So long as the war continues the spy will be among us.  I suggest that we face the problem of his activities without blue funk and hysteria.  The men and women who are shrieking for vicarious vengeance upon all the Germans remaining in our midst must remember that there are thousands of English families at the present moment residing in Germany and Austria.  The majority of them, comparatively poor people, with all their belongings around them, were unable to get away.  I shall, until I receive convincing proof to the contrary, continue to believe that they are living among their German neighbors unmolested.  Even were it not so, I would suggest our setting the example of humanity rather than our slavishly following an example of barbarity.

We are fighting for an idea—­an idea of some importance to the generations that will come after us.  We are fighting to teach the Prussian Military Staff that other laws have come to stay—­laws superseding those of Attila the Hun.  We are fighting to teach the German people that, free men with brains to think with, they have no right to hand themselves over body and soul to their rulers to be used as mere devil’s instruments; that if they do so they shall pay the penalty, and the punishment shall go hard.  We are fighting to teach the German Nation respect for God!  Our weapons have got to be hard blows, not hard words.  We are tearing at each other’s throats; it has got to be done.  It is not a time for yelping.

Jack Johnson as a boxer I respect.  The thing I do not like about him is his habit of gibing and jeering at his opponent while he is fighting him.  It isn’t gentlemanly, and it isn’t sporting.  The soldiers are fighting in grim silence.  When one of them does talk, it is generally to express admiration of German bravery.  It is our valiant stay-at-homes, our valiant clamorers for everybody else to enlist but themselves, who would have us fight like some drunken fish hag, shrieking and spitting while she claws.

Incredible Reports of Atrocities.

Half of these stories of atrocities I do not believe.  I remember when I was living in Germany at the time of the Boer war the German papers were full of accounts of Tommy Atkins’s brutality.  He spent his leisure time in tossing babies on bayonets.  There were photographs of him doing it.  Detailed accounts certified by most creditable witnesses.  Such lies are the stock in trade of every tenth-rate journalist, who, careful not to expose himself to danger, slinks about the byways collecting hearsay.  In every war each side, according to the other, is supposed to take a fiendish pleasure in firing upon hospitals—­containing always a proportion of their own wounded.  An account comes to us from a correspondent with the Belgian Army.  He tells us that toward the end of the day a regrettable incident occurred.  The Germans were taking off their wounded in motor cars.  The Belgian sharpshooters, not noticing the red flag