"Fully conscious of its strength, the German Government has twice in the course of the past few months expressed itself before all the world as prepared to conclude a peace safeguarding the vital interests of Germany. In doing so, it gave expression to the fact that it was not its fault if peace was further withheld from the peoples of Europe. With a correspondingly greater claim of justification, the German Government may proclaim its unwillingness before mankind and history to undertake the responsibility, after twenty-one months of war, to allow the controversy that has arisen over the submarine question to take a turn which might seriously affect the maintenance of peace between these two nations. "The German Government guided by this idea notifies the Government of the United States _that instructions have been issued to German naval commanders that the precepts of the general international fundamental principles be observed as regards stopping, searching and destruction of merchant vessels within the war zone and that such vessels shall not be sunk without warning and without saving human life unless the ship attempts to escape or offers resistance_." At the beginning of the war it was a group of military leaders consisting of General von Moltke, General von Falkenhayn, General von Mackensen, General von Herringen, Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, and a few of the Prussian military clique, which prevailed upon the Kaiser to go to war after the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne and his wife. The Allies proclaimed in their publications, in the press and in Parliaments that they were fighting to destroy and overthrow the military party in Germany which could make war without public consent. Millions of Allied soldiers were mobilised and fighting in almost a complete ring surrounding Germany, Austria Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. They had been fighting since August, 1914, for twenty-one months, and still their fighting had not shattered or weakened the hold which the military party had upon the people and the Kaiser. Von Tirpitz and von Falkenhayn, who, shortly after the war began, became the ringleaders of Germany's organised Might, had fallen not _before the armed foes on the battlefield but before an unarmed nation with a president whose only weapon was public opinion_. First, von Tirpitz fell because he was ready to defy the United States. Then came the downfall of von Falkenhayn, because he was prepared to damn the United States and all neutrals. Surely a nation and a government after thirteen months of patience and hope had a right to believe that after all public opinion was a weapon which was sometimes more effective than any other. Mr. Wilson and the State Department were justified in feeling that their policy toward Germany was after all successful not alone because it had solved the vexing submarine issue, but because it had aided the forces of democracy in Germany. Because, with the