g more than that hereditary
policy which has been the poison in Christendom for two hundred years.
There is a ghost who inhabits these perishing tenements, and in such a
picture as this of Raemaekers men can see it looking out of the eyes.
And it is neither the spirit of a tyrant nor of a booby; but the spirit
of a sly invalid.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

[Illustration: MISS CAVELL

WILLIAM: "Now you can bring me the American protest."]

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THE HOSTAGES

Ay', boy--you may well ask.

And the world asks also, and in due time will exact an answer to the
last drop of innocent blood.

What have you done?

You have fallen into the hands of the most scientifically organized
barbarism the world has ever seen, or, please God, ever will see--to
whom, of deliberate choice, such words as truth, honour, mercy, justice,
have become dead letters, by reason of the pernicious doctrines on which
the race has been nourished--by which its very soul has been poisoned.

Dead letters?--worn-out rags, the very virtues they once represented,
even in Germany, long since flung to the dust-heaps of the past in the
soulless scramble for power and a place in the sun which no one denied
her.

Deliberately, and of malice prepense, the military caste of Prussia has
taught, and the unhappy common-folk have accepted, that as a nation they
are past all that kind of thing. There is only one right in the
world--the might of the strongest. The weak to the wall! Make way for
the Hun, whose god is power, and his high-priests the Kaiser and the
Krupps.

And so, every nation, even the smallest, on whom the eye of the Minotaur
has settled in baleful desire, has said, "Better to die fighting than
fall into the hands of the devil!" And they have fought--valiantly, and
saved their souls alive, though their bodies may have been crushed out
of existence by overwhelming odds. As nations, however, they shall rise
again, and with honour, when their treacherous torturers have been
crushed in their turn.

And, wherever the evil tide has welled over a land, indemnities,
incredible and unreasonable, have been exacted, and hostages for their
payment, and for good behaviour under the yoke meanwhile, have been
taken.

Woe unto such! In many cases they have simply been shot in cold
blood--murdered as brazenly as by any Jack-the-Ripper. Murder, to