Monaco, he says, “seems to be, on the whole, the most prosperous and comfortable State in Europe.”  If this is buffoonery it is singularly out of place.  But even Monaco has an “army,” has had recently a small revolution, and the Monegasques do not consider themselves ideally comfortable, and they have many “injustices.”  Does he hold the principality up as a model administration and the source of its prosperity as above reproach?

Mr. Shaw represents no one but himself, and, like all small men, he reviles others greater than he, such as Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith, but it does not become him, looking at his own life’s history, to cast cheap sneers at anonymous journalists in cheap newspapers, who, though they may lack his literary style, possess, at least, one virtue which he boasts that he has not—­patriotism!  Yours very truly,

LAWRENCE GRANT.

New York, Nov. 18.

* * * * *

Antidote to “Long Infliction of Dreary Stuff."

To the Editor of The New York Times: 

Hail to Bernard Shaw!  Could anything be more refreshing?  After the long infliction upon us of the flood of dreary stuff from London and Paris, and all the talk of German militarism, and what is to become of it at the hands of such immaculately unmilitary apostles of peace and international righteousness and treaty observances as Russia, France, and England, and all the maudlin denunciations of the German Nietzsche and Bernhardi, and the terrible Kaiser, could anything be more refreshing than Shaw’s advent in the field of current war history?

Though an Anglo-Saxon of American birth and long descent, and no believer in militarism of any sort of itself, yet I see in that no reason to distort ancient history by an attempt to make it appear that German militarism is at all the chief sinner, or, for that matter, not a very necessary and desirable thing in order that Germany may have her rightful place in the world, or any place at all.

V.A.W.  Warwick, N.Y., Nov. 16.

* * * * *

False Assumptions Basis of Shaw’s Attack.

To the Editor of The New York Times: 

The article on the European war by Mr. G.B.  Shaw in THE TIMES of Sunday appeals to me as a noteworthy specimen of what an artful literary genius can do in the way of argumentative cantankerousness.  His chief grievance is British diplomacy as represented by Sir Edward Grey, upon whose devoted head he empties the vials of his splenetic humor.

Underlying his argument are two glaringly false assumptions, and on these the whole fabric rests.  The first is that a certain undefined but presumably multitudinous body, which he designates as “Socialist,” “Democratic,” and “Social Democratic,” is better qualified to determine the policy and conduct the correspondence of the Foreign Office than trained and experienced statesmen.