The Christmas of Kultur, A.D. 1915

CHRISTMAS EVEJoseph: "The Holy War is at the door!"

Mary, worn with grief and fear, covers her emaciated face with scarred hands, as she kneels in prayer before the infant Jesus. Joseph, grown old and feeble, nails up a barricade of planks to strengthen the door against the missiles of Kultur already bursting through it and threatening the sleeping child. So in that first Christmas, nineteen centuries ago, he saved Mary's child from the baby-massacre ordered by Herod to preserve his own throne.

Kultur, the gathered wisdom of the ages, has brought us back to the same Holy War. What a Christmas! What a Festival of Peace and goodwill towards men!

People ask: Why does God allow it? Is God dead? Foolish questions. When I was at school I had the good fortune to be under a great teacher whose name is honoured to-day. He used to tell us that the most terrible verse in the Bible was: "So He gave them up unto their own hearts' lust and they walked in their own counsels" (Ps. lxxxi, 13).

Man has the knowledge of good and evil; he has eaten of the tree and insists on going his own way. He knows best. Is not this the age of science and Kultur? We must not cry out if the road we have chosen leads to disaster.

Yet still the Child of Christmas lives and a divine light shines round His head. He sleeps.

A. SHADWELL.

Serbia

SERBIA

Genius has set forth the most brutal characteristic of the Hun. In moments of triumph, invariably he is the bully, and, as invariably, he wallows in brutality—witness Belgium under his iron heel and, in this cartoon, stricken Serbia impotent to ward off the blow about to be dealt by a monstrous fist. That is the Teuton conception of War, Merry War (Lustige Krieg)! In the English prize-ring we have an axiom indelibly impressed upon novices—"Follow up one stout blow with another—quick!" That, also, is the consummate art of war. But when a man is knocked out we don't savage him as he lies senseless at our feet. The Hun does. His axiom is—"As you are strong, be merciless!"

In the small pig-eyes, in the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in every house in the kingdom until the terms of such a peace have been imposed which will make the shambles in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia an eternal nightmare of the past, never to be repeated in the future. And over the anæmic hearts of the Trevelyans, the Ramsay MacDonalds, the Arthur Ponsonbys, who dare to prattle of a peace that shall not humiliate Germany, I would have this cartoon tattooed, not in indigo, but in vermilion.

If Ulysses Grant exacted from the gallant Robert Lee "Unconditional Surrender," and if our generation approves—as it does—that grim ultimatum, what will be the verdict of posterity should we as a nation—we who have been spared the unspeakable horrors under which other less isolated countries have been "bled white"—descend to the infamy of a compromise between the Powers of Darkness and Light? The Huns respect Force, and nothing else. Mercy provokes contempt and laughter. I hold no brief for reprisals upon helpless women and children; I am not an advocate of what is called the "commercial extermination of Germany"; but it is my sincerest conviction that criminals must be punished. The Most Highest War Lord and his people, not excluding the little children who held high holiday when theLusitaniawas torpedoed, are—criminals.

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.

The Last of the Race

THE LAST OF THE RACEVon Tirpitz: No, my dears, I'm not sending any more of you to those wicked English; the survivors shall go to the Zoo."

Raemaekers, the master of an infinite variety of moods and touch, reserves a special category of scorn for Von Tirpitz. Savage cruelty in war, the wanton destruction of life and property, the whole gospel of frightfulness—these things have been abandoned (so the historians tell us), not because savagery was bad morals but because it was the worst way of making war. It was wiser to take the enemy's property—and put it to your own use than to destroy it. If it was plundered it was wasted. It was wiser to spare men, women, and children, so that they should be better subjects if they remained conquered, less irreconcilable enemies, if they were restored to their old allegiance. Besides, murder, plunder, and rapine demoralized your men. They made them less efficient troops for fighting. Doubtless the argument is sound. But it would never have been accepted had not the horrors of savagery been utterly loathsome and repulsive to the nations that abandoned them.

Conventions in the direction of humanity are not, then,artificialrestrictions in the use of force. They are natural restrictions, because all Christian and civilized people would far rather observe them than not. Germany has revelled in abandoning every restraint. Raemaekers shows the cruelty, the wickedness of this in scores of his drawings. Here it is its folly that he emphasizes.

The submarine is no longer a death-dealing terror. It has become a blubbering fish. And the author of its crimes is no diabolical triton, but a semi-imbecile old dotard, round whom his evil—but terrified—brood have clustered; they fawning on him in terror, he fondling them in shaky, decrepit fondness. Note the flaccid paunch, the withered top, and the foolish, hysterical face. How the full-dress cocked hat shames his nakedness!

And this, remember, is the German High Admiral as history will know him, when the futility of his crimes is proved, their evil put out of memory, and only their foolishness remains!

ARTHUR POLLEN.

The Curriculum

THE NEW SCHOOL CURRICULUMWilliam: "Write it down, schoolmaster—Monday shall be Copper Day, Tuesday, Potato Day, Wednesday, Leather Day; Thursday, Gold Day, Friday, Rubber Day; Saturday, No Dinner Day; and Sunday, Hate Day!"

The nations are being educated amain, let us hope. Germany has prided herself on her education, her learning, and on her Kultur. To-day she is beyond the calculation of all that foresight which has been her boast, and foible. Human nature, other than German, has not been on the national curriculum, and, as in other departments of study, what has not been reduced to rule and line is beyond the ken and apprehension. How stupendously wrong a Power which could count, and into a European War! on insurrection in India, the Cape, and other parts of the British Empire! and how naïvely did Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg disclose theZeitgeistof German rulers when with passion he declared Britain to be going to war for "a scrap of paper!" A purpose to serve, a treaty becomes "a scrap"—in German courtly hands.

The artist depicts a scene, with masterly pencil, where Von Bethmann-Hollweg himself is charged by the All-Highest to be schoolmaster. It is a grim department of the training. Think of the unseen as well as that shown. What you do see is the lordly, truculent Kaiser, raising that menacing finger again. In spacious chair, he sits defiant, aggressive, as a ferocious captain; and there opposite is the "great Chancellor," bent, submissive, apprehensive, tablet and pencil ready to take down the very word of Kaiserly wisdom and will. What is it? The day's fare for a week! reaching a climax of "No dinner" on Saturday, and "Hate" on Sunday! Educative! of course it will be.

Some day, not so far, even the German people will not regard the orders of the Army and Navy Staff, the cruel mercies of the Junkers, as a revelation of Heaven's will. Three pounds of sugar for a family's monthly supply will educate, even when the gospel of force has been preached for fifty years to a docile people. Many of us are in "a strait betwixt two" as we see how thousands of inoffensive old men, women, and children are made to suffer, are placed by the All-Highest in this Copper and Hate School. It is not this, that, and the other that causes this, but the Director of the School, who does not, while the miserable scholars do, know what it is to endure "No dinner," not only on Saturdays, but many other days. And all to gratify the mad projectors imposing Kultur on an unwilling world!

W. M. J. WILLIAMS.

The Dutch Journalist to His Belgian Confrère

The Dutch Journalist to His Belgian Confrère: "Eat and hold your tongue."

Whether the type here taken is a true criticism of a commercial attitude in a neutral State like Holland, it does not become us to discuss. Raemaekers is a Dutchman, and doubtless a patriotic Dutchman. And the patriot, and the patriot alone, has not only the right but the duty of criticising his own country.

For us it is better to regard the figure as an international, and often anti-national, character who exists in all nations, and who, even in a belligerent country like our own, can often contrive to be neutral and worse than neutral. A prosperous bully with the white waistcoat and coarse, heavily cuffed hands, with which such prosperity very frequently clothes itself, is represented as thrusting food in the starved face of an evicted Belgian and saying: "Eat and hold your tongue."

The situation is worthy of such record, if only because it emphasizes an element in the general German plot against the world which is often forgotten in phrases about fire and sword. The Prussianized person is not only a military tyrant; he is equally and more often a mercantile tyrant. And what is in this respect true of the German is as true or truer of the Pro-German.

The cosmopolitan agent of Prussia is a commercial agent, and works by those modern methods of bribing and sacking, of boycott and blackmail, which are not only meaner, but often more cruel, than militarism. For any one who realizes the power of such international combinations, there is the more credit due to the artists and men of letters who, like Raemaekers himself, have decisively chosen their side while the issue was very doubtful. And among the Belgian confrères there must certainly have been many who showed as much courage as any soldier, when they decided not to eat and be silent, but to starve and to speak.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

A Bored Critic

"I say, do suggest something new. This is becoming too boring."

From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim "revue" lacks something of the patience of its creator, and our Mephistopheles, marking the god's protest, will doubtless hurry the scene and diversify it with new devilries to restore his interest. Indeed, that has happened since Raemaekers made his picture.

The etiquette of butchery has become more complicated since Troy fell, yet it has been so far preserved till now that the fiend measures Ares with his eyes and speculates as to how far the martial god may be expected to tolerate his novel engines. Will asphyxiating gas, and destruction of non-combatants and neutrals on land and sea, trouble him? Or will he demand the rules of the game, and decline to applaud this satire on civilization, although mounted and produced regardless of cost and reckoning?

As the devil's own entertainment consists in watching the effects of his masterpiece on this warlike spectator, so it may be that those who "staged" the greatest war in mankind's history derive some bitter instruction from its reception by mankind. They know now that it is condemned by every civilized nation on earth; and before these lines are published their uncivilized catspaws will have ample reason to condemn it also. Neutrals there must be, but impartials none.

The sense and spirit of the thinking world now go so far with human reason that they demand a condition of freedom for all men and nations, be they weak or powerful. That ideal inspires the majority of human kind, and it follows that the evolution of morals sets strongly on the side of the Allies.

"War," says Bernhardi, "gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things." So be it.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

"The Peace Woman"

The Peace Woman: "We will march in white before our sons."The Neutral Soldier: "Madam, we would prefer the protection of an armour-plate."

In this humorous yet pathetic cartoon—humorous because of its truth to the type, and pathetic because of the futility of the effort depicted—with unfailing skill the artist shows the folly of the cry "Peace! Peace!" when there is none. In the forefront is a type of woman publicist who can never be happy unless the limelight secured by vocal effort and the advocacy of a "crazy" cause is focussed upon her. She calls "Peace!" that the world may hear, not attend. Behind her stands that other type of detached "peace woman," who has, judging from her placid yet grieved expression, apparently scarcely realized that the War is too serious and has its genesis in causes too deep-rooted to be quelled by her or her kind. One can imagine her saying: "A war! How terrible! It must be stopped."

The soldier, who is wise enough to prefer armour-plate even to a shield provided by substantially built peace women clad in white, looks on amused. The thinking world as a whole so looks on at "Arks" launched by American millionaire motor manufacturers, and at Pacifist Conferences held whilst the decision as to whether civilization or savagery shall triumph, and might be greater than right, yet hangs in the balance. There must be no thought of peace otherwise than as the ultimate reward of gallant men fighting in a just cause, and until with it can come permanent security from the "Iron Fist" of Prussian Militarism and aggression, and the precepts of Bernhardi and his kind are shown to be false. Those who talk of peace in the midst of "frightfulness," of piracy, of reckless carnage and colossal sacrifices of human life which are the fruits of an attempt to save by military glory a crapulous dynasty, however good their intention, lack both mental and moral perspective.

CLIVE HOLLAND.

The Self-satisfied Burgher

THE SELF-SATISFIED BURGHER"What does it matter if we're annexed afterwards, so long as we remain neutral now?"

The artist has depicted the ordinary attitude of a self-satisfied burgher not only in Holland but in other countries also. "What does it matter if we are annexed afterwards, so long as we remain neutral now?" That is the sort of speech made by selfish merchants in some of the neutral countries, especially those of Scandinavian origin. It is really a variety of the old text: "Let us eat, drink, and be merry; for to-morrow we die." Why not, it is urged, make the best of present facilities? As long as we are left alone we can pursue our ordinary industrialism. We can heap up our percentages and profits. Our trade is in a fairly flourishing condition, and we are making money. No one knows what the future may bring; why, therefore, worry about it? Besides, if the worst comes to the worst and Germany annexes us, are we quite sure that we shall be in a much worse condition than we are now? It will be to the interest of Berlin that we should carry on our usual industrial occupations. Our present liberty will probably not be interfered with, and a change of masters does not always mean ruin.

So argues the self-satisfied burgher. If life were no more than a mere matter of getting enough to eat and drink and of having a balance at the banker's, his view of the case might pass muster. But a national life depends on spiritual and ideal interests, just as a man's life "consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." Freedom is the only principal of growth, and freedom is the one thing which German militarism desires to make impossible for all those whom she gathers into her fold. The loss of liberty means the ruin of all those ends for which a State exists. Even the material prosperity which the self-satisfied burgher desires will be definitely sacrificed by a submission to Teutonic autocracy.

W. L. COURTNEY.

The Decadent

SEPTEMBER, 1914, AND SEPTEMBER, 19151914 "Now the war begins as we like it."1915 "But this is not as I wished it to continue."(Published after the French success in Champagne)

War is a fiery winnower of incapacities. Many reputations have gone to the scrap-heap since August, 1914. None more surely than that of the braggart Crown Prince. It is said that this terrible catastrophe was largely of his bringing about and his great desire and hope.

Well—he has got his desire, and more than he expected.

He was going to do mighty things—to smash through the frontier and lead the German hordes triumphantly through France. And what has he done?

In the treacherous surprise of the moment he got across the frontier, and there the weighty French fist met the Imperial optic, and has since developed many stars in it. He has been held, wasting men, time, opportunity, and his own little apology for a soul. He has done nothing to justify his position or even his existence. He has wrecked his home-life by wanton indulgence. He has made himself notorious by his private lootings of the châteaux cursed with his presence.

Even in 1870 the native cupidity of the far finer breed of conquerors could not resist the spoils of war, and, to their eternal disgrace, trainloads of loot were sent away to decorate German homes—as burglars' wives might wear the jewellery acquired by their adventurous menfolk in the course of their nefarious operations.

But we never heard of "Unser Fritz," the then Crown Prince, ransacking the mansions he stayed in. He was a great man and a good—the very last German gentleman. And this decadent is his grandson!

"Unser Fritz" was a very noble-looking man. His grandson—oh, well, look at him and judge for yourselves! Of a surety the sight is calculated to heighten one's amazement that any nation under the sun, or craving it, could find in such a personality, even as representative of a once great but now exploding idea, anything whatever even to put up with, much less to worship and die for.

The race of Hohenzollern has wilted and ravelled out to this. The whole world, outside Prussia, devoutly hopes ere long to have seen the last of it.

It has been at all times, with the single exception above noted, a hustling, grabbing, self-seeking race. May the eyes of Germany soon be opened! Then, surely, it will be thrust back into the obscurity whence heaven can only have permitted it to escape for the flagellation of a world which was losing its ideals and needed bracing back with a sharp, stern twist.

JOHN OXENHAM.

Liquid Fire

LIQUID FIRE

When one sits down to think, there are few things in connection with the devastating War now raging, wild-beast-like, almost throughout the length and breadth of Europe, so appalling as the application of science and man's genius to the work of decimating the human species.

Early in the conflict, which is being fought for the basal principles of civilization and moral human conduct, one was made to realize that the Allied Powers were opposed to an enemy whose resources were only equalled by his utter negation of the rules of civilized warfare. Soon, to the horrors of machine-guns and of high-explosive shells of a calibre and intensity of destructive force never before known, were added the diabolical engines for pouring over the field of battle asphyxiating gases. We know the horrors of that mode of German "frightfulness," and some of us have seen its effects in the slowly dying victims in hospitals. But that was not enough. Yet other methods of "frightfulness" and savagery, which would have disgraced the most ruthless conquerors of old, were to be applied by the German Emperor in his blasphemous "Gott mit uns" campaign. And against the gallant sons of Belgium, France, England, and Russia in turn were poured out with bestial ingenuity the jets and curtains of "liquid fire" which seared the flesh and blinded the eyes. For this there will be a reckoning if God be still in heaven whilst the world trembles with the shock of conflict, and the souls of men are seared.

Raemaekers in this cartoon shows not only the horror of such a method of warfare, but also, with unerring pencil, the unwavering spirit of the men who have to meet this "frightfulness." There is a land to be redeemed, and women and children to be avenged, and so the fighting men of the allied nations go gallantly on with their stern, amazed faces set towards victory.

CLIVE HOLLAND.

Nish and Paris

THE TRIALS OF A COURT PAINTER"I commenced this as the entry into Paris, but I must finish it as the entry into Nish,"

Very happily and very graphically has Raemaekers here pointed the contrast between the Gargantuan hopes with which the Kaiser and his Junker army embarked on the War, and the exiguous and shadowy fruits of their boasted victories up to the present. They foretold a triumphal entry into the conquered capital of France within a month of the opening of hostilities. Yet the irony of Fate has, slowly but surely, cooled the early fever of anticipation. The only captured town where the All-Highest has found an opportunity of lifting his voice in exultant pæan is Nish, a secondary city of the small kingdom of Serbia. There, too, he perforce delayed his jubilation until the lapse of some eighteen months after the date provisionally and prematurely fixed in the first ebullition of overconfidence, for his triumphal procession through Paris.

Nish is a town of little more than 20,000 inhabitants; about the size of Taunton or Hereford—smaller than Woking or Dartford. Working on a basis of comparative populations, the Emperor would have to repeat without more delay his bravery at Nish in 150 towns of the same size before he could convince his people that he is even now on the point of fulfilling his first rash promises to them of the rapid overthrow of his foes. Pursuing the same calculation, he is bound to multiply his present glories 350 times before he can count securely on spending a night as conquering hero in Buckingham Palace.

Even the Kaiser must know in his heart that woefully, from his own and his people's point of view, did he overestimate his strength at the outset. For the time he contents himself with the backwater of Nish for the scene of his oratory of conquest. His vainglorious words may well prove in their environment the prelude of a compulsory confession of failure, which is likely to come at a far briefer interval than the eighteen months which separate the imaginary hope of Paris from the slender substance of Nish.

SIDNEY LEE.

Gott Strafe England!

GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND!"Now she prevents my sending goods by the Holland route!"

In these sombre times one is grateful for a touch of humour, and it would perhaps be impossible to conceive in all created nature a spectacle so exquisitely ludicrous as the appearance of the Prussian in the guise of a Wronged Man. For, of course, it is the very foundation of the Prussian theory that there can be no such thing as a wronged man. Might is right. That which physical force has determined and shall determine is the only possible test of justice. That was the diabolic but at least coherent philosophy upon which the Kingdom of Prussia was originally based and upon which the German Empire created by Prussia always reposed.

Nor was that philosophy—which among other things dictated this war—ever questioned, much less abandoned, by the Germans so long as it seemed probable to the world and certain to them that they were destined to win. Now that it has begun to penetrate even into their mind that they are probably going to lose, we find them suddenly blossoming out as pacifists and humanitarians.

Especially are they indignant at the "cruelty" of the blockade. It is not necessary to examine seriously a contention so obviously absurd. Any one acquainted with the history of war knows the blockade of an enemy's ports is a thing as old as war itself. Every one acquainted with the records of the last half-century knows that Prussia owes half her prestige to the reduction of Paris in 1871—effected solely by the starvation of its civilian inhabitants.

But the irony goes deeper than that. Look at the face of the Prussian in "Raemaekers' Cartoons" and you will understand why Germans in America, Holland, and other neutral countries are now talking pacifism and exuding humanitarian sentiment. You will understand why the German Chancellor says that in spite of the victorious march of Germany from victory to victory his tender heart cannot but plead for the dreadful sufferings of the unhappy, though criminal, Allies. Then you will laugh; which is good in days like these.

CECIL CHESTERTON.

The Pacificist Kaiser(The Confederates)

THE CONFEDERATES"Did they believe that peace story in the Reichstag, Bethmann?""Yes, but the Allies didn't."

From time to time of late the Kaiser has posed as the champion of peace. His official spokesman, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, has announced the Imperial readiness to stay the war—on his master's own terms, which he disdains to define precisely.

The Emperor and his advisers are involved in a tangle of miscalculations which infest the conduct of the war alike in the field of battle and the council-chamber. But no wild imaginings could encourage a solid hope that the Chancellor's peaceful professions would be taken seriously by anybody save his own satellites. Loudly the compliant Minister vaunted in the Reichstag his country's military successes, but he could point to no signs either of any faltering in military preparations on the part of the Allies, or of their willingness to entertain humiliating conditions of peace.

Even in Germany clear visions acknowledge that Time is fighting valiantly on the side of Germany's foes, and that peace can only come when the Central Powers beg for it on their knees.

It is improbable that the Kaiser and his Chancellor now harbour many real illusions about the future, although they may well be anxious to disguise even to themselves the ultimate issues at stake in the war. Their home and foreign policy seems to be conceived in the desperate spirit of the gambler. They appear to be recklessly speculating on the chances of a pacificist rôle conciliating the sympathy of neutrals. They count on the odds that they may convert the public opinion of non-combatant nations to the erroneous belief that Germany is the conqueror, and that further resistance to her is futile. But so far the game has miscarried. The recent German professions of zeal for peace fell in neutral countries on deaf or impatient ears. The braggart bulletins of the German Press Bureau have been valued at their true worth. Neutral critics have found in Bethmann-Hollweg's cry for peace mere wasted breath

The Chancellor and his master are perilously near losing among neutrals the last shreds of reputation for political sagacity.

SIDNEY LEE.

Dinant

DINANT—I SEE FATHER.

During the joint expedition to Peking, all the other contingents were horrified at the cruelty of the German troops. I have heard how on one occasion a number of Chinese women were watching a German regiment at drill, when suddenly the commanding officer ordered his men to open fire upon them. When remonstrated with, he replied that terrorism was humane in the end, because it made the enemy desire peace. For some reason, these atrocities were not very widely known in England; and no one dreamed that such infernal crimes would ever be perpetrated in European war. But such are indeed the calculated methods of Germany; and her officers began to order them as soon as her troops crossed the Belgian frontier. The German military authorities advise that terrorism should be used sparingly when there is danger of reprisals. Accordingly, though many abominable things have been done to civilians in France and Russia, and to ourselves when opportunity offered, the worst atrocities were committed in Belgium, because Belgium is a small country, which had dispensed with universal military service in reliance on the international guarantee of her security. These events of the first month of the war are in danger of being forgotten, now that Germany is contending on equal terms against the great nations of Europe. But they must not be forgotten. We are fighting against a nation which thinks it good policy to massacre non-combatants, provided only that the sons and brothers of the victims are not in a position to retaliate.

W. R. INGE.

"Hesperia" (Wounded First)

Another kind of heroism—the sinking of the Hospital ShipHesperia(Wounded First)

Sailors of all nationality except German have from time immemorial looked upon themselves as the guardians and protectors of land folk at sea.

That is why every sailor in the world, outside the doggeries of Hamburg, felt his calling spat upon and his personal pride injured by the sinking of theLusitania—by a sailor.

It seemed that nothing could be worse than that, and then came the sinking of theHesperia, a ship filled with wounded soldiers and Hospital nurses.

Raemaekers brings the fact home to us in this cartoon, not the fact of the English nurses' heroism, which goes without saying, but of German low-down common infamy. The fact has become so commonplace, so accustomed, so everyday that pictures of burning cathedrals, murdered children, and terrified women no longer move us as they did, but this artist, whose command of language seems as infinite and varied as the crimes of the criminals whom God sent him to scourge, has always some stroke in reserve, something to add to what he has said, if need be. In the case of this picture it is the medicine bottle, glass, and spoon flying off the shelf, flung to the floor by the bursting charge of Tri-nitro-toluine that adds the last touch as distinctive as the artist's signature.

H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.

Gallipoli

GALLIPOLITurkish General: "What are you firing at? The British evacuated the place twenty-four hours ago!""Sorry, sir—but what a glorious victory!

It is a fine touch, or a fortunate accident, in this sketch of Raemaekers' that it depicts the officer who has made the mistake as exhibiting the spruceness of a Prussian, and the officer who has found out the mistake as having the comparatively battered look of an old Turk. The moustaches of the Young Turk are modelled on the Kaiser's, spikes pointing to heaven like spires; while those of his justly incensed superior officer hang loose like those of a human being. The difference is in any case symbolic; for the sort of instinctive and instantaneous self-laudation satirized in this cartoon is much more one of the vices of the new Germany than of the antiquated Islam. That spirit is not easy to define; and it is easy to confuse it with much more pardonable things. Every people can be jingo and vainglorious; it is the mark of this spirit that the instinct to be so acts before any other instinct can act, even those of surprise or anger. Every people emphasizes and exaggerates its victories more than its defeats. But this spirit emphasizes its defeats as victories. Every national calamity has its consolations; and a nation naturally turns to them as soon as it reasonably can. But it is the stamp of this spirit that it always thinks of the consolationbeforeit even thinks of the calamity. It abounds throughout the whole press of the German Empire. But it is most shortly shown in this figure of the young officer, who makes a hero of himself before he has even fully realized that he has made a fool of himself.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

The Beginning of the Expiation

THE BEGINNING OF THE EXPIATION

It is sometimes an unpleasant necessity to insult a man, in order to make him understand that he is being insulted. Indeed, most strenuous and successful appeals to an oppressed populace have involved something of this paradox. We talk of the demagogue flattering the mob; but the most successful demagogue generally abuses it. The men of the crowd rise in revolt, not when they are addressed as "Citizens!" but when they are addressed as "Slaves!"

If this be true even of men daily disturbed by material discomfort and discontent, it is much truer of those cases, not uncommon in history, in which the slave has been soothed with all the external pomp and luxury of a lord. So prophets have denounced the wanton in a palace or the puppet on a throne; and so the Dutch caricaturist denounces the gilded captivity of the Austrian Monarchy, of which the golden trappings are golden chains.

But for such a purpose a caricaturist is better than a prophet, and comic pictures better than poetical phrases. It is very vital and wholesome, even for his own sake, to insult the Austrian. He ought to be insulted because he is so much more respectable than the Prussian, who ought not to be insulted, but only kicked. If Austria feels no shame in letting the Holy Roman Empire become the petty province of an Unholy Barbarian Empire, if such high historic symbols no longer affect her, we can only tell her, in as ugly a picture as possible, that she is a lackey carrying luggage.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

The Shirkers

THE SHIRKERS

Current experience is proving that war is a grim condition of life, and that none can escape its effects. No religious or philosophic precept is potent enough in practical application to prevent its outbreak or to stay its course. The strong man of military age, who claims the right to pursue normal peaceful avocations when his country is at war, pleads guilty, however involuntarily, to aberrations of both mind and heart.

There are few who do not conscientiously cherish repugnance for war, but practically none of those to whom so natural a sentiment makes most forcible appeal deem it a man's part to refuse a manifest personal call of natural duty. The conscientious objector to combatant service may in certain rare cases deserve considerate treatment, but very short shrift should await the able-bodied men who, from love of ease or fear of danger, simulate conscientious objection in order to evade a righteous obligation.

Lack of imagination may be at times as responsible for the sin of the shirker as lack of courage. Patriotism is an instinct which works as sluggishly among the unimaginative as among the cowardly and the selfish. The only cure for the sluggish working of the patriotic instinct among the cowardly and the selfish is the sharp stimulus of condign punishment. But among the unimaginative it may be worth experimenting by way of preliminary with earnest and urgent appeals to example such as is offered not only by current experience, but also by literature and history. No shirkers would be left if every subject of the Crown were taught to apprehend the significance of Henley's interrogation:

What have I done for you,England, my England?What is there I would not do,England, my own?

SIDNEY LEE.

One of the Kaiser's Many Mistakes

BOTHA TO BRITAIN"I have carried out everything in accordance with our compact at Vereeniging."

Louis Botha—we touch our hats to you!

You are supremely and triumphantly one of the Kaiser's many mistakes. You have proved yourself once again a capable leader and a man among men. You have proved him once more incapable of apprehending the meaning of the word honour. You are an honourable man. Even as a foe you fought us fair and we honoured you. You have valiantly helped to dig the grave of his dishonour and have proved him a fool. We thank you! And we thank the memory of the clear-visioned men of those old days who, in spite of the clamour of the bats, persisted in tendering you and yours that right hand of friendship which you have so nobly justified.

You fought us fair. You have uprisen from the ashes of the past like the Phoenix of old. You are Briton with the best.

Fair fight breeds no ill-will. It is the man, and the nation, that fights foul and flings God and humanity overboard that lays up for itself stores of hatred and outcastry and scorn which the ages shall hardly efface.

And Germany once was great, and might have been greater.

Delenda est Germania!—so far as Germania represents the Devil and all his works.

The following lines were written fourteen years ago when we welcomed the end of the Boer War. We are all grateful that the hope therein expressed has been so amply fulfilled. That it has been so is largely due to the wisdom and statesmanship of Louis Botha.

No matter now the rights and wrongs of it;You fought us bravely and we fought you fair.The fight is done. Grip hands! No malice bear!We greet you, brothers, to the nobler strifeOf building up the newer, larger life!Join hands! Join hands! Ye nations of the stock!And make henceforth a mighty Trust for Peace;—A great enduring peace that shall withstandThe shocks of time and circumstance; and every landShall rise and bless you—and shall never ceaseTo bless you—for that glorious gift of Peace.

Germany, if she had so willed, could have come into that hoped-for Trust for Peace.

But Germany would not. She put her own selfish interests before all else and so digs her own grave.

JOHN OXENHAM.

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