Lack of opportunity in the library has prevented a thorough exploration of the unspeakable atrocities of the early Huns who under Attila ravaged a great part of Europe. But sufficiently have I read to be convinced that the Huns and Vandals and Goths of early history, compared with the Hohenzollern-inspired fiends, were scarcely more than bungling altruists. We know it to be fact that German soldiers murdered priests and raped nuns in Belgium, violated practically every young woman in the Aisne and Champagne, razed defenseless towns and hamlets in these French Departments, murdered old people and children and mutilated youths everywhere, delighted in destroying hospital ships and treated Red Cross signs as targets for their guns, inoculated French prisoners as a means of furthering the Berlin plan to diminish the French race, and in cold blood murdered scores of women and children on the _Lusitania_. These are awful indictments, with not one excusable on the ground of military need or expediency. Given trial at the bar of civilization their perpetrators must forever be judged as outside the pale of humanity and hereafter can have no standing in lands where the principles of Christianity and humanity have a meaning. With my own eyes I have seen scores of proofs of German “frightfulness”; with me it is not hearsay. And remember that it was none other than Goethe who wrote that “the Prussian was born a brute, and civilization will make him ferocious.” Positive is it that the United States and her Allies will crush the conscienceless militarism of Germany, and ever of good omen is the Rainbow, telling of improving skies and perfect conditions for the morrow. FREDERIC COURTLAND PENFIELD, _American Ambassador to Austria-Hungary_, 1913-1917. [Illustration] _Russia Reborn_ In a hundred years no people has been so tortured and abused by rulers of its own blood and faith as the Russians. The free peoples have nothing in their experience by which they can imagine the greed and cruelty of which the subjects of the Romanoffs have been the victims. No adequate picture of the diabolical old régime can be painted till scholars have had time to explore its archives and expose the dark forces that operated it. Let no one look for Freed Russia to be shining and beautiful. From the gloomy caverns in which they have mouldered the Russian people stagger out upon the sunlit heights of freedom weak, bent, half blind. Few of the older will ever conquer the dense ignorance in which they were kept by autocracy. Few of the characters twisted and deformed by oppression will ever become quite straight. In the behavior of this people there will be exhibited folly, fanaticism and brutality that will make the peoples born free uneasy as to the new sister.