Jan. 11.
A brief summary of the speech delivered by Dr. von Bethmann Hollweg in the Reichstag on December 2 has been telegraphed to the Fur East. But fuller reports, arriving by mail, deserve fuller reference. Not much has" been heard of the Chancellor since the famous "'scrap of paper" interview with the British Ambassador; and this period of silence has given him time to invent an explanation for what then appeared to him Great Britain's inexplicable attitude. His speech in the Reichstag was practically nothing but a virulent attack on that country. Beginning with the statement that, although the apparent responsibility fell on Russia, the real responsibility fell on' the British jovernment, the—Chancellor continued "The Cabinet in London could have made the war impossible if it had without ambiguity declared at Pet that Great Britain would not allow a Con-Ainental war to develop from the Austro-'Servian conflict.
"Such a declaration would also have obliged France to take energetic measures to restrain Russia from undertaking war-ike operations. Then our action ax mediators between Pet und Vienna would have been successful, and there would have been no war. But Great Britain did not act thus. Great: Britain wag tevare of the belicos muschinatlone of the partly irresponsible but powerful. gran wun the Maar. Bhe and how th ing, informed Petrograd that was on the side of and consequently on the ide of Russia."
It may be noted in passing that Petrograd and Vienna needed no assistance from Germany in arriving at an agreement, which -they reached, unaided, on August! 1, the day after Germany had sent her ultimatums to France and Russia. But it is curious to see that Great Britain's crime in the Chancellor's eyes is that she did not play her friends of the Entente false and second Germany in' bullying the Slavs into quiescence while she and Austria completed their plans for the Germanizing of the Near East. That is the plain English of the first sentence of what we have quoted. "''Therefore,"' says the Chancellor, complacently, "'England and Russia have before God and men the responsibility for the catastrophe which has fallen upon. Europe. Belgian - neutrality, which England pretended to defend, was nothing but a disguise."*
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.