England and the War's Causes
Prince Lichnowsky's Memorandum a Document of Vital Importance to History
By VISCOUNT BRYCE
Former British Ambassador to the United States
[Copyright, 1918, by The New York Times Company]
The secret memorandum which Prince Lichnowsky wrote as a record and vindication of his conduct while German Ambassador in England is the most important single document which has come before the world since the first days of the war. It was not meant to become known during the war, perhaps not within his own lifetime. It was written not to justify England but to criticise the policy which tied Germany to Austria, and was published without, and indeed against, its author's will. It may have been composed partly to relieve the writer's own feelings, from an impulse which those will understand who are prevented by considerations of public duty from vindicating their conduct to the world. It may also be due to the sense, natural to men who have borne a part in great events, that they owe it to posterity to contribute what they can to the truth of history. Anyhow, it has exposed him to the anger and persecution of the German Government; and this persecution is evidence of the importance it attaches to it as a condemnation of its conduct. The truth of its contents has been confirmed, if indeed it needed confirmation, by the statements of Herr von Jagow, late German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and of Herr Mühlon, one of the Krupp directors.
Prince Lichnowsky appears in this document as a man of clear vision and cool judgment, an acute observer of social as well as political phenomena, a good witness both to what he noted during his residence here and to what he knew of the action of his own Government. And now let us see what he records.
When the war began in August, 1914, the German Government entered on two campaigns, which it has ever since prosecuted with equal energy and an equal disregard of honor and humanity.
One of these was the campaign by arms. It suddenly invaded Belgium, a peaceful neutral country, whose neutrality it was pledged to respect, and which it has treated with the utmost cruelty, murdering, or reducing to the slavery of forced labor, its civilian and noncombatant inhabitants. It has similarly enslaved the inhabitants of Poland, and has encouraged its Turkish allies to massacre their innocent Armenian subjects.