nt and to the American correspondents that
methods of submarine warfare would be altered and that ships would be
warned before they were torpedoed. But when the Navy heard that the
Foreign Office was inclined to listen to Mr. Wilson's protests it made
no attempt to conceal its opposition. Gottlieb von Jagow, the
Secretary of State, although he was an intimate friend of the Kaiser
and an officer in the German Army, was at heart a pacifist. Every time
an opportunity presented itself he tried to mobilise the peace forces
of the world to make peace. From time to time, the German financiers
and propaganda leaders in the United States, as well as influential
Germans in the neutral European countries, sent out peace "feelers."
Von Jagow realised that the sooner peace was made, the better it would
be for Germany and the easier it would be for the Foreign Office to
defeat the military party at home. He saw that the more victories the
army had and the more victories it could announce to the people the
more lustful the General Staff would be for a war of exhaustion. Army
leaders have always had more confidence in their ability to defeat the
world than the Foreign Office. The army looked at the map of Europe
and saw so many hundred thousand square miles of territory under
occupation. The Foreign Office saw Germany in its relation to the
world. Von Jagow knew that every new square mile of territory gained
was being paid for, not only by the cost of German blood, but by the
more terrible cost of public opinion and German influence abroad. But
Germany was under martial law and the Foreign Office had nothing to say
about military plans. The Foreign Office also had little to say about
naval warfare. The Navy was building submarines as fast as it could
and the number of ships lost encouraged the people to believe that the
more intensified the submarine war became, the quicker the war would
end in Germany's favour. So the Navy kept sinking ships and relying
upon the Foreign Office to make excuses and keep America out of the war.

The repeated violations of the pledges made by the Foreign Office to
the United States aroused American public opinion to white heat, and
justly so, because the people here did not understand that the real
submarine crisis was not between President Wilson and Berlin but
between Admiral von Tirpitz and Secretary von Jagow and their
followers. President Wilson was at the limit of his patience with
Ger