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diplomatic art, and in August, 1916, he had to return to Vienna a vanquished man.

“To the Magyars he now became a target for most violent attacks, the main accusation against him being that he had not been able to discover the real intentions of the Roumanian Government and had continued to lavish upon it promises and concessions at the expense of Hungary. The documents which were soon afterwards published showed that all these attacks were baseless, and that seldom, if ever, had Austria-Hungary possessed a diplomat so efficient as Count Czernin. It was not surprising, therefore, that when the young Emperor, himself a political pupil of Francis Ferdinand, ascended the throne of the Habsburgs, his first thought turned toward Count Czernin as his future Foreign Minister. In December, 1916, Baron Burian vacated the post at the express desire of the Emperor Charles, and Count Czernin was appointed.”

We have received the following note from Mr. George Saunders with regard to a point in the German Press Guide published in No. 78:—

“The last sentence of the paragraph on the Socialist Vorwärts (No. 78, page 415, lines 3–5), in which it is said that the Minority Socialists have managed to control it during the war, does not give a correct impression of the situation. Up to the strike of last January and the Majority Socialist victory at the Nieder-Barnim election, the Majority leaders were gravely concerned at the suspected growth of the Minority Party in the constituencies. At moments of crisis they and the Vorwärts were therefore constrained to stiffen their backs and revert, temporarily, to an anti-Government attitude. This was signally illustrated during the strikes, when an article was published which entailed the suppression of the Vorwärts for a couple of days. But since the collapse of the strike movement and the defeat of the Minority Socialists at Nieder-Barnim, the Vorwärts has generally supported the Government, as is shown, for example, by its attitude, corresponding to that of the Majority Socialist leader, Scheidemann, on the Lichnowsky disclosures. On 16 March, the day of the debate on the Lichnowsky disclosures in the Main Committee of the Reichstag, and before the debate actually took place, the Vorwärts said that it was certainly true that the Social Democrats had not in any way approved of the policy of the Government before the war. Their agreement (i.e., the agreement of the Majority Socialists with the Government) had only arisen when the terrible fact of the outbreak of war could not be altered. ‘This agreement did not refer to the past but to the future, and the subject of it was not based upon any particular reading of historical facts, but upon the will not to be defeated in this war. No disclosures in the world can shake that will.’”

The foregoing note recalls the time when, in the autumn of 1916, the control of the Vorwärts was forcibly transferred from the Minority to the Majority Socialists. We commented on that occasion (The New Europe, No. 3, 2 November, 1916): “The transfer . . . is one of the clearest signs yet given us that the German Government is genuinely nervous about its domestic situation. The columns of this great Socialist newspaper have reflected with fairness and as much truth as the circumstances would allow the actual opinions of the working classes of Berlin. It has more than once suffered suppression for its outspoken criticism of the annexation propaganda and the food control.” We went on to point out that the freedom which had been allowed this paper in the days of Germany’s early successes was deemed to be no longer possible when the difficulties ahead began to be increasingly clear, and the German Government therefore took the precaution of stopping one by one those channels of opinion which threatened trouble.