[Illustration: LIBERTÉ! LIBERTÉ, CHÉRIE!]
I--“A Knavish Piece of Work”
There can be no defence of the spirit of hatred in which the Germans
have, so fatally for their future, carried on this amazing mad war
of theirs, in violation of all human instincts of self-respect and
self-preservation, to say nothing of the obligations of religion
and morality observed among mankind from the first dawnings of
civilisation. The knavery, the villainy, and the besotted bestiality
of it can never be forgotten, and must never be forgiven, and Louis
Raemaekers, gifted as he is with the rare dramatic genius that
discriminates his Cartoons, has but discharged an obvious patriotic
duty in publishing them to the world at large, as true and faithful
witnesses to the unspeakable 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.”