RESIGNATION OF VON KÜHLMANN

PAN-GERMAN VICTORY

There is no longer any doubt that Von Kühlmann has left the German Foreign Office. This is, however, in itself a fact of but little significance. The fallen minister had involved himself in one of those dilemmas from which there is no escape. He had undertaken to explain that words used by him did not bear the only possible meaning that could be put upon them. When he declared in the Reichstag on June 24 that “an absolute end of the war can hardly be expected through purely military decisions alone”, he was cheered by the Socialists, and, apparently, by members of the other “majority” parties, namely, the Centre (Catholics) and the Progressists. But the Conservatives and National Liberals raged furiously, and he lost his nerve. To appease them he repeated his words, and in the same breath said, in effect, that he had never spoken them. That sealed his fate, for it lost him his old friends and brought him no new ones. The pan-germans refused to believe that he had really rallied to the “victory policy”, and the Socialists that he had abjured it. Apparently it was the immediate effect of his ineffectual recantation that Scheidemann announced the decision of the majority Socialists, for the first time in the course of the war, to refuse to vote the budget.

Whatever deeper significance there may be in the change in the German Foreign Office will be found in Kühlmann’s successor. Apparently Von Hintze was selected, but his appointment is being reconsidered in consequence of Parliamentary opposition. This admiral-diplomatist seems to be the candidate of the war-to-the-knife pan-germans, which is as much as to say that he will not be acceptable to the present Reichstag majority. The line followed by the German Government in such matters is generally a compromise. The Emperor’s sympathies and wishes lie, as a matter of course, on the side of the pan-germans, but he knows that he cannot afford openly to flout the Reichstag – at any rate, not yet.