the continuance of the "American Embargo Conference," which was set on foot to create opposition to our shipment of munitions to the Allies. He signified that this ought to be used as an influence to swing German voters in presidential elections. Mr. Bielaski brought into the record the "Citizens' Committee for Food Shipments," which was supported by Dr. Edmund von Mach of Cambridge. It had been organized in the home of a prominent New York citizen.
There was brought in the record also the name of a newspaper correspondent—more is the pity for that—who had letters from Count von Bernstorff and Captain von Papen, military attache, declaring that this man was in the service of Germany and Austria. The syndicate employing this man, as is well known, cancelled his contract as soon as his real character and his pro-German attitude were revealed.
The record also declared that a former correspondent of the Cologne Gazette in Washington, notified by the State Department to leave this country, had been in close wireless communication with a German paper in Rotterdam.
All of these revelations began to implicate certain Americans prominent in business and in politics, so that at once the transaction by the Senate Committee became the biggest news of the time, one recrimination following another and one explanation another in rapid sequence. The Committee, none the less, ground on, and produced original papers which proved German methods beyond a doubt. Two code dispatches from von Bernstorff to the Berlin Foreign Office were put into the evidence, one of which was dated November 1, 1916, and stated: "Since the Lusitania case, we have strictly confined ourselves to such propaganda as cannot hurt us if it becomes known. The sole exception is perhaps the peace propaganda, which has cost the least amount, but which also has been the most successful."
Again von Bernstorff states that it would not seem desirable for him to be held responsible for any articles in the subsidized newspaper, "when, as now, we are in a campaign of the bitterest character which is turning largely upon foreign policy."
