I have therefore thought it advisable to provide you with a catalogue of the real crimes of England; and I have selected them on a principle which cannot fail to interest and please you.  On many occasions we have been very wrong indeed.  We were very wrong indeed when we took part in preventing Europe from putting a term to the impious piracies of Frederick the Great.  We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the triumph over Napoleon to be soiled with the mire and blood of Blucher’s sullen savages.  We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the peaceful King of Denmark to be robbed in broad daylight by a brigand named Bismarck; and when we allowed the Prussian swashbucklers to enslave and silence the French provinces which they could neither govern nor persuade.  We were very wrong indeed when we flung to such hungry adventurers a position so important as Heligoland.  We were very wrong indeed when we praised the soulless Prussian education and copied the soulless Prussian laws.  Knowing that you will mingle your tears with mine over this record of English wrong-doing, I dedicate it to you, and I remain,

Yours reverently,

G. K. CHESTERTON

II—­The Protestant Hero

A question is current in our looser English journalism touching what should be done with the German Emperor after a victory of the Allies.  Our more feminine advisers incline to the view that he should be shot.  This is to make a mistake about the very nature of hereditary monarchy.  Assuredly the Emperor William at his worst would be entitled to say to his amiable Crown Prince what Charles ii. said when his brother warned him of the plots of assassins:  “They will never kill me to make you king.”  Others, of greater monstrosity of mind, have suggested that he should be sent to St. Helena.  So far as an estimate of his historical importance goes, he might as well be sent to Mount Calvary.  What we have to deal with is an elderly, nervous, not unintelligent person who happens to be a Hohenzollern; and who, to do him justice, does think more of the Hohenzollerns as a sacred caste than of his own particular place in it.  In such families the old boast and motto of hereditary kingship has a horrible and degenerate truth.  The king never dies; he only decays for ever.

If it were a matter of the smallest importance what happened to the Emperor William when once his house had been disarmed, I should satisfy my fancy with another picture of his declining years; a conclusion that would be peaceful, humane, harmonious, and forgiving.