It has always seemed to me a signal instance of Wordsworth’s penetrating thought “on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,” that he assigned to this virtue a dominant place in the Character of the Happy Warrior—­

  “Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
  And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train! 
  Turns his necessity to glorious gain”;

and who, “as more exposed” than others “to suffering and distress,” is

  “Hence, also, more alive to tenderness.”

This tribute to the moral nature of the Warrior, whether his warfare be on land or on sea or in the air, is as true to-day as when Wordsworth paid it.  The brutal and senseless cry for “reprisals” which of late has risen from some tainted spots of the Body Politic will wake no response unless it be an exclamation of disgust from soldiers and sailors and airmen.  Of course, everyone knows that there is a sense in which reprisals are a necessary part of warfare.  Generation after generation our forefathers fought bow to bow and sword to sword and gun to gun against equally armed and well-matched foes; this was reprisal, or, if you prefer, retaliation.  And when, in more recent times, the devilish ingenuity of science invented poisonous gas, there was nothing unmanly or unchivalrous in retorting on our German enemies with the hideous weapon which they had first employed.

But this is not the kind of reprisal which indurated orators demand.  They contend that because the Germans kill innocent civilians, and women, and little children in English streets, Englishmen are to commit the same foul deeds in Germany.  “It is hard,” says the Church Times, “to say whether futility or immorality is the more striking characteristic of the present clamour for reprisals in the matter of air-raids....  Mr. Joynson Hicks would ’lay a German town in ashes after every raid on London,’ and he is not much worse than others who scream in the same key.”  Nay, he is better than many of them.  The people who use this language are not the men of action.  They belong to a sedentary and neurotic class, who, lacking alike courage and mercy, gloat over the notion of torture inflicted on the innocent and the helpless.

A German baby is as innocent as an English baby, a German mother is as helpless as an English mother; and our stay-at-home heroes, safely ensconced in pulpits or editorial chairs, shrilly proclaim that they must be bombed by English airmen.  What a function to impose on a band of fighters, peculiarly chivalrous and humane!

I refer to the pulpit because one gross and disgusting instance of clerical ferocity has lately been reported.  A raving clergyman has been insolently parodying the Gospel which he has sworn to preach.  Some of the newspapers commended his courage; and we do not know whether his congregation quitted the church or his Bishop rebuked him.  Both results are possible, and I sincerely hope that the latter is true.