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 civilization.
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."