owever, hard at work taking the propaganda which it had so
successfully crammed down the throats of the German citizen and
translating it into English to be crammed down the throats of the
people in America. This was simply one of the Wilhelmstrasse's
numerous mistakes in the psychological analysis of other people.
But the Wilhelmstrasse possesses the two estimable qualities of
perseverance and willingness to learn, with the result that its
recent propaganda in the United States has been much more subtle
and very much more effective.

The American newspapers which reached Germany after the outbreak of
war gave that country its first intimation that her rush through
Belgium was decidedly unpopular on the other side of the Atlantic.
Furthermore, many American newspapers depicted the Kaiser and the
Crown Prince in a light quite new to German readers, who with their
heads full of Divine Right ideas considered the slightest
caricature of their imperial family as brutally sacrilegious.

But the vast majority of Germans never saw an American newspaper.
How is it, then, that they began to hate the United States so
intensely? The answer is simple. In the early winter of 1914-15,
the German Government with its centralised control of public
opinion turned on the current of hatred against everything American
as it had already done against everything British, for the war had
come to a temporary stalemate on both fronts, and the
Wilhelmstrasse had to excuse their failure to win the short, sharp
pleasant war into which the people had jumped with anticipation of
easy victory. "If it were not for American ammunition the war
would have been finished long ago!" became the key-note of the new
gospel of hate, a gospel which has been preached down to the
present.

Just before I left Germany the "Reklam Book Company" of Leipzig
issued an anti-American circular which flooded the country. The
request that people should enclose it in all their private letters
was slavishly followed with the same zest with which the Germans
had previously attached _Gott strafe England_ stickers to their
correspondence.

The circular represented a 7000-ton steamer ready to take on board
the cargo of ammunition which was arranged neatly on the pier in
the foreground. The background was occupied by German troops,
black lines dividing them into three parts, tagged
respectively--30,000 _killed_, 40,000 _slightly wounded_, 40,000
_seriously wounded_. This