Part 34

Herr von Stumm, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, replying to a question as to who was responsible for Prince Lichnowsky's appointment in London, said that the appointment was made by the Kaiser, in agreement with the responsible Imperial Chancellor. While in London the Prince had devoted himself zealously to his task. His views, it was true, had frequently not agreed with those of the German Foreign Office. That was especially the case regarding his strong optimism in reference to German-English relations. When his hopes aiming at a German-English understanding were destroyed by the war, the Prince returned to Germany greatly excited, and even then did not restrain his criticism of Germany's policy.

Herr von Stumm continued:

"His excitement increased owing to attacks against him in the German press. All these circumstances must be taken into consideration when gauging the value of his memorandum. It was unjustifiable to draw conclusions from it regarding the Ambassador's activity in London and blame the Government for it. Regarding the German White Book, the Under Secretary admitted that it was not very voluminous, but it had to be compiled quickly, so as to present to the Reichstag at the opening a clear picture of the question of guilt. The Blue Books of other States, it was true, were much more voluminous. The German White Book, however, differed from them in so far to its advantage as it contained no falsification. A new edition of the German White Book is in preparation."

Dr. Payer then discussed the revelations of Dr. Mühlon, at present in Switzerland. Dr. Mühlon, an ex-Director of Krupps, had made a statement according to which he had a conference with two exalted personages in the latter half of July, 1914, from which it appeared that it was not the intention of the German Government to maintain peace. The Vice Chancellor alleged that Dr. Mühlon was suffering from neurasthenia at the time, and that no importance could be attached to his revelations, since the two gentlemen referred to had denied making the statements attributed to them.

In the subsequent discussion disapproval of Prince Lichnowsky's attitude was expressed, but some speakers urged the need for the reorganization of Germany's diplomatic service.

According to the report of the debate published by the Neues Wiener Journal, Herr von Payer himself acknowledged that prior to the war German diplomacy had made some bad blunders, and that reform was urgently needed. Herr Müller (Progressive) sharply criticised Herr von Flotow, who was German Ambassador in Rome at the beginning of the war, and charged him with having declared to the Marquis di San Giuliano, then Italian Foreign Minister, that there existed for Italy no casus foederis. Prince Bülow also came in for severe criticism.

A bill indicting Prince Lichnowsky for treason has been introduced into the Reichstag and is still pending at this writing. A dispatch from Geneva on April 21 stated that he was virtually a prisoner in his château in Silesia. According to the Düsseldorfer Tageblatt the Prince was under police surveillance because of the discovery of a plan for his escape to Switzerland.

Comments of German Publicists

Immediately following the sending out by the semi-official Wolff Telegraph Bureau on March 19 of an account of the discussion in the Main Committee of the Reichstag on March 16 of the Lichnowsky memorandum, together with excerpts from that document, the editorial writers of the German newspapers began emptying vials of wrath upon the head of the former Ambassador in London. With the exception of the Socialist and a few Liberal newspapers, the press was practically a unit in condemning the Prince for his "treasonable and indiscreet acts" and in asserting that, although his "revelations" might be welcomed with shouts of joy in the allied countries, they would have no serious effect upon the fighting spirit of the German Nation.

In trying to explain what prompted Prince Lichnowsky to write his memorandum for "the family archives," nearly all the German editors lay great stress upon his alleged personal vanity and his resentment at seeing his efforts toward strengthening the bonds between England and Germany made a grim joke by the outbreak of the world war. The Prince is also called a simple-minded person, completely taken in by the deceptive courtesy of the British diplomats and possessing none of the qualifications necessary to make him a profitable representative of the Kaiser at the Court of St. James's. All through the comments, from extreme Pan-German to socialistic, runs a vein of sarcastic criticism of the peculiar "ability" shown by the German Foreign Office in picking its Ambassadors.

All the Pan-German and annexationist papers take occasion to link up Prince Lichnowsky with Dr. von Bethmann Hollweg, the former Imperial Chancellor, and make the latter responsible for the appointment of the "pacifist" Prince. In doing this they renew all their old charges of weakness and pacifism against the ex-Chancellor, and intimate that he may be the next German formerly occupying a high place in the Government to write memoranda for his family archives. Some of the papers did not wait to write regular editorials about the memorandum, but interlarded their reports of the meeting of the Reichstag Committee with sarcastic comment and explanations. This was notably the case with the Vossische Zeitung, the leading exponent of reconciliation with Russia at the expense of Great Britain.

REVENTLOW FURIOUS

Although it has since been cabled that the Imperial Government was considering taking action against Prince Lichnowsky, and that Captain Beerfelde, a member of the German General Staff, was under arrest for having aided in the distribution of manifolded copies of the memorandum, there was no general demand in the German press for the trial of the Prince on a charge of high treason. The exceptions were a few extreme Pan-German organs, led by Count zu Reventlow's Deutsche Tageszeitung. On the other hand, a few of the Socialist and Liberal papers cautiously remarked that, after all, although what the Prince said about the responsibility for the war was altogether too pro-Entente, it might help the movement in Germany for a negotiated peace.

Count zu Reventlow's article in the Deutsche Tageszeitung read, in part, as follows:

"When a former Ambassador, and an experienced diplomat and official besides, writes an article and gives it to some one else in these times, there is, in our opinion, no excuse. It is a case of high treason and it makes little difference if here one might perhaps admit the view of its being high treason through negligence, because certainly no former diplomat and official ought to allow himself to be so negligent, and furthermore he must have known the great danger of his action, which, as has been said, was exclusively meant to be to his personal interest. Therefore, we cannot very well understand for what reasons the proper steps have not been taken already against Prince Lichnowsky. We use the characterization 'high treason' after due deliberation.

"Prince Lichnowsky should not have allowed a single piece of his article to have left his hands, for he was very well able to judge that its publication outside of the German Empire was bound to have the effect of a treasonable act. The German cause will not be made any worse because a former diplomat, completely enchanted by English ways and never in touch with the essence of the English policy, places himself on the side of the enemies of the German Empire."

The Kölnische Volkszeitung, the organ of the annexationist faction of the Centre Party, concluded its editorial thus:

"One thing must be emphasized, Liebknecht, Dittmann, and other traitors have been jailed because of their high treason. Lichnowsky wanted to show to the whole world with his memorandum that Germany had sought, wanted, and begun the war because some persons did not wish to have him, Prince Lichnowsky, enjoy the success of the Anglo-German friendship. And, in so doing, Lichnowsky furnished our enemies with weapons, worked to our enemies' advantage. In time of war this is treason. The excuse that the fourteen copies that he had prepared were only written for his friends is ridiculous. Theodore Wolff of the Berliner Tageblatt is known to be one of Lichnowsky's most intimate friends. Who knows who the others may be! If a Social Democrat or an anarchist writes an inciting pamphlet in the form of a memorandum and doesn't distribute it himself, but has his friends do it, is he then exempt from punishment? If a person commits high treason and does not circulate the document himself, but lets others do it, or at least does not take precautions to see that it is not distributed, does he go free? The German people will hardly understand the decision of the Imperial Department of Justice as just rendered in favor of Lichnowsky. Even at the last session of the Prussian House of Lords Prince Lichnowsky sat beside his friend Dernberg. Will he appear in the House of Lords again?"

GERMANIA WAXED SARCASTIC

Germania, speaking for the so-called moderate section of the Centre Party, called the Lichnowsky case "one of the most disturbing political events that we have experienced in the course of the war," and hoped that the courts would still have a chance to decide as to the Prince's guilt. The newspaper comment was in general spiced with much sarcastic comparison of the Lichnowsky case with the cases of Dr. Karl Liebknecht and Deputy Wilhelm Dittmann, and many remarks were passed regarding the difference between the treatment accorded to a member of the Prussian nobility and that suffered by commoners and representatives of the German working class. The Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, in ending its comment as to the paeans of joy with which the enemy press would be sure to welcome the publication of the Lichnowsky indictment, added the following item of news:

"We learn on good authority, in the matter of the distribution of the Lichnowsky pamphlet, that in the beginning of February the police succeeded in seizing 2,000 copies of this pamphlet which the Neues Vaterland Society had had sent to it from South Germany through its business manager, Else Bruck. She, together with Henke, a bookseller, was placed under charges, but was acquitted by the court-martial, presumably because the court was not able to foresee the far-reaching result of the document."

Under the heading "The Blind Argus" the Bremer Nachrichten opined that the man who should have been using a thousand eyes in London in the interest of Germany was blind, and it referred to the Lichnowsky case as "the most gloomy chapter in the history of German diplomacy."

PAN-GERMANS CAUSTIC

Prince Lichnowsky's aversion to the old Triple Alliance drew much caustic criticism, especially from the Pan-German press, and excerpts from the semi-official Vienna Fremdenblatt and other Austrian papers, indignantly repudiating the Prince's charge that the Dual Monarchy had always regarded Germany as a shield under which it could make raids upon the Near East and otherwise stir up trouble, were eagerly reprinted in Germany.

The Berlin Vorwärts, speaking for the pro-Government Socialists, said:

"The Ambassador returned with the feeling of a man who had seen his life work knocked to pieces. No doubt he felt at that time not very different from us German Socialists who had also worked for reconciliation with France and England and now, in the face of the unchained elemental forces, had to recognize our impotence with gnashing of teeth. In Germany, Prince Lichnowsky, who had believed in the possibility of agreement as every toiler must believe in his work, was greeted with the scorn of the Pan-Germans, who asserted that he had allowed himself to be softsoaped by the English and had never recognized their real intentions. * * *

"And who can deny that this pamphlet casts a deep shadow upon the German foreign policy before the war? They can say that everything that Lichnowsky writes is the result of a diseased imagination and that all is distorted and badly drawn. But this would merely mean that the most important Ambassadorial post that Germany had at her disposal was occupied by a fool and a blockhead. So, if one wishes to spare the German policy this compromising implication, the only thing to do is to take the memorandum and its author seriously and argue the points with him in an expert manner."

The Vorwärts concluded its comment by saying that, no matter how the war started, the German people were now determined to see that Germany was not defeated, but if Prince Lichnowsky's article would help the people of Germany to adopt a more conciliatory attitude toward England and thus hasten a negotiated peace, it was worth reading. Comment of other Socialist papers was along the same lines.

Comment of an English Editor

_Valentine Chirol, former foreign editor of The London Times, published the following in that newspaper on March 26, 1918:_

The publication of Prince Lichnowsky's memorandum furnishes evidence which even the most skeptical Englishman can hardly question of the peculiar system of dualism practiced by the German Foreign Office in the conduct of its diplomacy abroad. To those who had opportunities of observing its methods at close quarters this is no new revelation. The German Foreign Office has almost invariably conducted its diplomatic work abroad through two or more different channels, for it was always too tortuous and complicated to be intrusted to any single agent. There was the public policy directed toward more or less avowable ends to be propounded in official dispatches and conversations, and there was "the higher policy" to be promoted by means of discreet propaganda in the press and in society, and especially by appropriate appeals to the prejudices or interests of political and financial and commercial circles. Hence in the more important posts abroad it was the habit of the Wilhelmstrasse to rely mainly upon the Councilor of Embassy both to check the proceedings of the Ambassador and to manipulate all the complicated threads of its diplomatic network in which, for various reasons, it was deemed inexpedient for the Ambassador to get himself entangled, sometimes lest inconvenient disclosures might impair his influence with the Government to which he was accredited, and sometimes--as in the case of Prince Lichnowsky in London, and of the late Prince Radolin in Paris--because the Ambassador's personal sense of honor or his belief in the superiority of honorable statesmanship recoiled from the duplicity of "the higher policy." * * *

I gained an insight into this complex machinery when I went to Berlin as correspondent of The Times, in the early years of the present Emperor's reign, through Baron Holstein, who was then known as the "eminence Grise" of the German Foreign Office from the commanding influence he wielded without the slightest ostentation of power. Owing to accidental circumstances, I came into much closer intimacy with him than he was wont to allow, not merely to journalists, but even to the chief foreign diplomatists in Berlin; and, subject to occasional intermittences when he resented somewhat ferociously my expositions of German policy, I maintained friendly relations with him long after I had ceased to reside in Berlin and he had himself outlived the Emperor's favor, for which he lacked the courtier's obsequiousness. He had been bred in the Bismarckian tradition; he had been a member of the old Chancellor's staff throughout the Franco-Prussian war, and had acted as his confidential agent when he was Councilor of Embassy in Paris under Count Harry von Arnim, whose sensational downfall he helped to bring about at Bismarck's behest. Although in other respects a man of great integrity and with many admirable qualities, including, besides a certain rather cynical frankness, a thoroughly un-Prussian contempt for the gewgaws of official life, he was so saturated with the Wilhelmstrasse tradition that he was rather proud than otherwise of the unsavory part he had played toward his Paris chief, and had, therefore, the less hesitation in disclosing to me, when he thought it served his purpose, the existence of equally peculiar relations between Count Wolf-Metternich, then Councilor of Embassy in London, and the then Ambassador, Count Hatzfeld.

In the face of such a confession as Prince Lichnowsky's, it would be amusing, were it not so pitiful, to see the same British politicians who were so egregiously duped by Germany's "secret" diplomacy before the war still venting their chagrin in the House of Commons, not on their German "friends," by whom they were constantly fooled, and are apparently quite prepared to be fooled again tomorrow, but upon the British Foreign Office, whose timely appreciation of the German menace they invariably derided and whose endeavors to forearm the country against it they did their utmost to defeat.

Dr. Liebknecht's Indictment of Germany

A copy has been received of an open letter by Dr. Karl Liebknecht, the German Socialist, which proved an important factor in his imprisonment--which still continues. It bears date May 3, 1916, and was addressed to the Berlin District Court-Martial. The German authorities suppressed it, and made it a criminal offense for any one to be found in possession of it.

After stating his view of the war as a struggle of the masses against the classes throughout the world, Dr. Liebknecht wrote:

"The German Government is in its very social and political being an instrument for the exploitation and suppression of the laboring masses. It serves at home and abroad the interests of Junkerdom, capitalism, and militarism. It is the reckless representative of world political expansion, the strongest driver of competition in armaments, and therewith one of the weightiest exponents in the creation of the causes for the present war. It plotted this war in conjunction with the Austrian Government, and so burdened itself with the chief responsibility for its outbreak. It arranged this war while misleading the masses of the people and even the Reichstag.

"Compare, for instance, the keeping silent about the ultimatum to Belgium, the making up of the German White Book, the alteration of the Czar's telegram of July 29, 1914, &c. It seeks to maintain the war feeling in the nation by the most blameworthy means. It carries on the war by methods which, even regarded from the hitherto customary level, are monstrous. Such, for instance, are the invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg, poison gases, the Zeppelins, which are designed to destroy everything living, combatant or noncombatant, in a wide circle below them; the submarine trade war; the torpedoing of the Lusitania; the system of hostages and contributions, especially in the beginning, in Belgium; the systematic trapping of Ukrainian, Polish, Irish, Mohammedan, and other war prisoners in German prison camps for purposes of a traitorous war service and traitorous espionage in the interests of the Central Powers; the treaty of Under Secretary Zimmermann with Sir Roger Casement of December, 1914, as to the formation, equipment, and training of British soldiers from among the prisoners to form an Irish brigade in the German prison camps; the attempts to use civilian subjects of hostile States who were in Germany, by threatening them with forced internment, for war services of a treacherous character against their country; the dictum necessity knows no law, &c.

"The German Government has tremendously increased the want of political rights and the exploitation of the masses of the people by the conditions it imposed under a state of siege. It refuses all serious political and social reforms, while by phrases about the supposed equality of all parties, about the supposed reform of political and social treatment, about the supposed 'neuorientierung,' &c., it tries to maintain its hold on the masses of the people for the purposes of its imperialistic war policy. Because of its regard for the agragrians and the capitalists it has entirely failed in the economic provisioning of the population during the war, and it has prepared the road for making usury out of the people and their very needs. Today still it holds fast to its war objects of conquest, and therewith forms the chief hindrance to immediate peace negotiations on the ground of no annexations and no force of any kind. By the maintenance of the illegal state of siege, censorship, and so on, it smothers public knowledge of uncomfortable facts and criticism of its methods.

"The present war is not a war for the defense of the national inviolability or for the liberty of small nations. From the standpoint of the proletariat it signifies only the most extreme concentration and increase of the political suppression, their economic draining, and militaristic slaughter of the life of the working classes for capitalistic and absolutist advantage. To this there is only one answer of the laboring classes of all countries, namely, a sharpened international class fight against the capitalistic Governments and dominating classes of all countries, for the removal of every form of suppression and exploitation, and for ending the war by a peace in the Socialistic sense. As a Socialist I am on principle an opponent of this war, as of the existing military system. The fight against militarism is a life question for the working classes. The war demands that the anti-militarism struggle shall be carried on with redoubled energy."

Why the German Strike Failed

The attempt of the German workingmen last Winter to force a genuine peace movement by means of a general strike was promptly suppressed by the Government, which proclaimed a state of siege and threatened to force the strikers into military service. The underlying causes of this failure were explained in an instructive article in the Arbeiter Zeitung, the leading Austrian labor organ, from which the following is taken:

The most important reason is undoubtedly the lack of unity among the German working classes. Even in Berlin the strike was not general; in many factories only part of the men went out, while the rest continued their work. In many cities, such as Munich, the workmen divided according to party; the Independent Socialists struck, members of the old party went on with their work. The most important industrial districts were only slightly affected. On the Rhine, in Westphalia, in Upper Silesia, even in Saxony, where lie the chief fortresses of independent socialism, only a small section struck. And even where they struck there was no kind of uniform action; in many towns, like Nürnberg, for instance, only a demonstrative strike of limited duration was decided upon, while elsewhere the intention was to hold out until the demands were obtained. In Berlin the pressmen struck, but not the compositors; one newspaper could appear, another not.