BISMARCK-ARNIM CORRESPONDENCE.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4332, 6 February 1875, Page 2 (Supplement)

BISMARCK-ARNIM CORRESPONDENCE.

(From the A r eiu Yorh Herald , Nov. 12.) • We are in the gratifying position to lay before our readers the full text of the historical correspondence between Bulow and Arnim: BULOW TO AHNIM. Berlin, July C, 18(1. After your Excellency had returned, through the medium of Count Arnim Scblageuthin, altogether fourteen edicts and drafts, winch were taken from the archives of the Imperial Legation in Paris, the Imperial Ambassador, Prince Hohenlohe, presented a list (a copy of which is enclosed) of the official documents which, after a comparison of the numbers in the records of the Negation, were found to be missing'. It still appears tbat a considerable number of political edicts and reports of the years 1572-IS7I, and other communications relative to the business of that mission, were never entered on the records of the Negation, and are no longer to be found among the archives, d'ho statement of their contents has been completed, as far as possible, by reference to the register of tins office. the responsibility. It is self-evident that the responsibility for the absence of these documents rests, first of all, with the former chief of the Negation. I, therefore, demand from your Excellency an official explanation as to your knowledge of these missing documents, and that yon return forthwith to the Foreign Office those of the enclosed list which may still be in your possession. Por the Imperial .Chancellor. V. Bulow. To his Excellency the Royal Intimate Counsellor Count Von Arnim. arnim TO BULOW. Arnim’s lengthy and exhaustive answer, in which he declines to give the official explanation demanded by the Foreign Office, on the ground that he had no 1 longer the honor of holding official relations with the Chancellor, has already been published. bulow TO arnim. Berlin, August 5, 1871. The reply to my letter of July 6 which your Excellency kindly addressed, under date of the 21st, to the undersigned State Secretary as a private communication, could only be received and treated as an official document. The view expressed by your Excellency that your relations to the Foreign Office had entirely ceased is not in harmony with the law relating to imperial officials, whose applicability in this instance is self-evident, and has also been freely admitted by your Excellency. ARNTJt’s DUTY. Your Excellency was temporarily retired by the most high imperial order of May ID, and consequently obliged, under penalty of losing your “waiting salary,” to accept an imperial office which might be conferred upon you under the legal presumptions. Until these have been graciously transferred by the Imperial Government to another department, or until the most high authority ordains your dismissal from the Imperial service, your Excellency remains—what you were up to your retirement —an official of the Foreign Office, hence subjected to its official supervision and disciplinary power. Even if your Excellency had not chosen to accept the legal “waiting salary” incident to your retirement, or to claim it any longer, there would have been no change in your relations to the Foreign Office, except that by the most high order of the Foreign Office, the services of your Excellency had been temporarily dispensed with. OBEDIENCE NECESSARY. This view of the position of a retired official of the Empire has' been acknowledged in theory and practice since the publication of the law relating to Imperial officials and placed beyond doubt by the law itself—in fact, even by the paragraphs 81 to 118, quoted by your Excellency. Were your view the correct one, then section 110 would overthrow it, as an official of the Empire cannot he freed from his relations to an authority to whom he is subject in a disciplinary point of view. Your Excelleuy will, moreover, consider that sections 29 to 31 of the law in question explicitly recognise the retired officials as “ officials” in the ' most cllversiHecl reiations." ' THIS LAW neither recognises officials other than “ officials of the Empire,” nor does it recognise officials not subject to an authority responsible to -his Majesty the Emperor. When your Excellency hints that you are merely at the disposition of the Emperor, our most gracious master, without recognising an authority between, than an examination of the imperial constitution .as well as that of the Kingdom of Prussia will convince you that every official is, first of all, subordinate to the responsible Minister, respectively to the Chancellor of the realm. And the authority with which the retired official maintains these relations is and remains—until a most high order provides differently—the former authority'of the official. STILL ANOTHER DOSE. The Foreign Office regrets to be compelled to add another reason why your Excellency is legally prevented from considering your independence as not being restricted by your former subordinate relations.

Your Excellency (lid not consider it necessary, when you left the mission which had been confided to you, to transfer the archives to the temporary Charge d’Affaires, and to state, at the - same time, that they were delivered by you in tliht complete and orderly condition which duty prescribed. Hence your Excellency remained responsible to the Foreign Office for the completeness of the archives intrusted to you in the most high service according to the general principles of the law. Now that your Excellency, in consequence of the demand resulting from the first discovery of missing documents of importance, has delivered the then named papers, and also again returned a few of the missing drafts, and maintains that the political edicts Nos, 224, 239, 271, 281 of 1872, 90, 102, 103, 104 of 1873, 2,0, 14, 33, 68, 69, 74, 93, 193 of 1874 Aliß YOUR PROPERTY, being private letters, the Foreign Office is compelled to state that neither this assertion nor the other evoking the eventual decision of the civil courts can be reconciled with the respective laws. What belongs to the archives of an Imperial Legation will, in case of doubts arising, not be settled by the official to whom it was entrusted, but by that superior authority to which he was and remains responsible for his official conduct. Papers which, in official business and form, constitute the contents of a correspondence touching upon official relations and duties are not private but official documents, and hence belong to the archives. In the present case this demonstration can be the less impugned, as the papers Tjuotod above are numbered— i.e., officially marked—in their order of succession, both for the sender and receiver. BETTER AND BETTER, These considerations are so simple that the Foreign Office does not for the present enter into the motives asserted by your Excellency, and simply remarks that the chief of a foreign mission is pennitted, under certain circumstances, to secrete those papers, owing to their political or other significance, but that this right ceases with the end of his official term, and consetpiently that he is bound, on pain of being considered, guilty of a violation of bis duty, to deliver the entire archives to his representative or successor. If it can be proved from the register of the Foreign. Office, in regard to the Legation in Paris, and from the statements of the officials in question—what, however, has even partially been admitted by your Excellency—that the still missing papers wore either taken from the archives of the Legation or never placed among them, your Excellency will not deny, after mature deliberation, that your conduct in this matter is apt to necessitate ’not only a disciplinary but also a criminal proceeding. THE DISCIPLINARY' PROCEEDING. As far as an explanation by way of a civil suit is concerned, the provisions of the Prussian law which, according to section 19 of the law relating to officials of the Empire, are to be applied to the present case and to papers of courts and administrative authorities, exclude the recognition of the respective documents. On the other hand, the very appropriation or

abstraction of official papers from the archives of the Legation, such .as is presented in this case and still continued, requires the institution of the disciplinary proceeding, as provided by the law relating to officials of the Empire ; also against retired officials. Besides, according to the provisions of.the Prussian criminal code, page 345, an official is punishable who removes a document officially intrusted to him, and according to section 350, if he embezzles money or other things. Even if it should be questionable whether despatches and papers of a legation are documents in the technical meaning of the word (as the Royal Prussian Supremo Tribunal assumes) there can, nevertheless, be no doubt, in view of sections 133 and 27G of the Code, that everything confided to an official belongs to the class to which the punishment for embezzlement applies. A SEVERE FINALE. If then, the criminality of the removal of archives is established, your Excellency is responsible to the criminal and not to the civil law for the complete surrender of the papers in your possession. While the Foreign Office reserves to the Chancellor of the Empire the action required by the ease, it acknowledges the receipt from your Excellency of the above quoted drafts of your political reports from Paris, Nos. 131, 132, 133, of the year 1873. V. Bulow. State Secretary of the Foreign Office. To his Excellency the Royal Actual Intimate Councillor Count Yon Arnim. ARNIM TO BULOW. Nassertieide, August 11, 1874. I have the honor to receive upon my return tbo kind letter of your Excellency, dated August 5. I should leave it unanswered if I had not special reasons for avoiding all doubts as to my position in this case. Your Excellency has felt constrained to take my private letter as an official one, and so to treat it. HE CANNOT HELP IT. I cannot prevent your Excellency from,doing this. However, I have the honor to declare that my view of our mutual relations cannot be changed. I continue to maintain that the ForeiguOffioe is not my superior authority. The temporarily retired officials of the Empire are a class of persons wiio, iu view of their former functions and of those which may be imposed upon them, have rights and duties in regard to the Empire the extent of which is marked exactly by the law of March 31, 1873. FREE STATE CITIZENS. Beyond the line drawn by the law these persons are entirely free citizens of the State, which appears more especially from section 119. Your Excellency refers to it iu order to prove that my view is incorrect, but I am of the opinion that section 119 makes my relations with the Foreign Office appear as having completely ended, and that I have, more particularly, ceased to he subject to its disciplinary power. Section 119 declares that sections 84 to US apply also to temporarily retired officials of the Empire. Sections 72 to 73, however, do not apply to them. These are the - sole sections by which the superior authority is endowed with means for the manifestation of its disciplinary power. THE PRUSSIAN DISCIPLINARY LAW. The Prussian Disciplinary law places the official in a more disadvantageous position, and I believe that tire change which Iras taken place in the Imperial Officials law can ire traced back to the desire for protecting the official after his retirement from persecution prompted by political motives. Your Excellency seeks to prove the incorrectness of my view by the assertion that the. law does not recognise an official without his superior authority, and that the authority to which he still holds these relations is the one to which he was formally subject. , THIS DECLARATION contradicts the clear provisions of the law, and I scarcely need to point out how impossible it would be, for instance, to find a superior authority for the temporarily retired Chancellor of the Empire. According to the provisions of the law relating to Imperial officials, the disciplinary power over the temporarily retired officials has been transferred to tbe Disciplinary Chambers and tbe Disciplinary Court, and their decision can bo actively influenced by tbe superior authority of tile Empire, as well as in an exceptional case (section 85) by the authority named iu section 80. _ A relationship such as exists between the superior and subordinate is thereby not created between the beforenamed authority and the official. “NOT CORRECT.” This is not changed'by the circumstance that the Foreign Office believes to have claims upon me, arising out of the time when I was in active service. For even if I were a pensioned official, the Foreign Office would not lose its right to enforce its claims by the arm of the law. As far as the other legal views contained in the esteemed letter of the fifth of this month are concerned, I have only to declare that I do not consider them correct. However, I desist from any further polemics, as I have no interest in pi-eventing the institution of a disciplinary or a criminal proceeding, I avail myself of this opportunity, &c., &c., Arnim. His Excellency the State Secretary of the Foreign Office, Herr Yon Bulow. Berlin, Nov. 11, 1874. The Municipal Tribunal of this city requested the Provincial Court of Vienna to insist, by coercive measures, upon Herren Hauser and Lecher, editors of the Frcssc, giving evidence as to the source from which tbe Von Arnim despatches,’ published in that paper, were obtained, since the Austrian penal code sanctioned such a course iu important cases. The Vienna Court, however, declined to so act, observing that, “ although the matter was important to Prussia it was not to Austria.”