THE LICHNOWSKY DISCLOSURES.
[To THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR.")
Sur,—I have read the article in the Spectator on the Lichnowsky matter as well as several others. They one and all strike me as being written in ignorance of some important features of Ger- man social life. To talk of an ex-Ambassador's "formal degrada- tion" is nonsense. There is no such -thing. It is either disciplinary or criminal prosecution, as instanced by Bismarck's suit against Count Arnim, or there is no penal case. The real explanation of Lichnowsky's action is to be found in the cruel social ostracism which falls on a man in Germany who is identified with failure, whether- he be a Prince or an- Emperor, as we shall
yet live to see. After Bismarck's dismissal, his son, Herbert, was socially a dead man in Berlin. In fact, people crossed the street to avoid meeting him, as he himself frankly told me. Old Bis- marck fared for a time little better; nearly all his friends deserted him. In the case of so insignificant a personage as Prince Lichnowsky, this means being cat dead in nearly every drawing-room. It is difficult for us to realize the idea of a "Prince " being a social outcast. It is so foreign to our childlike conceptions of rank, though they are now apparently in the melting-pot. In Lichnowsky's case, I take it, his relatives, and notably his wife—only so recently " adored " in London society as "so charming " and " so clever "—found the situation intoler- able, and probably urged him to resent it, with the results we are now acquainted with. I met Lichnowsky repeatedly at Prince Bfilow's table some ten years ago, *here he excited so little interest that I do not remember him being once drawn into the conversa- tion during the whole evening. He held a minor post in the Foreign Office, where he was looked upon as a nonentity. But he was wealthy, and William apparently thought him thus good enough for our rank- and-wealth-worshipping Metropolis. Such an Envoy was only intended to act as "eyewash "—as "window- dressing," as they would say in the drapery line. The real dens ex machine was the fiery little Levantine, Kiihlmann, born in Constantinople—he who bluntly declared to one of his countrymen at the outbreak of the war that the invasion of Belgium had been decided upon in Berlin ten years previously. Verily this war is a cruel awakener to stern realities.—I am, Sir, &c., [We did not use the phrase " formal degradation." We simply repeated the statement made in the Reichstag to the effect that Prince Lichnowsky had had to resign his diplomatic rank, and we added that he had been publicly rebuked for his indiscretion.— En. Spectator.]
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