ding to the same document, of _men and
women_ between 17 and 46 years of age. If they refuse "they will be
placed in a _battalion of civil workers, on reduced rations_." Here is
the address of one of these militarised civilians dropped from a train
leaving for the Western front and picked up by a friend: X., 3 Comp.
Ziv. Arb. Bat. 27.--Et. Indp.--Armee No.

This did not prevent Governor von Bissing from declaring, a week later
(letter to Cardinal Mercier, October 26th), that: "No workman can be
obliged to participate in work connected with the war (_entreprises de
guerre_)"! [5]

The last fatal step has been taken. From decree to decree, from
proclamation to proclamation, the last threads of the curtain of
legality which remained between the victim and the tyrant have been cut
one by one. Between the acts of the German administration in Belgium and
those of the African slave drivers, we are now unable to discover any
difference whatever. The old plague which had been the shame of Europe
for more than two centuries has risen again from its ashes. It appears
before us with all its hideous characteristics. People are torn from
their homes and sent away to foreign lands without any hope of
returning. Any protest is crushed by the application of torture in the
form of starvation, exposure, and their kindred ills ... There is,
however, one new point about the modern slave: his face is as white as
that of his master.

The nineteenth century stamped out black slavery. It was left to the
twentieth century to reinstate white slavery. It is the purest glory of
the English-speaking people to have succeeded in eradicating the old
evil. It will be the eternal shame of the German-speaking people to have
replaced it by something worse. Civilisation forbade any man, sixty
years ago, to force another man to work for him. Civilisation to-day
does not forbid a man--a conqueror--to force another man to work against
himself. The old slave only lost his liberty. The new slave must lose
his honour, his dignity, his self-respect. He has only one other
alternative: death. And this, not the glorious death of a martyr which
makes thousands of converts and shines all over the world, not the death
of Nurse Cavell, but the anonymous death of X.Y.Z., the death of
hundreds and hundreds of unknown heroes who will die under the whip or
in the darkness of their cells in the German prison camps.

I had almost forgotten a last distinction between the ol