Well may the Russian Government say in their covering communication that “the forms of punishment”--if we can speak of punishment when no offence had been committed--“remind one of the tortures of the Middle Ages.” Other documents in my possession recite how the prisoners were harnessed to ploughs and carts, like cattle, and lashed with long leather whips; how a man who fainted from exhaustion was immediately bayoneted, while another who fell out of the ranks to pick up a rotten turnip shared a like fate; how wounded men were forced to stand naked for hours in the frost until gangrene set in, tied up for hours to posts with their toes just touching the ground until, the blood rising to the head, copious hæmorrhage took place from the nose, mouth, and ears; how yet others who, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, could not keep up on the march were bayoneted or clubbed where they lay. As for the conduct of the German populace let the following speak for itself: “The peaceful inhabitants along the routes traversed in Germany showed the greatest hostility towards the prisoners, whom they reviled as ‘Russian swine and dogs.’ Women and even children threw stones and sand at them, and spat right in their faces.... Even the wounded men were not spared by these demented Germans who struck them, pulled their moustaches, and spat in their faces.” The German Ideal--Europe in Chains. The conception of the educated classes of Germany as to the future of Europe we have on record: it is to be a tributary Europe, vast satrapies of subject populations more rightless than the mediæval villein, their language proscribed, their liberties disfranchised, their commerce prohibited, their lands expropriated, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the conqueror. The ill-disguised slavery under which Belgium[56] and the occupied French Departments[57] groan to-day is to be perpetuated. The small nations of Europe are to exchange the protection of Europe for the suzerainty of Germany and to live under the German “shield.” Their territories are to be to Germany what the provinces were to Rome at her worst--great praedial estates, the peasantry of which are either to be “cleared” or to remain as the menials of the conqueror. The German dream is the dream of the Latin historian who sighed for more provinces to conquer in order that liberty might be “banished from the sight”[58] of those already under his heel. What Germany cannot annex she will ruin, so that borne down by heavy indemnities France shall never be able to lift her head again. Such are the “terms of peace” proclaimed by the German Professors, a body of men who, it should be remembered, in Germany hold their chairs at the pleasure of the State and are, in fact, a branch of the Civil Service. They therefore speak as men having authority.[59] A Moral Distemper.