spoke
on the future "Freedom of the Seas." The reason for this attitude
of the Secretary of State, as appears in my reports reproduced
above, lay in the state of public opinion. It was unfortunately
impossible for the American Government to carry through the policy
they had adopted in respect to England so long as the _Lusitania_
question was brought forward daily in the American Press.

The negotiations should have been carried through orally and
confidentially between Mr. Lansing and myself. Unfortunately, however,
it was impossible to keep anything confidential in Washington,
particularly as, very much against my wishes, the conversations
were protracted for weeks. The state department was continually
besieged by journalists, who reported in their papers a medley
of truth and fiction about each of my visits. In this way they
provoked denials, and so ended by getting a good idea of how the
situation stood. In addition to this, authoritative persons in
Berlin gave interviews to American journalists, who reported to
the United States papers everything that they did not already know.
Consequently, the negotiations did not progress in the way Mr.
Lansing and I had expected. We wanted to arrive quickly at a formula
and make it known at once. Public opinion in both countries would
then have been set at rest, and the past would have been buried
so long as no fresh differences of opinion and conflict arose out
of the submarine war. The formula, however, was not so easy to
arrive at. The wording of the Memorandum which I was to present
to the American Government had to be repeatedly cabled to Berlin,
where each time some alteration was required in the text that Mr.
Lansing wanted.

The American Government held to the point of view which they had
formulated in the Note of the 21st July, as follows:

"...for a belligerent act of retaliation is _per se_ an act beyond
the law and the defense of an act as retaliatory is an admission
that it is illegal."

The standpoint of the American Note of the 21st July, 1915, shows
clearly the mistake of treating the submarine war as reprisals.
It shows how every surrender of a position compromises the next.

The German Government, on the other hand, refused under any
circumstances to admit the illegality of the submarine warfare within
the war-zone, because they regarded the right to make reprisals as
a recognized part of the existing international law. Further, the
American demand