From ‘The Threat of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz’, The Spectator, 9 January 1915:
THE Manchester Guardian of Tuesday published the text of the interview with Grand Admiral von Tirpitz which appear last week in the New York Sun. This was the interview in which Admiral von Tirpitz seriously proposed that German submarines might declare war on all enemy merchant ships. It is obvious that submarines would hardly ever be able to save the persons on board torpedoed merchant ships. Such warfare would be unmitigated murder, outraging not only the letter and spirit of all the Hague Conventions which Germany signed, but the customs of war as they were understood and practised long before the Hague Conferences were established. Incidentally, the neutral goods carried in enemy merchant ships would be sunk without a trace of evidence remaining by which claims might be made against Germany, even on the generous supposition that Germany would hold herself liable for compensation. The mind reels at the spectacle of the German Minister of Marine making such a proposal of this, while much money is being spent by Germany in trying to gain the good opinion of neutral countries—neutral countries whose chief concern at this moment is that their commerce should escape to the utmost degree possible from the necessary military measures of the combatants. Never, we suppose, did any country behave in so muddle-headed a way as Germany is behaving now. She deserves to take the classic place of a Tantalus or Sisyphus. She should stand for a figure of work that is always being done and undone in the same act. The dualism of German efficiency and German blundering is already familiar to us, but this latest stroke from the head of the German Navy seems to exceed every previous example. In one breath Admiral von Tirpitz insists on the importance of American interests at sea, and proposed so far as he can to shatter them.
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