AS AMBASSADOR TO GERMANY 1897-1903 135 



On the 12th of June I presented the President s letter 

 of credence to the Emperor William II. The more impor 

 tant of my new relations to the sovereign had given me no 

 misgivings; for during my stay in Berlin as minister, 

 eighteen years before, I had found him very courteous, he 

 being then the heir apparent ; but with the ceremonial part 

 it was otherwise, and to that I looked forward almost with 

 dismay. 



For, since my stay in Berlin, the legation had been raised 

 to an embassy. It had been justly thought by various 

 patriotic members of Congress that it was incompatible, 

 either with the dignity or the interests of so great a nation 

 as ours, to be represented simply by a minister plenipoten 

 tiary, who, when calling at the Foreign Office to transact 

 business, might be obliged to wait for hours, and even until 

 the next day, while representatives from much less impor 

 tant countries who ranked as ambassadors went in at once. 

 The change was good, but in making it Congress took no 

 thought of some things which ought to have been provided 

 for. Of these I shall speak later ; but as regards the pres 

 entation, the trying feature to me was that there was a 

 great difference between this and any ceremonial which I 

 had previously experienced, whether as commissioner at 

 Santo Domingo and Paris, or as minister at Berlin and St. 

 Petersburg. At the presentation of a minister plenipoten 

 tiary he goes in his own carriage to the palace at the time 

 appointed ; is ushered into the presence of the sovereign ; 

 delivers to him, with some simple speech, the autograph 

 letter from the President ; and then, after a kindly answer, 

 all is finished. But an ambassador does not escape so 

 easily. Under a fiction of international law he is regarded 

 as the direct representative of the sovereign power of 

 his country, and is treated in some sense as such. There 

 fore it was that, at the time appointed, a high personage 

 of the court, in full uniform, appeared at my hotel accom 

 panied by various other functionaries, with three court 

 carriages, attendants, and outriders, deputed to conduct 

 me to the palace. Having been escorted to the first of the 



