_Former British Ambassador to the United States_
[Copyright, 1918, by The New York Times Company]
The secret memorandum which Prince Lichnowsky wrote as a record and
vindication of his conduct while German Ambassador in England is the
most important single document which has come before the world since
the first days of the war. It was not meant to become known during
the war, perhaps not within his own lifetime. It was written not to
justify England but to criticise the policy which tied Germany to
Austria, and was published without, and indeed against, its author's
will. It may have been composed partly to relieve the writer's own
feelings, from an impulse which those will understand who are prevented
by considerations of public duty from vindicating their conduct to the
world. It may also be due to the sense, natural to men who have borne a
part in great events, that they owe it to posterity to contribute what
they can to the truth of history. Anyhow, it has exposed him to the
anger and persecution of the German Government; and this persecution
is evidence of the importance it attaches to it as a condemnation of
its conduct. The truth of its contents has been confirmed, if indeed it
needed confirmation, by the statements of Herr von Jagow, late German
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and of Herr Mühlon, one of the
Krupp directors.
Prince Lichnowsky appears in this document as a man of clear vision
and cool judgment, an acute observer of social as well as political
phenomena, a good witness both to what he noted during his residence
here and to what he knew of the action of his own Government. And now
let us see what he records.
When the war began in August, 1914, the German Government entered on
two campaigns, which it has ever since prosecuted with equal energy and
an equal disregard of honor and humanity.
One of these was the campaign by arms. It suddenly invaded Belgium, a
peaceful neutral country, whose neutrality it was pledged to respect,
and which it has treated with the utmost cruelty, murdering, or
reducing to the slavery of forced labor, its civilian and noncombatant
inhabitants. It has similarly enslaved the inhabitants of Poland, and
has encouraged its Turkish allies to massacre their innocent Armenian
subjects.