these sombre reflections he seemed to derive a sort of pasture. Little doubt, then, as to what had to come when five of the greatest nations on earth were suddenly rolling over and under each other in the dust. While their armies saw to the biting, the snarling was done with a will by the press of Berlin and Vienna, Petrograd, Paris, and London. That we were all fighting foul, every man, was the burden of the strain. Phone and anti-phone, the choric hymn of detraction swelled; if this had been an age of simpler faith there might have been serious fear lest the music should reach the ear of some Jove sitting at his nectar; what if he should say in a rage that those nasty little beasts were at it again, and throw such a comet down on the earth as would settle the hash of us all? But no such fears troubled Europe. And then policy, viewing these operations of instinct, was moved to cut in. Official propaganda began, and one of its stock lines was to help in stoking these fires in the non-combatant heart. II Some of the fuel to hand was fine. The German command fed the best of it all into our bunkers, gratis. It owned that its "frightfulness" plan was no slip, no "indiscretion of a subordinate," but a policy weighed and picked out--worse than that, an embodied ethical doctrine. A Frenchman, when he is cross with our English virtue, will say that none of us can steal a goose without saying he does it for the public good. But the fey rulers of Germany could not even be content to say it was an act of moral beauty to sink the _Lusitania_ or to burn Louvain. They must go on to boast that these scrubby actions were pieces of sound, hard thinking, the only tenable conclusions to impregnable syllogisms. Besides man's natural aversion to cruel acts, they thus incurred his still more universal distaste for pedants. They delivered themselves into our hand. They were beautiful butts, ready made, like the learned elderly lady in _Roderick Random_, whose bookish philosophy made her desire to "drag the parent by the hoary hair," and to "toss the sprawling infant on her spear."