ed that a man of your position and intelligence can
find it in his heart to defend an act which has for ever stained the
fair name and honour of your country.

I read with amazement your assertions that the _Lusitania_ was armed,
that she carried ammunition in defiance of American laws, and that our
official inspection of her was careless. Your own Government has itself
abandoned the false charge that the _Lusitania_ carried guns, and no
longer makes such a ridiculous claim; while the German reservist who
pretended to have seen the gun has admitted that he lied and is now
serving a term in prison for perjury. You are not familiar with American
shipping-laws which expressly permit the carrying of certain types of
ammunition on passenger vessels, and you are, of course, quite ignorant
as to what inspection of the vessel was made in New York, for you were
in Germany at the time. Your assertions were made wholly on the basis of
the false statements furnished you in Government-controlled papers. You
had no means of determining the truth or falsity of the statements, on
the basis of reliable and impartial evidence; yet you did not hesitate
to make assertions which your own Government now practically admits were
not well founded. The fact that the learned men of Germany have
throughout the war violently supported the German position by reckless
charges and wild assertions, paying no regard to the necessity of basing
such charges and assertions on impartial evidence, instead of accepting
with child-like simplicity the unsupported statements of the German
Government, has destroyed the confidence of Americans in the ability of
the German educated men to think and reason fairly and honestly about
the war.

The manifestos of the German professors, issued to Americans, did much
to alienate American sympathy from Germany; for the bitterness and
unreasoning fury of the documents, combined with the entire absence of
evidence to support the many reckless statements made in them, did much
to convince Americans that the German position was not capable of
honest, logical, dispassionate, manly defence. There has never at any
time been any such outbreak of fury and bitterness among the English or
French people. While there are individual exceptions, taken as a whole
the press, pamphlets, and private letters of the English and French,
dealing with the war, have from the first been characterised by a
self-control and calm determination, which