“Until Home Rule emerges from its present suspended animation,” says Mr. Shaw, “I shall retain my Irish capacity for criticising England with something of the detachment of a foreigner.”  Now, these words are not a little surprising, because Mr. Shaw’s interest in the Home Rule cause has hitherto been of a most restrained and well-nigh secret character, and any one who imagines that Mr. Shaw is a strenuous campaigner for Home Rule is greatly mistaken.  If in the years preceding the war the Horne Rule cause had depended upon Mr. Shaw’s activities, it would have been in a bad way.  It is now, when a foreign enemy menaces our nation as a whole, that Mr. Shaw manifests this enhanced interest in Home Rule.

The suffragettes, who have fought and suffered for their cause as no living man reformer in the British Isles has fought and suffered for his, have during the present crisis subordinated their claim to the urgent claims of national honor and safety.  So Mr. Shaw, whose campaigning is done generally in the armchair, and never in any place more dangerous than the rostrum, ought surely to refrain from his frivolous, inconsistent, destructive, and unprofitable criticism of our country.

As for the question of lynching, Mr. Shaw is, the American public may be assured, in no danger whatever of being lynched.  He is in far more danger of having the Iron Cross conferred upon him by the Kaiser in recognition of his attempt to supplement the activities of the official German Press Bureau.  But if he were a German subject, writing on certain points of German policy as he does upon certain points of British policy, his fate can well be imagined.  The only retribution that will come upon this man, who exploits the freedom of speech and pen that England gives him, is that his words lose now and henceforth the weight they used to have.  Oh, the conceit of the man, who in this dark hour, when the English are dying on the battlefield, writes of “taking the conceit out of England” by a stroke of his inconsequent pen!

Admits England’s Cause Is Just.

But with all his will to “take the conceit” out of this England, so fiercely menaced, her sons killed, her daughters widowed—­yet needing, so he thinks, his castigation into the bargain—­the critic is constrained to admit that our country is playing the part of “the responsible policeman of the West” and that “for England to have refrained from hurling herself into the fray, horse, foot, and artillery, was impossible from every point of view.”  Then why preface these statements by a series of attacks upon the country which is admitted to be justly fighting in a just cause?

The sole importance of Mr. Shaw’s criticism comes from this.  He unwarrantably indorses statements made by Germany in her attempt to put the Allies in the wrong.  Because he is known to the German people by his dramatic work, extracts from his article will be circulated among them as an expression of the views of a representative British citizen.  And how are the Germans to know that this is false, deprived as they are of news of what is happening in the outside world and ignorant as they must be of Mr. Shaw’s real lack of influence at this serious time?