preceded on the stand by certain literary gentlemen, college
professors and others, who undertook to explain to the Committee utterances they had made in print or elsewhere which were charged to show disloyalty to the interests of the United States. It is impossible to give in any sort of detail the vast extension of the testimony before this Committee, or to mention the many widely extended forms of the German activities that ran in this country during the war. Perhaps we may summarize the German attitude, as well as in any other way, by citing the opinion of that delectable gentleman, the Count von Bernstorff, ambassador of the Imperial German Government at Washington, in his communication to the Foreign Office in Berlin, in explanation of his activities in the United States:
It is particularly difficult in a hostile country to find suitable
persons for help of this sort, and to this fact, as well as
the Lusitania case, we may attribute the shipwreck of the
German propaganda initiated by Herr Dernburg. Now that
opinion is somewhat improved in our favor, and that we are
no longer ostracized, we can take the work up again. As I
have said before, our success depends entirely upon finding
the suitable people. We can then leave to them whether they
will start a daily, weekly, or a monthly, and the sort of support
to be given. In my opinion, we should always observe
the principle that either a representative of ours should buy
the paper, or that the proprietor should be secured by us by
continuous support. The latter course has been followed by
the English in respect of the New York , and our
enemies have spent here large sums in this manner. All the
same, I do not think that they pay regular subsidies. At
least, I never heard of such. This form of payment is moreover
inadvisable, because one can never get free of the
recipients. They all wish to become permanent pensioners of
the Empire, and if they fail in that, they try to blackmail us.
I, therefore, request your Excellency to sanction the payment in question.
By way of general summary, it may be said that a well-defined
organization long existed in our country, districted
with the usual German exactness. German Naval Intelligence
had charge of destruction of our shipping, naval
sabotage, etc. Boy-Ed, naval attache at Washington, was