A flat denial of the atrocity stories was furnished by a Washington dispatch to the New York "World", five months after the invasion of Belgium. The report contained the substance of aa official finding by the British government and was turned over to Ambassador Walter H. Page for transmission to Washington upon the request of the American government. When Dr. Edmund von Mach subsequently requested the State Department for information about the finding, after returning one evasive reply, Secretary Lansing left Dr. von Mach's letters unanswered and the report has never been made public. Following is the Washington report referred to :

Washington, Jan. 27. (Special to the World)—Of the thousands of Belgian refugees who are now in England not one has been sub­jected to atrocities by German soldiers. This in effect is the substance of a report received at the State Department from the American Embasy in London. The report states that the British government thoroughly had investigated thousands of reports to the effect that German soldiers had perpetrated outrages on the fleeing Belgians. During the early period of the war, columns of the British newspapers were filled with these accusations. Agents of the British government according to the report from the American Embassy at London, carefully investigated all of these charges ; they interviewed alleged victims and sifted all the evidence. As a result of the invest­igation the British Foreign Office notified the American Embassy that the charges appeared to be based upon hysteria and natural prejudice. The report added that many of the Belgians had suffered severe hardships but they should be charged up against the exi­gencies of war rather than the brutality of the individual German soldier.

The whole web of lies and the conditions underlying the scheme are conclusively exposed in "The Tragedy of Belgium" by Richard Grasshof, (New York: C. E. Dillingham Co.)

No paper has been more agressive in charging the Germans with atroc­ities than the New York "Times", which received 250,000 shares of Marconi stock as a present before the war. The paper pursued the same policy during the Civil War, when it charged similar atrocities to the South. In its issue of April 17, 1865, it said:

"Every possible atrocity appertains to this rebellion. There is nothing whatever that its leaders have scrupled at. Wholesale mas­sacres and torturings, wholesale starvation of prisoners, firing of great cities, piracies of the cruelest kind, persecution of the most hideous character and of vast extent, and finally assassination in high places — whatever is inhuman, whatever is brutal, whatever is fiendish, these men have resorted to. They will leave behind names so black, and the memory of deeds so infamous, that the execration of the slave­holders' rebellion will be eternal."

BARALONG — An English pirate ship commanded by Capt. William McBride which sailed under the American flag with masked batteries and sank a German submarine which had been deceived by the Stars and Stripes and the American colors painted on both sides of her hull. On August 19, 1915, the "Nicosian," an English ship loaded with American

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