Then, when you were checked at the Marne, it was perfidious England who had leagued the nations against you. To crush England–that was the real reason for the war. And your people believed it.
Now it's for the freedom of the seas that you must take Verdun—and your people apparently still believe.
But in dealing with me, Wilhelm, after the war, if you'll lay the cards face up on the table right from the start, we'll get on a good deal faster.
Business, Wilhelm, is nothing but credit. That's old stuff, of course, but true. Money is only scraps of paper; all I've got to show for my life savings are a few scraps of paper printed in green ink and red. When you were fighting France in 1870, and had her army penned up against the Belgian frontier, she surrendered rather than regard her treaties as mere matters of convenience. That little remark about "scraps of paper" and the careless way in which your press bureau handles facts (that funny note, for instance; about the ship you sunk being some other ship than the Sussex—you remember, the note with the foolish little drawing), things like that made me wonder whether you are fundamentally a truthful citizen, or whether you are only truthful in so far as it suits your convenience. I just can't help it, Wilhelm.
There are a half dozen little things, Wilhelm, that have sort of estranged me from you; but I'm going to pass them over, because I want to get the big things set right first of all. And the other big thing that sticks in my crop is this: I can't understand at all why a nation which professes to want peace as much as you do should have to fill the houses of its friends so full of spies. When your troops marched into Belgium, the well-to-do Belgian women looked out of their windows and saw in the front ranks, leading the way, the very men whom they had entertained as guests. "They had used the sacred cloak of a guest's privilege to ferret out and report to you all the household secrets of poor little Belgium.
How far does this system extend in the world, Wilhelm? I don't know; and the very fact that I don't know makes me afraid. Our factories have been blown up and our ships sunk, our bridges and railroads menaced. Of course, you have explained through von Bernstorff that this was done by fanatics and not at all by your orders. Yet why did the explosions cease all at once after we had finally given von Bernstorff notice that our patience was exhausted and that we were on the point of sending him home? If nobody ordered them to start, who ordered them all of a sudden to cease?
If you really wanted our friendship, Wilhelm, was it tactful to blow us up? And if you really want us to take you at face value hereafter, won't you have to begin right away to throw this spy system out? It puts the poison of suspicion in my heart, Wilhelm. How can I
6
