Still another evil, and one which of late has been much ventilated in Germany, is the abuse of power by officers and non-commissioned officers towards their subordinates. There has always been too much of this in the German army, and it would carry us too far afield to trace here the causes. In itself it seems a strange anomaly that in an army which calls itself by the proud term of a “nation in arms,” and whose membership is recruited from every stratum of society, there should be such wholesale maltreatment of the privates by their superior officers. And yet such is the fact, inexplicable as it seems at first sight. Against this curse the Kaiser has likewise launched his thunderbolts at some time or other. But they have had no effect. If anything there has been an increase in such cases. At a Reichstag session, in the middle of December, the Kaiser’s spokesman, General von Einem, made the formal admission that during the preceding year no fewer than fifty officers and five hundred and seventy-nine non-commissioned officers had been court-martialed and sentenced for cruelly maltreating their subordinates. When we reflect that scarcely in one case out of every hundred formal charges are preferred by the victims, who know themselves completely in the power of their tyrannous masters, the official record thus stated is indeed appalling. But here again the Kaiser himself, as chief commander of the army, must be held largely responsible; for his more than lenient treatment of the convicted offenders is nothing less than a direct encouragement to their fellows to continue in these fiendish practices. One sergeant, a man by the name of Franzki, belonging to the Eighty-fifth Regiment of the Infantry, was shown at the trial to have been guilty of no less than twelve hundred and fifty individual cases of cruelty and of one hundred cases of abuse of power. Another man, Lieutenant Schilling, of the Ninety-eighth Regiment of Infantry, stationed in Metz, had a record against him of over a thousand such cases. Both men were recently tried and convicted, and the degree of their punishment seems strangely inadequate. Yet in most instances the Kaiser does not even allow these convicted offenders to serve out their brief terms of confinement, but issues free pardons to them after they have undergone but a small portion of their penalty.