little to choose, from the
moral point of view, between their "sailing under false flags,"
for the purpose of evading the British guardians of the sea, and
the hoisting of neutral ensigns by British ships to escape from
German submarines.

There can, at all events, be no question of a "German conspiracy"
in these cases of forged passports as I had officially announced on
behalf of the German Government, that under the circumstances no one
who remained in America would, on his arrival in Germany, be punished
for not answering the call to the Colors. I can repudiate in the
most express terms any personal responsibility for the activities
of the above-mentioned secret bureau in New York, although attempts
have been made to connect my name with it on the sole ground of a
letter, said to have been written to me by von Wedell before his
departure, which was, as a matter of fact, first made known to me
by its publication in the Press. It is true that this gentleman,
a New York barrister before the war, was a personal acquaintance of
mine; he had, however, immediately after the outbreak of hostilities,
hastened back to Germany to join his own regiment, and later returned
secretly to America, presumably under orders from his superiors,
only to disappear again with equal secrecy after a short stay. I
had never even heard the name of Rueroede before his arrest, but
in view of his denial that any personal profit accrued to him from
his services in providing his fellow-countrymen with documents for
the purpose of facilitating their escape from British vigilance,
I much regret the severity of the penalty inflicted on him.

If the cases of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and the falsification
of the passports damaged the German cause in America, this was
still more true of the acts of violence planned or carried out
by Germans or German-Americans against individuals known to be
hostile to our cause. The few authentic cases of this sort of thing
were, as every impartial person must recognize, engineered by a
few patriotic but foolish hotheads; the more sober and responsible
German elements in the United States were certainly no party to
them.

To the list of these outrages, the enemies of Germany deliberately
added others which probably had no foundation in fact. Thus, for
every accident which occurred in any American munition factory--and
many accidents were bound to happen in the new works which had
sprung up like mushrooms all over th