The American newspapers which reached Germany after the outbreak of war gave that country its first intimation that her rush through Belgium was decidedly unpopular on the other side of the Atlantic.  Furthermore, many American newspapers depicted the Kaiser and the Crown Prince in a light quite new to German readers, who with their heads full of Divine Right ideas considered the slightest caricature of their imperial family as brutally sacrilegious.

But the vast majority of Germans never saw an American newspaper.  How is it, then, that they began to hate the United States so intensely?  The answer is simple.  In the early winter of 1914-15, the German Government with its centralised control of public opinion turned on the current of hatred against everything American as it had already done against everything British, for the war had come to a temporary stalemate on both fronts, and the Wilhelmstrasse had to excuse their failure to win the short, sharp pleasant war into which the people had jumped with anticipation of easy victory.  “If it were not for American ammunition the war would have been finished long ago!” became the key-note of the new gospel of hate, a gospel which has been preached down to the present.

Just before I left Germany the “Reklam Book Company” of Leipzig issued an anti-American circular which flooded the country.  The request that people should enclose it in all their private letters was slavishly followed with the same zest with which the Germans had previously attached Gott strafe England stickers to their correspondence.

The circular represented a 7000-ton steamer ready to take on board the cargo of ammunition which was arranged neatly on the pier in the foreground.  The background was occupied by German troops, black lines dividing them into three parts, tagged respectively—­30,000 killed, 40,000 slightly wounded, 40,000 seriously wounded.  This, then, is the graphic illustration of the casualties inflicted upon the German Army by a single cargo of one moderate-sized liner.

Since at such a rate, it would take less than two hundred cargoes of this astoundingly effective ammunition to put the entire German Army out of action, one wonders why Britain troubles herself to convert her industries.

Ere the first winter of war drew to a close the official manipulators of the public opinion battery had successfully electrified the nation into a hate against the United States second only to that bestowed on Great Britain.  And so it came about that the Government had the solid support of the people when the original submarine manifesto of February 4th, 1915, warning neutral vessels to keep out of the war zone, threatened a rupture with the United States.  When two weeks later Washington sent a sharp note of protest to Berlin, the Germans became choleric every time they spoke of America or met an American.