Henceforward the general public must be kept informed of what is happening in the international world.  Foreign politics must be conducted with greater publicity.  There, at least, Bernard Shaw is right, but this is a reform which he and his fellow-men have failed to effect, whereas women, had they been voters, would have demanded and secured it long ago.

Now, although undue diplomatic secrecy, always wrong, will be especially wrong when the terms of peace come to be made, sentimentality will certainly be more mischievous still.  It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Bernard Shaw’s writings on the war are intended as an appeal to sentimentality—­an appeal that Germany at the close of the war shall have treatment which, by being more than just to her, would be less than just to the countries whom she has attacked, and would mean a recurrence of this appalling war in after years.

Before the war specious words were used to cloak the German policy of aggression which has plunged the world in horror and is martyrizing peoples.  In view of the coming victory of the Allies, the same tactics will be adopted by the German militarists, and it behooves Bernard Shaw to beware lest even without intent he serve as their tool.  Men such as he who believe that while they can never be in the wrong, their country can never be in the right, are just the men who are in danger of stumbling at this time.

[Illustration:  CHRISTABEL PANKHURST.

Photo (C) by Underwood & Underwood.

See Page 68]

[Illustration:  JAMES M. BARRIE. See Page 100]

Comment by Readers of Shaw

     Shaw Has Made Minister von Jagow’s Remark on a “Scrap of Paper”
     Understandable.

To the Editor of The New York Times: 

Most hearty thanks for that masterly “common-sense” article of Bernard Shaw.  How clearly he expresses the much that many of us have felt way down inside and have not been able to formulate even to ourselves!

He has made at least one woman—­and one of German parentage at that—­understand what reams of public and private communications from all over the Fatherland could not make clear:  just why the blunt, impetuous, shocked, and astounded Kaiser dared give utterance to that disgraceful “scrap of paper” remark—­inexcusable but also very understandable in the light of his knowledge of and confidence in a more astute miscreant; why France and Germany have always considered England more or less of a Tartuffe and a “Scheinheilige” (one who seems holy); and why every German—­man, woman and child—­so execrates Sir Edward Grey and colleagues.

Nothing in all the sickening present conditions, the future long-lasting woe and misery, the barbarous neutrality violations has so made me blush for my mother’s country as the “scrap of paper” incident; and it has been most bitter to listen to the extravagant, fantastic eulogies on England, with which we’ve been so favored without feeling honestly able to make any excuses whatever for Germany.