At the beginning of the war most of the public opinion in Switzerland was strongly in favour of Germany. That this was only partly due to natural racial tendencies (for seven out of every ten Swiss are of German origin and speak or read the German language) is obvious from the way in which, after about six months of the war, a large proportion of the German-Swiss majority began to lose their pro-German proclivities and to come round to the side of the Allies. Naturally we all wish to have the neutral nations on our side, not only because it is our side, but for the higher reason that we believe it to be the side of right. But besides this there were and are particularly strong economic military reasons which made it desirable for us to secure the support, or at least the really benevolent neutrality, of the Swiss. While any considerable part of them, especially before Italy joined the alliance, were for the Germans and against us, secret contraband was bound to run riot, with disastrous consequences for our projected blockade of German war-material. And that is exactly what happened, chiefly owing to our policy with regard to the Press. At the beginning of the war, Switzerland, like America, could only form her views of the rights and wrongs of the conflict and the course which it was pursuing, from the newspapers. In German-Switzerland numbers of the newspapers are financed by German money and even written by German writers. Quite naturally the readers of these papers believed what they told them. In other words, they were convinced that the atrocities in Belgium were either imaginary or grossly exaggerated, that Germany would at the end of the war make good her promise to make up to Belgium for the violation of her neutrality, and that meanwhile she was winning all along the line.