Evening Post. TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1915.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 104, 4 May 1915, Page 6

Evening Post. TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1915.

AN AMBASSADOR'S "INDISCRETION"

According t« a message which reached u# from Amsterdam yesterday, Herr Dernburg, the friend and confident of the Kaiser and his financial agent in the United States, has been severely criticised by the Conservative Press of his native land for the dangerous moderation of one of his recent utterances. The speech which forms tho subject of these diatribes is said to have been delivered at the University Club, Brooklyn, and, according to the Berlin Post, it supplies "full and final proof of Herr Dernburg'a incapacity.". Our namesake of Berlin, though nothing like the power that it onee 'was, remains one of the most conspicuous organs of the "armour-plate" press of the Fatherland, and can always be relied upon to bang the patriotic drum with the loudest of its rivals,' but it ia not easy to see why any of these organs should have selected this particular deliverance of the Kaiser's attorney as the occasion for such furious banging. What Herr Dernburg is reported to have said at Brooklyn, whether -wiso or foolish, is neither wiser nor more foolish than what he has been saying in the most explicit fashion in the United State* for months past. Germany, according to the speech at Brooklyn, is prepared to "evacuate Belgium and France on. condition that freedom of the seas is guaranteed and freedom given to Germany to expand beyond her European frontiers." This statement does not go an inch further than that which was cabled to us from Washington on the 19th April as having been made by the same authority in a letter addressed to a proGerman meeting at Portland, Maine. "Personally, he (the writer) favoured the neutralisation of all seas and an international agreement that all cable* and mail communications should be internationalised. If these demands wer« complied with. Germany would agree to 'give up Belgium, provided commercial relations between. Belgium and Germany were placed on a just, workable basis." The neutralisation of the sea* and the internationalisation of all the means of oversea and undersea communication are modest and eminently practicable stipulations, in which Herr Dernburg has great authority to back him. Did not the great Treitschke himself plead for a free passage for the merchant ships of all nations in time of war' And did he not ccc that in fighting Napoleon Prussia had grievously misunderstood a man who had this noble ideal before him? "If ,any of Napoleon's schemes were justified," said Treitscbke, "it was certainly his struggle for the freedom of the eeas." Since the outbreak of the present war the Cologne Gazette has expressed similar views, proclaiming that England has all along been the real enemy of Europe and that the Prussians in accepting her aid to recover their freedom had really, to use a colloquialism, been putting their money on the wrong horse. If only the seas had been, free, if only they had been neutralised and internationalised, how much easier Germany's path j would have been ! Like the NorthGerman Lloyd, the Hamburg-Amerika Line has produced no balance-sheet for 1914, and will hold no general meeting. The explanation offered is a delightful one, and should put to confusion the malignant critics who have denied to the Germans a sense of humour. " The Company has for months been more or less cut off from its branches abroad, so that the directors are not m a position to form a clear picture of the con- | ditions abroad which concern the preparation of to. balance-sheet." This is , charming indeed. To form a clear pic- \ ture of the trade that is being done by vesfeeJs which have been captured or sunk j or interned would impose too severe v, strain on the Teutonic imagination, and, therefore, it declines to put tho result of their. operaUoafl mUi ji -bthace-sheet..

If Prussia had. only backed Napoleon, if there had only been a treaty to guarantee the neutrality of the sea as that of Belgium wa& guaranteed, and if it had been to nobody's interest to rip the scrap of paper to pieces, as in the case of Belgium, the Hamburg-Amerika Line might have published a balance-sheet. Its fleet might have been sailing the ocean still, the British Fleet might have been scrapped, and a. number of other nice things might have happened for Germany. The conditions on which alone Herr Dornburg is prepared to make peace presuppose the securing of all these nice things for Germany, yet he is denounced by stay-at-home patriots as having furnished "full and final proof" of his incapacity. It is, of course, not j the freeing of the Beas from th© British Navy, but the evacuation of Belgium j and France by their ijwn armies, that rouses their ire. Yet Herr Dernburg had', as we have said, put it all in black and white months ago. The peace conditions which he formulated for Germany in December declared that she would not consider it wise to take any European territory, though some " minor correction* of frontiers for military purposes " would be needed; that, though " Belgium belongs geographically to the German Empire," it would suffice to in--elude her in the German Customs Union ; that "the channel coasts of England, Holland, Belgium, and France must bo neutralised even in time of war"; and that Germany, in addition to beuig aloneexempted from the beneficent process of neutralisation, was to get all her colonies back. The triumph of the unconscious humour of Germany has now been exceeded by the critics who think its de-" mands too modest. Much harder blows from Hie clubs of the Allies are needed to coax the "mad dog of Europe" into sweet reasonableness.