=Cavell, Edith.=--An English nurse shot by the Germans as a spy at Brussels in October, 1915, an episode of the war which supplied the English propagandists in the United States with one of the principal articles in their bill of charges of German atrocities. Colonel E. R. West, chief of the legislative section of the Judge Advocate General’s Department, before the American Bar Association’s Committee on Military Justice, declared that the execution was entirely legal. S. S. Gregory, chairman of the committee, and Judge William P. Bynum, of Greensboro, N. C., before the Bar Association, (Baltimore, August 27, 1919), rendered a minority report of the same import. Col. West said: “We have heard much of the case of ‘poor Edith Cavell.’ Yet I have become rather firmly convinced that she was subject to her fate by the usual laws of war. Certainly the French have executed women spies.” Col. West agreed with the Chairman that it would be only consistent with the Anglo-Saxon attitude on the Cavell case to exempt women from the death penalty, but he added: “I believe that a woman spy deserves the same fate as a man spy. Otherwise we would open the gates wide to the most resourceful class of spies that is known.” In his report Mr. Gregory said: “A careful consideration of the case of Miss Edith Cavell, one of the most pathetic and appealing victims of the great war, whose unfortunate fate has aroused the sympathy and excited the indignation of two continents, has led me to the conclusion that she was executed in accordance with the laws and usages of what we are commonly pleased to refer to as civilized warfare. This being so, it has seemed to me quite inconsistent with our condemnation of those who thus took her life to retain in our own system of military justice those provisions of law which were relied upon by the German military authorities in ordering her execution. For us to take any other course, it seems to me, is to impeach our sincerity and good faith in criticising the German authorities in this regard, and to warrant the suggestion that such criticism is inspired rather by the fact that they, our enemies, were responsible for it, as well as sympathy for a good and worthy woman, than any well-considered judgment in the case.” The three majority members declared that “they could not concur in the suggestion of Mr. Gregory that there should be a provision prohibiting the death penalty in the case of women spies.”