It was extremely interesting to the student of the war to see that the people really did not understand what it was all about.  Theodor Wolff, the brilliant editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, with great daring for a German editor, raised this point in the edition in which the Ultimatum was printed.  He asserted that the German people did not understand the case because they purposely had been left in the dark by the Government.  He said, among other things, that his countrymen were in no position to understand the feeling of resentment in the United States, because the meagre reports permitted in the German Press never described such details as the death agonies of women and children struggling helplessly in the water.

This article in the Tageblatt was the striking exception to the rest of the Press comment throughout Germany, for the German Government made one of its typical moves at this point.  “To climb down or not to climb down,” was a question which would take several days to decide.  Public opinion was already sufficiently enraged against America to give the Government united support in case of a break, but it must be made more enraged and consequently more united.  Thus on Easter Sunday the full current of hate was turned on in the German Press.  President Wilson was violently attacked for working in the interest of the Allies, whom he wished to save.  Germany would not bow to this injustice, she would fight, and America, too, would be made to feel what it means to go to war with Germany.  The German Press did its part to inflame a united German sentiment, and the Foreign Office, which believes in playing the game both ways when it is of advantage to do so, with characteristic thoroughness did not permit the American correspondents to cable to their papers the virulent lies, such as those in the Tagliche Rundschau, about the affair in general and President Wilson in particular.  These papers were furthermore not allowed to leave Germany.

On the evening preceding the publication of the Ultimatum, Maximilian Harden’s most famous number of the Zukunft appeared with the title “If I Were Wilson.”  On Saturday morning it was advertised on yellow and black posters throughout Berlin, and was quickly bought by a feverish public to whom anything pertaining to German-American relations was of the sharpest interest.  The remarkable article was directly at variance with all the manufactured ideas which had been storming in German brains for more than a year.  The British sea policy was represented in a light quite different from the officially incubated German conception of it.  President Wilson was correctly portrayed as strictly neutral in all his official acts.  This staggered Harden’s readers quite as much as his attacks on the brutal submarine policy of his country.

A careless censor had allowed “If I Were Wilson,” to appear.  But a vigilant Government, ever watchful of the food for the minds of its children, hastened with the usual police methods to correct the mistake.  The Zukunft was beschlagnahmt, which means that the police hastily gathered up all unsold copies at the publishers, kiosks, and wherever else they were to be found.  If a policeman saw one in a man’s pocket he took it away.