an Agincourt tradition.  Now it is not more cowardly to kill a woman than to kill a wounded man.  And there is only one reason why it is a greater crime to kill a woman than a man, and why women have to be spared and protected when men are exposed and sacrificed.  That reason is that the destruction of the women is the destruction of the community.  Men are comparatively of no account:  kill 90 per cent, of the German men, and the remaining 10 per cent. can repeople her.  But kill the women, and Delenda est Carthago.  Now this is exactly what our Militarists want to happen to Germany.  Therefore the objection to killing women becomes in this case the reason for doing it.  Why not?  No reply is possible from the Militarist, disable-your-enemy point of view.  If disablement is your will, there is your way, and the only effectual way.  We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or shrunk from such a glaring “biological necessity.”  A pair of puling pious sentimentalists if you like.  But Supermen!  Nonsense.  O, my brother journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs, call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy overcoat buttoned over paunchy figure, playing the contrabass tuba in a street band; but do not flatter them with the heroic title of Superman, and hold up as magnificent villainies worthy of Milton’s Lucifer these common crimes of violence and raid and lust that any drunken blackguard can commit when the police are away, and that no mere multiplication can dignify.  As to Nietzsche, with his Polish hatred of Prussia (who heartily reciprocated the sentiment), when did he ever tell the Germans to allow themselves to be driven like sheep to the slaughter in millions by mischievous dolts who, being for the most part incapable of reading ten sentences of a philosophic treatise without falling asleep, allow journalists as illiterate as themselves to persuade them that he got his great reputation by writing a cheap gospel for bullies?  Strictly between ourselves, we also are an illiterate people; but we may at least hold our tongues about matters we don’t understand, and not say in the face of Europe that the English believe that the composer of Parsifal was a Militarist Prussian (he was an exiled revolutionist); that Nietzsche was a diciple of Wagner (Nietzsche preferred the music of Bizet, a Frenchman); and that the Kaiser is a disciple of Nietzsche, who would have laughed his childish pietism to scorn.

The Simple Answer.