I have been told that there are still some individuals in England who cherish the idea that this vast orgy of blood, lust, rapine, hate, and pride is in some peculiar way merely the _Bacchanalia_ of troops unused to the heady bouquet of the wines of Champagne or, stranger still, that it is the mental aberration of a people seduced by idle tales into these courses by its rulers. It is no part of my task to find explanations. But if the reader is astonished, as well he may be, at the disgusting repetition of stories of rape and sodomy let him study the statistics of crime in Germany during the first decade of this century, issued by the Imperial Government; he will find in them much to confirm the impression that the whole people is infected with some kind of moral distemper.[60] The seduction of a people by its rulers is impossible; such hypnotic susceptibility to the influences of “suggestion” would, of itself, be a symptom of mental degeneration in the people itself. It is impossible to believe that the most highly educated nation in Europe is either so ignorant or so credulous as such an explanation would suggest. It is not in their ignorance but in their turpitude that the clue to these barbarities is to be found. This is a sombre fact which has to be faced or these appalling records will have been sifted and published in vain. The problem of explanation is ultimately one for the anthropologist rather than the lawyer, and there may be force in the contention of those who believe that the Prussian is not a member of the Teutonic family at all, but a “throw-back” to some Tartar stock. Certain it is that he exhibits an insensibility to the feelings of others which is only equalled by his extreme sensitiveness as to his own.[61] This morbid insensibility is, of course, the secret of German “Terrorism,” and of the immense influence which it has exerted on the theory and practice of war among the German nation. It explains their singular ingenuity in finding means to an end, and between the German trooper who dips a baby’s head into scalding water in order to get more coffee from its mother[62] to the commandant who at the point of the bayonet thrusts a living screen of priests, old men, and women with babes at the breast[63] between his own troops and those of the enemy there is a difference of degree rather than of kind. Similarly the dark passage in the German War Book which hints that there may be occasions on which it will be profitable to massacre prisoners of war reveals the same quality of mind as the order to shoot helpless sailors who are struggling for their lives in the sea.[64] All things are lawful which are expedient, and if your enemy has ties of affection, the better he lends himself to your belligerent exploitation. _Mentem mortalia tangunt_--human things touch the heart--acquires for the German Staff a new and sinister significance. Every tender feeling that their enemy has becomes a