surprised that the Kaiser blundered so badly. He, too, believed in the
schoolmaster view of Woodrow Wilson. A man who had refused such a
golden opportunity of annexing Mexico must be a timid, invertebrate
person, who had only to be bullied in order to do what he was told.
Moreover, was there not a great German population to serve as a whip
for the Presidential blank and see that he did not send the polite,
the gracious, the supple Prince von Buelow to Washington?

That courtly gentleman was dispatched to Italy to charm the Italian
Nation into quiescence. For the Americans he needed another style of
diplomacy, and he sent thither the stout and rather stupid Dernburg to
let President Wilson and the Americans know that Germany was a very
rough customer and would stand no nonsense from anybody.

It was a fatal blunder, the blunder of a people who had been so
blinded by materialism that they do not seem to have so much as the
consciousness that there is such a thing as moral strength on earth.
No one who had followed with intelligent understanding the career of
President Wilson could have doubted that he had to deal with a man of
iron, a man with a moral passion as fervid as that of his colleague
Bryan, but with that passion informed by wide knowledge and controlled
by a masterful will, a quiet, still man, who does not live with his
ear to the ground and his eye on the weathercock, who refuses to buy
popularity by infinite hand-shaking and robustous speech, but comes
out to action from a sanctuary of his own thoughts, where principle
and not expediency is his counselor.

It is because no man in a conspicuous position of the democratic world
today is so entirely governed by principle and by moral sanctions that
President Wilson is not merely the first citizen of the United States,
but the first citizen of the world.

_The Daily Chronicle says:_

President Wilson's note gives Germany every opportunity of saving her
face if she desires to do so. Not only is it phrased in the most
friendly terms, but it invites a submission of further evidence
regarding the Lusitania's alleged guns and even the resumption of
negotiations with Great Britain through American intermediacy. Here
are the vistas of a negotiation which might keep the diplomatists of
Berlin and Washington happily employed till the war is over; only the
President insists once more that the submarine outrages must stop
while the negotiations are in progress. It is th