'The noble woman who, out of the abundance of her charity, sought to save men from these things has been condemned and executed on a charge of having offended against military law. I know nothing more tragically ironical than that the Power which has broken all laws, human and divine, should seek to justify the condemnation of Edith Cavell with all the pomp of a tribunal of justice. While thousands of ravishers and spoilers go free, one woman who had spent her life in ministries to such as were sick and afflicted is handed over to the executioner. Truly there has been no such trial since Barabbas was released and Christ led forth to the hill of Calvary.' Mr. G. K. Chesterton contributed a scathing indictment to the _Illustrated London News_: 'There is not much that can be said, or said easily, about the highest aspects of the murder of Edith Cavell. When we have said, "Dear in the sight of God is the death of His saints," we have said as much as mere literature has ever been able to say in the matter. 'The thing was not done to protect the Prussian power. It was done to satisfy a Prussian appetite. The mad disproportion between the possible need of restraining their enemy and the frantic needlessness of killing her is simply the measure of the distance by which the distorted Prussian psychology has departed from the moral instincts of mankind. The key to the Prussian is in this extraordinary fact: that he does truly and in his heart believe that he is _admired_ whenever he can manage to be dreaded. An indefensible act of public violence is to him what a poem is to a poet or a song to a bird. It at once relieves and expresses him; he feels more himself while he is doing it. His whole conception of the State is a series of such _coups d'état_. In Poland, in Alsace, in Lorraine, in the Danish provinces, he has wholly failed to govern; indeed, he has never really attempted to govern. For governing means making people at home. 'Wherever he goes, and whatever success he gains, he will always make it an occasion for sanguinary pantomimes of this kind. And awful as is the individual loss, it is well that now, at the very moment when men, wily or weak, are beginning to talk of conciliatory possibilities in this incurable criminal, he should himself have provided us with this appalling reply.' Mr. Hall Caine attended the great Memorial Service in St. Paul's Cathedral; and below is a short extract from his impressions as recorded in the _Daily Telegraph_: