Anyhow he started off in his Bouverie biplane to distribute a million or so leaflets of his own composition over the whole expanse of the Fatherland.  It has been my privilege to read a sample which he handed to me just before leaving earth.  It runs as follows:—­

“GERMANS—­Your Kaiser has taken good care that his Press should keep you in ignorance of the feelings with which your nation is regarded by the civilized world.  I am therefore about to oblige you with a few home-truths.

“You have probably heard a rumour that we and our Allies have no quarrel with the German people, but only with its rulers.  Don’t you believe a word of it.  Possibly we still respected you when the War began, for we had not guessed how many of you had been looking forward for years to the coming of ‘The Day.’  It is what we have found out about you since you started fighting that has made us loathe and despise you.

“When, as a nation, you accepted without protest the filthy savagery of your armies in Belgium and other occupied lands; when even your women were vile in their cruelty to the helpless prisoners you had taken; when you rang your church bells and waved flags and took holidays for joy of the murder of innocent women and children, we were not deceived by apologists who explained that your only defect was that you were the slaves of a brutal militarism (though you were that, all right).  We knew that you must have something of the beast in your hearts.  How it got there was another matter; we only knew that it was there and that while it remained you were not fit for intercourse with decent men.

“Another thing that you may have heard (for even some of our own statesmen, reputed intelligent, have said it, and it has no doubt been eagerly seized upon by the officials who control your Press), is that your form of Government, the particular pattern of tyranny under which you elect to grovel, is no concern of ours.  Well, don’t you believe that either.  This is no question of private taste, like the cut of your shoulder-pads or the shape of your women’s waists, which are matters of purely local interest.  Your type of Government is as much our concern; as the quality of your poison-gas or the composition of the bombs that you drop on our babies.

[Illustration:]

“I am reminded of the nonsense that used to be talked by responsible statesmen at the time when you were feverishly building a fleet to dispute our right to ensure the freedom of the seas.  We were told that you were at perfect liberty to do so if you chose, and that it was not for us to interfere with your arrangements.  Yet everybody knew all the time that there was nothing in the world that concerned us so closely.  If France had been massing troops on your frontier you would at once have asked her to state her intentions, or even possibly have taken action without asking her.  Well, the sea is our frontier.