some international notoriety eight years ago by interviewing the Kaiser.  That interview was so full of blazing political indiscretions that the German Government suppressed it at great cost by buying up the entire issue of the New York magazine in which the explosion was about to take place.  Enough of the contents of the interview subsequently leaked out to indicate that its main feature was the German Emperor’s insane animosity to Great Britain and Japan and his determination to go to war with them.

Dr. Hale also enjoyed the prestige of having once been an intimate of President Wilson.  He had written the latter’s biography, and later represented him in Mexico as a special emissary.  Shortly before the war he married a New York German woman, who is, I believe, a sister or near relative of Herr Muschenheim, the owner of the Hotel Astor, which in 1914 and 1915 was inhabited by the German propaganda bureau, or one of the many bureaus maintained in New York City.  From the date of his German matrimonial alliance Dr. Hale became an ardent protagonist of Kultur.  One of his last activities before going to Germany was to edit a huge “yellow book” which summarised “Great Britain’s violations of international law” and the acrimonious correspondence on contraband and shipping controversies between the British and American Governments.  This publication was financed by the German publicity organisation and widely circulated in the United States and all neutral countries.

Dr. Hale, a tall, dark, keen-looking, smooth-shaven, and smooth-spoken American, received in Berlin on his arrival a welcome customarily extended only to a new-coming foreign Ambassador.  He came, of course, provided with the warmest credentials Count Bernstorff could supply.  Long before Hale had a chance to present himself at the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office presented itself to him, an emissary from the Imperial Chancellor having, according to the story current in Berlin, left his compliments at Dr. Hale’s hotel.  He had not been in Berlin many days before an interview with Bethmann-Hollweg was handed to him on a silver plate.  Forthwith the New York American began to be deluged with the journalistic sweetmeats—­Ministerial interviews, Departmental statements, and exclusive news tit-bits—­with which Karl Heinrich von Wiegand had so long and alone been distinguishing himself.

I have told in detail these facts about von Wiegand and Hale because between them the two men are able to flood the American public with a torrent of German-made news and views, whose volume and influence are tremendous.  The New York World’s European news is “syndicated” to scores of newspapers throughout the American, continent, and the service has “featured” von Wiegand’s Berlin dispatches to the exclusion, or at least almost to the eclipse, of the World’s other war news.  Hale’s dispatches to the Hearst Press have been published all the way across the Republic, not only in the dailies of vast circulation owned by Mr. Hearst in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also in a great many other papers like the prominent Philadelphia North American, which subscribed to the “International News Service.”