On the last day of May, Germany’s answer was received. The Imperial government declared that the _Lusitania_ had not been an unarmed merchantman but an auxiliary cruiser of the British navy. That she had had masked guns mounted on her lower deck, that she had Canadian troops among her passengers, and that in violation of American law she had been laden with high explosives which were the real cause of her destruction because they were set off by the detonation of the single torpedo that had been discharged by the submarine. To these allegations, unaccompanied by the slightest proof and contradicted by the testimony both of British and American eye-witnesses, the United States replied calmly and categorically. It was pointed out that if the German ambassador at Washington or the German consul at New York had complained to the Federal authorities before the _Lusitania_ sailed and either guns or troops had been found concealed on her, she would have been interned. The statement of Mr. Dudley Field Malone, collector of the Port of New York, that the _Lusitania_ was not armed, may be accepted as final. Gustav Stahl, the German reservist who signed an affidavit that he had seen guns on board her, later pleaded guilty to a charge of perjury and was sentenced to eighteen months in a Federal penitentiary. As for her cargo, every passenger train and steamer in this country is allowed to transport boxes of revolver and rifle cartridges--the only explosives carried on the _Lusitania_--because it is extremely difficult to set off any number of them together, either by heat or concussion. Dropping these points, Germany then pledged the safety of American ships in the war zone, if distinctly marked, and to facilitate American travel offered to permit the United States to hoist its flag on four belligerent passenger steamers. This, if accepted, would by implication have made Americans fair game anywhere else on the high seas, and was accordingly rejected in the strong American note of July 21. “The rights of neutrals in time of war,” declared President Wilson through the medium of Secretary Lansing, “are based upon principle, not upon expediency, and the principles are immutable. It is the duty and obligation of belligerents to find a way to adapt the new circumstances to them. “The events of the past two months have clearly indicated that it is possible and practicable to conduct such submarine operations as have characterized the activity of the Imperial German naval commanders within the so-called war-zone in substantial accord with the accepted practices of regulated warfare. The whole world has looked with interest and increasing satisfaction at the demonstration of that possibility by German naval commanders. It is manifestly possible, therefore, to lift the whole practice of submarine attack above the criticism which it has aroused and remove the chief causes of offense.”