he crime was no greater than that of Pilate, who sought to wash his
hands of innocent blood; but von Bissing will enjoy "until the last
syllable of recorded time" the unenviable fame of Judge Jeffreys. He,
too, was an able Judge and probably believed that he was executing
justice, but because he did not execute it in mercy, but with a ferocity
that has made his name a synonym for judicial tyranny, the world has
condemned him to lasting infamy, and this notwithstanding the fact that
he was made Chief Justice of the King's Bench, Lord High Chancellor of
England, and a peer of the realm. All these titles are forgotten. Only
that of "Bloody Jeffreys" remains.

Similarly, if his master shall be pleased to honor General Baron von
Bissing with the iron cross for his action in the case of Miss Cavell,
as the Kaiser honored the Captain of the submarine which destroyed the
Lusitania--and what order could be more appropriate in both cases than
the cross, which recalls how another innocent victim of judicial tyranny
was sacrificed?--then even the Order of the Iron Cross will not save von
Bissing from lasting obloquy. I do not question that he acted according
to his lights and shared with Dr. Albert Zimmermann great "surprise"
that the world should make such a sensation about the murder of one
woman. Trajan once said that the possession of absolute power had a
tendency to transform even the most humane man into a wild beast, and
Judge Black in his great argument in the case of _ex parte_ Milligan
recalled the fact that Robespierre in his early life resigned his
commission as Judge rather than pronounce the sentence of death, and
that Caligula passed as a very amiable young man before he assumed the
imperial purple. The story is as old as humanity that the appetite for
blood, or at least the habit of murder, "grows by what it feeds upon."

The murder of Miss Cavell was one of exceptional brutality and
stupidity. It never occurred to her judges that her murder would add an
army corps to the forces of the Allies and that every English soldier
will fight more bravely because of her shining example. So little was
this appreciated either in Brussels or Berlin that the German Foreign
Office, in its official apology for the crime, issued over the signature
of Herr Doctor Albert Zimmermann, Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs,
expresses its surprise

_that the shooting of an Englishwoman and the condemnation of
several women in Br