The worst part of these infamous inventions has been that they have stirred up the blind fury of the English populace against tens of thousands of inoffensive and useful foreigners who have done nothing but good in a hundred honest professions, and who are now, in the midst of savage threats and insults, torn from their industrious homes and thrust into bleak and miserable prisons without a single comfort on the brink of the wintry season. The spectacle is a hideous one, and the military censorship which has spread the exciting calumnies has gained no enviable place in truthful history. F. Hugh O’Donnell. Formerly foreign editor on the “Morning Post,” “Spectator,” and other leading journals. Melville E. Stone, general manager of the “Associated Press,” in an address before the Commercial Club of St. Louis, early in 1918, as reported in the St. Louis “Globe-Democrat,” of March 25, 1918, among other things made the following statement: One of the many rumors which I have investigated since the beginning of the war is that “the hands of Belgian children have been cut off.” This is not the truth. Aside from all other proof, a child whose hands had been cut off would die if not given immediate medical attention; any surgeon or physician will bear me out in this. The rumor was given currency by pro-Germans in this country, I believe, because it was so easy to deny it; they could assume on the strength of the proof of that denial that all other atrocities, of which there were innumerable instances, could be denied. I have investigated forty or fifty of such stories, and in every case have found them untrue. One of these statements came from the wife of a leading banker in Paris. She was asked where she had seen the child, and mentioned a certain railway station. Asked if she had seen the child, she replied she had seen a little girl with her hands wrapped up. She did not know the little girl. In reply to another question she admitted she had been told the child’s hands had been cut off by Germans by a woman who stood on the platform near her. She had never seen the woman before or after, and did not know her or know her name. “There is a little band of Catholic priests,” he said, “who have been going into Belgium and Holland and hunting out children who have lost one or both parents or in the great excitement have become separated from their parents. They informed me in a letter that they had taken between 5,000 and 6,000 children from these countries and found homes for them, and that they never had seen such a case and didn’t believe they existed.”