nces, they looked for all the
world like a school treat. But I have often wondered whether we
were right to take them away or whether it would not have been
better to have left them to take their chance. War is a very
terrible thing, and the well-meant interference of the kind-
hearted may do far more harm than good. What is going to
happen to those children? I suppose that they are in some
refugee home, to remain there till the war is over. And then?
We did our best to identify them, but what are the chances that
many of them will ever see their parents again? From what I
have seen of these things I do not think that they are very large.
Perhaps you will say that the parents ought to have gone with
them. It is easy for the well-to-do to leave their homes and to
settle again elsewhere; but the poorer a man is the less can he
afford to leave what little he possesses. In their own town they
might be in danger, but at least they had not lost their homes,
and they possessed the surroundings without which their
individual lives would be merged in the common ocean of
misery. The problem of the civil population, and especially of
the children, in time of war is entirely beyond the scope of
individual effort. It is a matter with which only a Government or a
very powerful organization can deal, and it is a matter in which
Governments do not take a great deal of interest. Their hands
are quite full enough in trying to defeat the enemy.

In all previous wars between civilized nations a certain regard
has been paid to the safety of the civilian population, and
especially of the women and children. But from the very first the
German policy has been to utterly ignore the rights of non-
combatants, tearing up the conventions which they themselves
had signed for their protection. No Government could be
expected to be prepared for such a total apostasy from the
elementary principles of civilized society, or to anticipate
methods at which a Zulu might blush. If they had done so, it
should have been their first care to remove all non-combatants
from the area of fighting, and to make provision for them
elsewhere. It is unfair that a civilian should be left with the
hopeless choice of leaving a child in a house where it may at
any moment be killed by a shell or taking it away with a
considerable probability that it will be a homeless orphan. For
life is a matter of small moment; it is living that matters.

The problem of the children o