In America the news of the sinking of the '
Ancona' has also been received with horror. In the first place, it has made the American people realize that the stopping of submarine murder in the North Sea was due, not, as they had fondly hoped, to President Wilson's Notes and protests, but simply to the fact that we had made the presence of submarines in our home waters almost impossible, and that the Germans, making a virtue of necessity, pretended that they stopped torpedoing liners out of a desire to show goodwill to their American friends. Now that German submarines have got into the Mediterranean they will, of course, play the old game, though possibly, for a change, under the Austrian flag. When we get the mastery of them in the Mediterranean, as no doubt we shall in time, we may expect, but not till then, to hear that America has again convinced the Germans that the sinking of emigrant ships and the drowning of women and children is a policy which they are willing to abandon now that their attention has been drawn to it by a friendly Power.
