[Sidenote: The first letter of inquiry not answered.]

[Sidenote: Reasons given for Miss Cavell's arrest.]

One day in August it was learned at the Legation that an English nurse,
named Edith Cavell, had been arrested by the Germans. I wrote a letter
to the Baron von der Lancken to ask if it was true that Miss Cavell had
been arrested, and saying that if it were I should request that Maitre
de Leval, the legal counselor of the Legation, be permitted to see her
and to prepare for her defense. There was no reply to this letter, and
on September tenth I wrote a second letter, repeating the questions and
the requests made in the first. On the twelfth of September I had a
reply from the Baron stating that Miss Cavell had been arrested on the
fifth of August, that she was confined in the prison of St. Gilles, that
she had admitted having hidden English and French soldiers in her home,
as well as Belgians, of an age to bear arms, all anxious to get to the
front, that she had admitted also having furnished these soldiers with
money to get to France, and had provided guides to enable them to cross
the Dutch frontier; that the defense of Miss Cavell was in the hands of
Maitre Thomas Braun, and that inasmuch as the German Government, on
principle, would not permit accused persons to have any interviews
whatever, he could not obtain permission for Maitre de Leval to visit
Miss Cavell as long as she was in solitary confinement.

[Sidenote: The German mentality.]

[Sidenote: The principle that power makes right.]

[Sidenote: The accused without rights.]

For one of our Anglo-Saxon race and legal traditions to understand
conditions in Belgium during the German occupation, it is necessary to
banish resolutely from the mind every conception of right we have
inherited from our ancestors--conceptions long since crystallized into
inimitable principles of law and confirmed in our charters of liberty.
In the German mentality these conceptions do not exist; they think in
other sequences; they act according to another principle, if it is a
principle, the conviction that there is only one right, one privilege,
and that it belongs exclusively to Germany, the right, namely, to do
whatever they have the physical force to do. These so-called courts, of
whose arbitrary and irresponsible and brutal nature I have tried to
convey some notion, were mere inquisitorial bodies, guided by no
principle save that of interest in their own bloody nature