"Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace in a few months.
"ZIMMERMAN."
BETHMANN-HOLLWEG'S FALSE STATEMENT.
This document was in the possession of the government at the very time Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg was declaring that the United States had placed an interpretation on the submarine declaration "never intended by Germany," and that Germany had promoted and honored friendly relations with the United States "as an heirloom from Frederick the Great."
Of itself, if there were no other, it is considered a sufficient answer to the German Chancellor's plaint that the United States "brusquely" broke off relations without giving "authentic" reasons for its action.
The document supplies the missing link to many separate chains of circumstances, which until then had seemed to lead to no definite point. It shed new light upon the frequently reported but indefinable movements of the Mexican government to couple its situation with the friction between the United States and Japan.
It added another chapter to the celebrated report of Jules Cambon, French Ambassador in Berlin before the war, of Germany's world-wide plans for stirring strife on every continent where they might aid her in the struggle for world domination, which she dreamed was close at hand. It added a climax to the operations of Count von Bernstorff and the German Embassy in this country, which had been colored with passport frauds, charges of dynamite plots and intrigue, the full extent of which never had been published.
And last but not least, it explained in a very large degree the attitude of the Mexican government toward the United States on many points.
UNCLE SAM NOT BOTHERED.
But the efforts of the German enthusiasts, which carried them beyond the bounds of reasonable safety in the United States, did not bother Uncle Sam much in the prosecution of his war plans. Within a short period after the declaration of war the country had written a chapter in national achievement unrivalled in the history of the world.