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.

Germany lied about the Dutch liner Tubantia.  As in the case of the Sussex, the evidence of the fragments of torpedo was so incontrovertible that Berlin had to admit that a German torpedo sank the Tubantia.  Indeed, one fragment contained the number of the torpedo.  During my travels in the Fatherland at that time I found no doubt in the minds of those with whom I discussed the matter that a German submarine sank the vessel, though many were of the opinion that it was a mistake.

The Wilhelmstrasse is tenacious, however, and we awoke one morning to read, what was probably its most remarkable excuse.  To be sure, a German torpedo sank the Tubantia, but it was not fired by the Germans.  The expert accountant who was in charge of the U-boat learned upon consulting his books that he fired that torpedo on March 6.  It did not strike the Tubantia until March 16.  So that it had either been floating about aimlessly and had encountered the liner, or perhaps the cunning British had corraled it and made use of it.  At any rate, Berlin disclaimed all responsibility for its acts subsequent to the day it parted company with the German submarine.