A war of aggression is not less brigandage
because the armies march to proud songs and summon the Almighty to their
aid.

Raemaekers has done much to clear the eyes of humanity. The monarch of
_Felix Austria_, with the mantle of the Holy Roman Empire still dragging
from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old man, crowded
in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom his fathers
defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his bombast, is
only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band, the All Highest
himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver helmet, shows the
slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner bravo. And the cry
"God with us," which once rallied Crusades, has become on such lips the
signal of the _apache_.

JOHN BUCHAN.

[Illustration: GOD WITH US

"At the command 'Gott mit uns' you will go for them."]

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FERDINAND THE CHAMELEON

There is one whole field of the evil international influence of Germany
in which Ferdinand of Bulgaria is a much more important and symbolic
person than William of Prussia. He is, of course, a cynical
cosmopolitan. He is in great part a Jew, and an advanced type of that
_mauvais juif_ who is the principal obstacle to all the attempts of the
more genuine and honest Jews to erect a rational status for their
people.

Like almost every man of this type, he is a Jingo without being a
patriot. That is to say, he is of the type that believes in big
armaments and in a diplomacy even more brutal than armaments; but the
militarism and diplomacy are not humanized either by the ancient
national sanctities which surround the Czar of Russia, or the
spontaneous national popularity which established the King of Serbia. He
is not national, but international; and even in his peaceful activities
has been not so much a neutral as a spy.

In the accompanying cartoon the Dutch caricaturist has thrust with his
pencil at the central point of this falsity. It is something which is
probably the central point of everything everywhere, but is especially
the central point of everything connected with the deep quarrels of
Eastern Europe. It is religion. Russian Orthodoxy is an enormously
genuine thing; Austrian Romanism is a genuine thing; Islam is a genuine
thing; Israel, for that matter, is also a genuine thing.