of paper” just as effectively as Germany has?  As my husband puts it:  England gave Belgium a check, a big check, and gave it with much ostentation, but took care that there should be no funds to meet it!  Trusting to your check Belgium finds herself bankrupt, sequestrated, blotted out as a nation.  But I know England well enough to foresee that English statesmen, with our old friend, the Manchester Guardian, which we used to read in years gone by, will always quote with pride how they “guaranteed” the neutrality of Belgium.

As to the future.  You cannot win.  A nation that has prided itself on making no sacrifice for political power or even independence must pay for its pride.  Our house here in Bremen has lately been by way of a centre for naval men, and to a less extent, for officers of the neighbouring commands.  They are absolutely confident that they will land ten army corps in England before Christmas.  It is terrible to know what they mean to go for.  They mean to destroy.  Every town which remotely is concerned with war material is to be annihilated.  Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, Northampton are to be wiped out, and the men killed, ruthlessly hunted down.  The fact that Lancashire and Yorkshire have held aloof from recruiting is not to save them.  The fact that Great Britain is to be a Reichsland will involve the destruction of inhabitants, to enable German citizens to be planted in your country in their place.  German soldiers hope that your poor creatures will resist, as patriots should, but they doubt it very much.  For resistance will facilitate the process of clearance.  Ireland will be left independent, and its harmlessness will be guaranteed by its inevitable civil war.

You may wonder, as I do sometimes, whether this hatred of England is not unworthy, or a form of mental disease.  But you must know that it is at bottom not hatred but contempt; fierce, unreasoning scorn for a country that pursues money and ease, from aristocrat to trade-unionist labourer, when it has a great inheritance to defend.  I feel bitter, too, for I spent half my life in your country and my dearest friends are all English still; and yet I am deeply ashamed of the hypocrisy and make-believe that has initiated your national policy and brought you down.  Now, one thing more.  England is, after all, only a stepping stone.  From Liverpool, Queenstown, Glasgow, Belfast, we shall reach out across the ocean.  I firmly believe that within a year Germany will have seized the new Canal and proclaimed its defiance of the great Monroe Doctrine.  We have six million Germans in the United States, and the Irish-Americans behind them.  The Americans, believe me, are as a nation a cowardly nation, and will never fight organized strength except in defense of their own territories.  With the Nova Scotian peninsula and the Bermudas, with the West Indies and the Guianas we shall be able to dominate the Americas.  By our possession of the entire