The facts which gave rise to the Note are of the simplest. On the 30th of January two German submarines appeared off Liverpool, and, giving the crews ten minutes to take to the boats, torpedoed and sank some British merchant vessels. On the 6th of February the _Lusitania_, coming up the Irish Channel at the end of her voyage from New York, hoisted the Stars and Stripes and came safely to harbour. To these simple facts are to be added, according to the German version, that the Admiralty advised the master by wireless to hoist the American flag; or had issued a secret order to merchant ships in general to hoist a neutral flag in the circumstances. Whether these facts are accurate or not is absolutely immaterial; but the Germans have based on them the charge of violation of international law. It should be noted with surprised wonder that the German Admiralty seems to have forgotten that the _Emden_ sailed into Penang harbour flying the Japanese ensign, and that this, added to her other disguises, enabled her to accomplish her raid successfully.[10] The United States Government, having been appealed to by Germany, addressed a Note to Great Britain, to the great jubilation of her adversary; for she had just planned the infamy of her new piracy, and the smart of the thrashing administered to herself was somewhat mitigated by the fact that the other boy got a ‘wigging’ too. The position of the United States is so delicate, her diplomatic officers have achieved so much, her people have done and said so many things that have gone to our hearts, that it is impossible to be querulous at the presentation of the Note; yet, when it is analysed, it seems to go far beyond what was necessary to the occasion, and it has enabled Germany to confuse, in her usual clumsy fashion, the _post_ and the _propter_ in the sequence of events. The Government of the United States reserved for future consideration the legality and propriety of the deceptive use of the flag of a neutral Power in any case for the purpose of avoiding capture; but pointed out that the occasional use of the flag of a neutral or of an enemy under stress of immediate pursuit, and to deceive an approaching enemy, was a very different thing from the explicit sanction by a belligerent Government for its merchant ships generally to fly the flag of a neutral Power within certain portions of the high seas which, it is presumed, will be frequented with hostile warships. A formal declaration of such a policy for the general misuse of a neutral’s flag jeopardises the vessels of a neutral visiting those waters in a peculiar degree by raising the presumption that they are of belligerent nationality, regardless of the flag they may carry.