Of importance scarcely secondary to the economic phase of her warfare in the United States was the diplomatic problem. Here was a nation of infinite resources, a people of infinite resource. This nation must be enlisted on the side of the Central Powers; failing that, must be kept friendly; under no circumstances was she to be allowed to enlist with the Allies. One fundamental trait of Americans Germany held too lightly--their blood-kinship to Britons--and it is a grimly amusing commentary upon the confidence of the German in bonds Teutonic that he believed that the antidote to this racial "weakness" of ours lay in the large numbers of Germans who had settled here and become Americans of sorts. But the German was alarmingly if not absolutely correct in his estimate, for upon the conduct and zeal of Germans in America actually depended much of the success of Germany's diplomatic tactics in America.
[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_
The German Embassy in Washington, headquarters and clearing-house of German intrigue in the world outside Mittel-Europa, 1914-1917]
The war, then, so far as the United States figured in Germany's plan, was economic and diplomatic. But it was also military. German representatives in the United States were bound by oath to coöperate to their utmost in all military enterprises within their reach. With a certain few notable exceptions, no such enterprises came within their reach, and if the reader anticipates from that fact a disappointing lack of violence in the narrative to follow, let him remember that "all's fair in war," and that every German activity in the United States, whether it was economic, diplomatic or military, was carried on with a certain Prussian thoroughness which was chiefly characterized by brutal violence.
We have come to believe that thoroughness is the first and last word in German organization. Any really thorough organization must be promptly convertible to new activities without loss of motion. If these new activities are unexpected, the change is more or less of an experiment, and its possibilities are not ominous. But truly dangerous is the organization which transfers suddenly to coping with the expected. Germany had expected war for forty years.