The only factors really feared by the Germans of the governing class are the Western front and the blockade. I went into Germany determined to try to find out the truth, and to tell the truth. I had an added incentive to be thorough and work on original lines, since I was fortunate enough to secure possession of an official letter which advised those whom it concerned to give no information of value to Americans in general. I also got accurate information that the Wilhelmstrasse had singled me out as one American in particular to whom nothing of value was to be imparted. The German, with his cast-in-a-mould mind, does not understand the trait developed among other peoples of seeing things for themselves. He is unacquainted with originality in human beings. He thinks a correspondent does not observe anything unless it is pointed out to him. Last summer, for example, one could learn in the Wilhelmstrasse that the potato crop was a glittering success. By walking through the country and pulling up an occasional plant, also talking to the farmers, I concluded that it was a dismal failure, which conclusion I announced in one of the first newspaper articles I wrote after I had left Germany. Recent reports from that country show that I was right, which increases my conviction that the _confidential tips_ given by Germany's professional experts, who instruct neutral visitors, do very well to make Germany's position seem better than it actually is, but they seldom stand the acid test of history. Seeking to invent excuses is not peculiar to the Germans, but it is more prevalent among them than among any other people that I know. In this one respect the German Government is a Government of the people. Some of the diplomatic explanations which have emanated from Berlin during the war have been weird in their absurdity and an insult to the intelligence of those to whom they were addressed. President Wilson did not accept the official lie concerning the sinking of the _Arabic_, in view of the positive proof against Germany, and Germany backed down. President Wilson did not accept the official lie concerning the sinking of the _Sussex_. Incomprehensible as it is to the Teutonic mind, he attached greater weight to the first-hand evidence of reliable eye-witnesses, plus fragments of the torpedo which struck the vessel, than to the sacred words of the German Foreign Office, which had the impertinence to base its case on a sketch, or alleged sketch, hastily made by a U-boat manipulator whose artistic temperament should have led him to Munich rather than to Kiel. The crime and the lie were so glaring that Germany once more backed down.