:
Whilst these pages were in the printers' hands, the German Army has made use of asphyxiating gases and the Navy has sunk another passenger steamer -the Lusitania.
These barbarous acts and the defence of the sinking of this vessel, according to the German Note (of sympathy!) cabled to Washington, must have had the previous sanction of the German Emperor as the head of both the Army and Navy. Moreover, he and his Ministers must have known almost a week before the perpetra- tion of this infamous deed that their preposterous warning had not been taken seriously, that many of the passengers could not even be aware of it and that their number exceeded a thousand, including many women and children.
I am therefore compelled to abandon my charitable doubts as to the Emperor's personal responsibility; incredible as it seems to me even to-day that a man of his apparent virtues, one who continuously invokes and claims the blessings of a Christian God for all his actions (as I wrote on page 28), should have sanctioned such and similar barbarities of his unspeakable Prussians!
LONDON, E.C..
10th May, 1915.
H. SANDERS.