Throughout the reign Germany has made it her constant policy to cultivate friendly relations with the United States.  Chancellor von Buelow, in 1899, apropos of Samoa, said in the Reichstag:  “We can confidently say that in no other country has America during the last hundred years found better understanding and more just recognition than in Germany.”  This is true of the educated classes, professional, professorial, and scientific; but the ordinary European German, who does not know and understand America, still displays no particular love for the ordinary American.  At the same time he probably prefers him to the people of any other nation.  American outspokenness in politics, for example, must be refreshing to minds penned within the limits of the Rechtstaat.  He sees in them, too, millionaires, or at least people who come from a country where money is so abundant that, as many country-people still think, you have only to stoop to pick it up.  When it comes to business, however, he is a little afraid of their somewhat too sanguine enterprise, and is given to suspect that a “bluff” of some sort is behind the simplest business proposition.  Much of this, of course, is due to ignorance heightened by yellow journalism, for as a rule only the vastly interesting, but mostly untrue, “stories” regarding Germany printed in the yellow press come back to the Fatherland.

The German, again, is made uneasy by what he thinks the hasty manners of the Americans; he considers them uncivil.  So, let it be admitted, they sometimes appear to be to people of other nationalities; but then as a rule Americans who jar on European nerves will be found to hail from places where life, to use the American expression, is “woolly,” or too strenuous to allow of the delicacies of real refinement.  The ordinary idea of the German in Germany, held by the stay-at-home American, is a vague species of dislike, founded on the conviction that the American, not the German, is the salt of the earth; that the German regard for tradition makes them a slow and slowly moving race; and that the Emperor as War Lord—­for he is almost solely known to him in that capacity—­must be ever desirous of war, in particular wishes to seize a coaling-station or even a country, in South America, and, generally speaking, set at naught the Monroe doctrine.  The Governments on both sides, of course, know and understand each other better.  In November, 1906, Prince Buelow publicly thanked America for her attitude at Algeciras, implying that it was due to her representative’s conciliatory and reconciliatory conduct that the Conference did not end in a fiasco.  “This,” said the Chancellor, “was the second great service to the world rendered by America; the other,” he added, “being the bringing about of peace between Russia and Japan.”