ble and
inexpiable abominations wrought throughout Belgium and French Flanders
by the Germans--which, already, in the course of Divine retribution,
have involved their own country in material losses it will take from
three to four generations to repair; and their once honoured name in
contempt, and reprobation, and infamy, wherefrom it can never be
redeemed.

Nevertheless, as an Englishman, I shrink from giving any emphasis there
may be in my "hand and signature" to these righteously condemnatory and
withering cartoons; and because, each one of them, as I turn to it,
brings more and more crushingly home to me the transcending sin of
England--of every individual Englishman with a vote for Members of
Parliament--in not having prepared for this war; a sin that has
implicated us in the destruction of the whole rising generation of the
flower of our manhood; and, before this date, would have brought us
under subjection to Germany but for the confidence placed by the rank
and file of the British people and nation in Lord Kitchener of Khartum.

Now--face to face with enemies--from the Kaiser downward to his humblest
subjects--animated by the highest, noblest ideals, but again perverted
for a time--as in the case of their ancestors in the Middle Ages--by a
secular epidemic of "Panmania," they are to be faced not with idle
reproaches and revilings, still less with undignified taunts and gibes,
but with close-drawn lips and clenched teeth, in the determination that,
once having cast Satan out of them, he shall be bound down to keep the
peace of Christendom--"for a thousand years."

GEORGE BIRDWOOD.

[Illustration: WE'LL GIVE YOU THE TITLE OF MPRET OF POLAND

The new Governor has had the title of Mpret given to him, the same that
was given to the ill-starred Prince of Wied when made ruler of Albania
in 1914.]

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II--"SISYPHUS,--HIS STONE"

Sisyphus, as the story goes, was a King who widely extended the
commerce, and largely increased the wealth, of Corinth, but by
avaricious and fraudful ways; for the sin whereof he was sentenced after
death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus, a huge
unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill top, for
all his efforts, rolls down again. In classical representation of the
scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantal