matters, the chancellor had fallen into a curious way of summoning eminent German diplomatists from various capitals of Europe into the ministry of foreign affairs for a limited time--trying them on, as it were. These gentlemen were generally very agreeable; but on this occasion I had to deal with one who had been summoned from service at one of the lesser German courts, and who was younger than most of his predecessors. To my surprise, he brushed aside all the precedents I had cited, and also the fact that a former acting minister of foreign affairs had distinctly stated that, as a matter of comity, the German Government proposed to consider the Bancroft treaties as applying permanently to Alsace-Lorraine. Neither notes nor verbal remonstrances moved him. He was perfectly civil, and answered my arguments, in every case, as if he were about to yield, yet always closed with a ``but''--and did nothing.
He seemed paralyzed. The cause of the difficulty was soon evident. It was natural that Bismarck should have a feeling that a young man who had virtually deserted the German flag just before reaching the military age deserved the worst treatment which the law allowed. His own sons had served in the army, and had plunged into the thickest of the fight, one of them receiving a serious wound; and that this young Alsatian Israelite should thus escape service by a trick was evidently hateful to him. That the chancellor himself gave the final decision in this matter was the only explanation of the fact that this particular acting minister of foreign affairs never gave me an immediate answer.
The matter became more and more serious. The letter of the law was indeed on Bismarck's side; but the young man was an American citizen, and the idea of an American citizen being held in prison was anything but pleasant to me, and I knew that it would be anything but pleasant to my fellow-citizens across the water. I thought on the proud words, ``civis Romanus sum,'' and of the analogy involved in this case. My position was especially difficult, because I dared not communicate the case fully to the American State Department of that period. Various private despatches had got out into the world and made trouble for their authors, and even so eminent a diplomatist as Mr. George P. Marsh at Rome came very near being upset by one. My predecessor, Bayard Taylor, was very nearly wrecked by another; and it was the escape and publication of a private despatch which plunged my immediate successor into his quarrel with Bismarck, and made his further stay in Germany useless: I therefore stopped short with my first notification to the State Department--to the effect that a naturalized American had been imprisoned for desertion in Alsace-Lorraine, and that the legation was doing its best to secure his release.
To say more than this involved danger that the affair might fall into the hands of sensation-mongers, and result in howls and threats against the German Government and Bismarck; and I knew well that, if such howls and threats were made, Bismarck would never let this young Israelite out of prison as long as he lived.
It seemed hardly the proper thing, serious as the case was, to ask for my passports. It was certain that, if this were done, there would come a chorus of blame from both sides of the Atlantic. Deciding, therefore, to imitate the example of the old man in the school-book, who, before throwing stones at the boy in his fruit-tree, threw turf and grass, I secured from Washington by cable a leave of absence, but, before starting, saw some of my diplomatic colleagues, who were wont to circulate freely and talk much, stated the main features of the case to them, and said that I was ``going off to enjoy myself''; that there seemed little use for an American minister in a country where precedents and agreements were so easily disregarded. Next day I started for the French Riviera.
The journey was taken leisurely, with interesting halts at Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle; and, as I reached the hotel in Paris, a telegram was handed me--``Your man in Alsace-Lorraine is free.'' It was evident that the chancellor had felt better and had thought more leniently of the matter, and I had never another difficulty of the sort during the remainder of my stay.
