EVASIVE AND INSINCERE
The Philadelphia Public Ledger also criticized it for ignoring altogether “the protest in the name of humanity against submarine warfare upon non-combatants,” and the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune laid bare the “absolute ignoring of the vital principles set forth in the Wilson letter,” adding that “there is a half contemptuous, albeit entirely courteous, suggestion of ‘Well, they are still dead; now, what do you propose to do about it?’”
No Use.
The German claim that the Lusitania was in effect a warship, with mounted guns, and carried ammunition and Canadian soldiers, was emphatically denied in a public statement by Dudley Field Malone, collector of the port of New York, and the New York World vehemently answered the German claim by declaring that “the Lusitania was a warship in the same way that Belgium was an aggressor against Germany; in the same way that the University of Louvain and Rheims Cathedral were ‘fortifications’; in the same way that various seaside resorts in England, raided by Germans, were ‘defended.’”