of course, Germany—­is rapidly solidifying into a severe condemnation of the German Empire.  The profoundest moral judgment of the world is taking the strongest stand against Germany and German methods.  Such incidents as the burning of Louvain and other places, the slaughter of civilian populations, the outrages against women and children—­outrages of such a nature that they cannot be printed, but which form a matter of common conversation everywhere—­have had the result of arousing Great Britain to a mood of the grimmest determination.

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This message had hardly reached Washington when the peace effort of which it warned the President began to take practical form.  In properly estimating these manoeuvres it must be borne in mind that German diplomacy always worked underground and that it approached its negotiations in a way that would make the other side appear as taking the initiative.  This was a phase of German diplomatic technique with which every European Foreign Office had long been familiar.  Count Bernstorff arrived in the United States from Germany in the latter part of August, evidently with instructions from his government to secure the intercession of the United States.  There were two unofficial men in New York who were ideally qualified to serve the part of intermediaries.  Mr. James Speyer had been born in New York; he had received his education at Frankfort-on-the-Main, Germany, and had spent his apprenticeship also in the family banking house in that city.  As the head of an American banking house with important German affiliations, his interests and sympathies were strong on the side of the Fatherland; indeed, he made no attempt to conceal his strong pro-Germanism.

Mr. Oscar S. Straus had been born in Germany; his father had been a German revolutionist of ’Forty-eight; like Carl Schurz, Abraham Jacobi, and Franz Sigel, he had come to America to escape Prussian militarism and the Prussian autocracy, and his children had been educated in a detestation of the things for which the German Empire stood.  Mr. Oscar Straus was only two years old when he was brought to this country, and he had given the best evidences of his Americanism in a distinguished public career.  Three times he had served the United States as Ambassador to Turkey; he had filled the post of Secretary of Commerce and Labour in President Roosevelt’s cabinet, and had held other important public commissions.  Among his other activities, Mr. Straus had played an important part in the peace movement of the preceding quarter of a century and he had been a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague.  Mr. Straus was on excellent terms with the German, the British, and the French ambassadors at Washington.  As far back as 1888, when he was American Minister at Constantinople, Bernstorff, then a youth, was an attache at the German Embassy; the young German was frequently at the American Legation and used to remind