Another part of the National Liberals’ policy is the keeping alive of all German businesses, banks and others, in enemy countries.  Some people in England seem to think that the Germans are anxious to keep these businesses alive in order to make money.  Many Germans regard John Bull as extremely simple, but not so simple as to allow them to do that.  So long as the businesses are kept going until after the war, when they can again start out with redoubled energy, the Germans desire nothing more.  The Deutsche Bank, for example, which bears no comparison to an English or American bank, but which is an institution for promoting both political and industrial enterprise, is entrenched behind so powerful an Anglo-German backing in London, I was informed on many occasions, that the British Government dare not close it down.  The mixture of spying and propaganda with banking, with export, with manufacture, seems so foreign to Anglo-Saxon ways as to be almost inconceivable.

Coincident with the destruction of foreign shipping, and the maintenance of their businesses in enemy countries (England and Italy especially) is the exploitation of the coal and other mines, oil wells, and forests in occupied enemy territory.  The French and Belgian coalfields are being worked to the utmost, together with the iron mines at Longwy and Brieux.  Poland is being deforested to such an extent that the climate is actually altering.

It is a vast and definite scheme, with such able leaders as Herr Bassermann, the real leader of the National Liberal Party, Herr Stresemann, and Herr Hirsch, of Essen.  “We have powerful friends, not only in London, Milan, Rome, Madrid, New York, and Montreal, but throughout the whole of South America, and everywhere except in Australia where that verdammter Hooges (Hughes) played into the hands of our feeble, so-called leader, von Bethmann-Hollweg, by warning the people that the British people would follow Hughes’ lead.”

So much for the commercial part of submarining.

U-boating close to England has long ceased to be a popular amusement with the German submarine flotilla, who have a thoroughly healthy appreciation of the various devices by which so many of them have been destroyed.  The National Liberals believe that the British will not be able to tackle long-distance submarines operating in the Atlantic and elsewhere.  Their radius of action is undoubtedly increasing almost month by month.  From remarks made to me I do not believe that these submarines have many land bases at great distances—­certainly none in the United States.  They may have floating bases; but this I do know—­that their petrol-carrying capacity altogether exceeds that of any earlier type of submarine, and that their surface speed, at any rate in official tests, runs up to nearly 20 knots.

The trip of the Deutschland was not only for the purpose of bringing a few tons of nickel and rubber, but for thoroughly testing the new engines (designed by Maybach), for bringing back a hundred reports of the effects of submersion in such cold waters as are to be found off the banks of Newfoundland, for ascertaining how many days’ submerged or surface travelling is likely to be experienced, and, indeed, for making such a trial trip across the Atlantic and back as was usual in the early days of steamships.