1.  To remain in Germany for the duration of the war, unless given special permission to leave by the German authorities.

2.  To guarantee that dispatches would be published in the United States precisely as sent from Germany, that is to say, as edited and passed by the military censorship.

3.  To supply their own headlines for their dispatches, and to guarantee that these, and none others, would be printed.

After labouring in vain to instruct Major Nicolai that with the best of intentions on the part of the correspondents it was beyond their power to say in exactly what form the Omaha Bee or the New Orleans Picayune would publish their “copy,” they affixed their signatures to the weird document laid before them.  It was signed, without exception, by all the important correspondents permanently stationed in Berlin.  Two or three who did not desire to hand over the control of their personal movements to the German Government for an unlimited number of years did not “take the pledge,” with the result that they were not invited to join the personally conducted junkets to the fronts which were subsequently organised.

Nothing that has happened in Germany during the war illustrates so well the vassalage to which neutral correspondents have been reduced as the humiliating pledges extorted from them by the German Government as the price of their remaining in Berlin for the practice of their profession.

It was undoubtedly this episode which inspired the American Ambassador, Mr. Gerard, to tell the American correspondents last summer that they would do well to obtain their freedom from the German censorship before invoking the Embassy’s good offices to break down the alleged interference with their dispatches by the British censorship.  When the Germans learned of the rebuff which Mr. Gerard had administered to his journalistic compatriots, the Berlin Press launched one of those violent attacks against the Ambassador to which he has constantly been subject in Germany during the war.

As I have shown in a previous chapter the German Government attaches so much importance to the control and manufacture of public opinion through the Press that it is drastic in the regulation of German newspapers.  It is therefore comprehensible that it should strive to enlist to the fullest possible extent the Press of other countries.  At least one paper in practically every neutral country is directly subsidised by the German Foreign Office, which does not, however, stop at this.  The attempt to seduce the newspapers of other nations into interpreting the Fatherland as the Wilhelmstrasse wishes it to be interpreted leads the investigators to a subterranean labyrinth of schemes which would fill a volume.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914.  Long before that Dr. Hammann, head of the Nachrichtendienst of the German Foreign Office, had organised a plan for the successful influencing of the Press of the world.  In May, 1914, the work of a special bureau under his direction and presided over by a woman of international reputation was in full operation.