h Baal.

Independence Day without Independence! The liberty of the seas denied
us for the peaceful Commerce of our entire land and granted us only for
the murderous trafficking of a few men!

Independence Day has dawned for us in alien yet friendly land. It has
brought to us at least the independence of our minds.

Free from the abominations of the most dastardly campaign of falsehood
that ever disgraced those who began and those who believe it, we have
stripped ourselves of the rags of many perilous illusions. We see
America as a whole, and we see it with a fatal and terrible clarity.

We see that once again our liberties of thought, of speech, of
intercourse, of trade, are threatened, nay, already seized by the one
ancient enemy that can never be our friend.

With humiliation we behold our principles, our sense of justice trodden
underfoot. We see the wild straining of the felon arms that would drag
our land into the abyss of the giant Conspiracy and Crime.

We see the foul alliance of gold, murderous iron and debauched paper to
which we have been sold.

We know that our pretenses and ambitions as heralds of peace are
monstrous, so long as we profit through war and human agony.

We see these rivers of blood that have their source in our mills of
slaughter.

The Day of Independence has dawned.

It is a solemn and momentous hour for America,

It is a day on which our people must speak with clear and inexorable
voice, or sit silent in shame.

It is the great hour in which we dare not celebrate our first
Declaration of Independence, because the time has come when we must
proclaim a new one over the corpse of that which has perished.

Berlin, July 4th, 1915.

AN ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA DOCUMENT

* * * * * * * *

The League of Truth, however, was but one branch of the intricate
propaganda system. While it was financed almost entirely by
German-Americans living in Germany who retained their American
passports to keep themselves, or their children, out of the army, all
publications for this bureau were approved by the Foreign Office
censors. Germans, connected with the organisation, were under
direction of the General Staff or Navy.

In order to have the propaganda really successful some seeds of
discontent had to be sown in the United States, in South America and
Mexico as well as in Spain and other European neutral countries. For
this outside propaganda, money a