mistake, and never so tragic as now, when a small coterie of human
beings, subject to the same mistakes and sins as other human beings, can
hurl you into a terrible war before you know what has happened, clap on
a rigid censorship to keep out any news they do not want you to learn,
then publish a white book which pretends to explain the causes of the
war, but omits documents of the most vital importance, thereby causing
the people of a confiding nation to drench the earth with their
life-blood in the fond illusion that the war was forced upon them, and
that they are fighting for a noble cause. Most pitiful is the sad
comment of an intelligent German woman in a letter recently received in
this country: "We, of course, only see such things as the Government
thinks best. We were told that this war was purely a defensive one,
forced upon us. I begin to believe this may not be true, but hope for a
favourable ending."

Certainly in what you wrote to me you were thoroughly sincere and
honest; yet your letter was full of untrue statements because you were
dependent for your information upon a Government-controlled press which
has misled you for military and political reasons. How can a nation know
the truth, think clearly, and act righteously when a few men, called the
"State," can commit you to the most serious enterprise in your history
without your previous knowledge or consent, and can then keep you in
ignorance of vitally important documents and activities in order to
insure your full support of their perilous undertaking? Such is the
thought which has always led America to denounce as false the old theory
of "divine right of kings," long imposed upon the German people in the
more subtle and, therefore, more dangerous form of "the divine right of
the State." Our conviction that such a government as yours is
reactionary and incompatible with true liberty, and that it stunts and
warps the intellects of its citizens, has been amply confirmed by