As to the reliability of the _Borsen_, it is edited by a Government statistician, and considered by Danish traders as official.
So far as Norway is concerned, H.B.M. Minister at Christiania had difficulty in obtaining official statistics regarding imports and exports after the Casement affair remained unanswered; certain it is that Government assistance was denied to various Consuls acting under him; whilst I, when in that country, was informed (by British authorities) I must not collect these figures, although to me and others working with me they were comparatively easy of access.
So far as Foreign Office knowledge is concerned, it is hardly a credit to the ability or even sanity of the British Legations in Scandinavia if they have denied knowledge of these colossal imports of goods into Germany, which were known to almost every inhabitant of seaport towns. If they deliberately shut their eyes to the evidence all around them, they presumably obeyed orders. One could then only wonder as to the reason for such suicidal policy.
As before mentioned, at the commencement of his speech Sir Edward Grey laid stress upon the fact that part of the stated increased import, namely, 2,000,000 barrels of flour were allowed to be exported to Belgium; whilst a little later in his speech he admitted that "She [Germany] had requisitioned the food supplies of the civil population of Poland and Belgium." Almost immediately afterwards Lord Robert Cecil strove hard to back up the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, but he could not give the House any positive assurance that the Belgian Relief distribution was absolutely independent of German control. The disposition of this is therefore obvious.
Sir Edward Grey attempted to whittle down the U.S.A. exports of wheat by stating that nearly half went to Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Malta; but he did not refer to the corn, etc., exported to Northern neutrals from Liverpool and other British ports, nor did he make any allowances for the stream of mysterious ships sailing round far northern seas (many of them choosing the passage north of Iceland), which sighted land on the north-western coast of Norway and carried their course inside neutral waters into the Baltic; which heavily-laden cargo-boats I and others in the Secret Service had watched and reported week by week and month by month with heart-rending persistency. The majority of these ships probably sailed direct to German ports, and no records of their cargoes were likely to be made, or returned from any country concerning them. Nor did Sir Edward Grey make reference to the grain ships, which although nominally bound for Scandinavian ports, were intercepted by their owners' or consignees' agents in the Baltic, for the purpose of varying orders for their ultimate port of destination; nor to the ships which were held up in the Baltic by German war vessels and taken to German ports under circumstances calling for grave investigation. Nor did he attempt to answer the general American statistics showing that the gain in imports to northern neutral countries exceeded the German loss.