The catastrophe has fallen, but the foes of Europe have been those of her own household, and we have discovered with a shock of dismay that the comity of European nations has harboured a Power which is European in nothing but in name, and is more completely alien to Western ideals than the tribes of Afghanistan. A hybrid nation of this type which is intellectual without being refined, which can discipline its mind but cannot control its appetites, which can acquire the idiom of Europe and yet retain the instincts of Asia or rather of some pre-Asiatic horde, presents the greatest problem that has ever perplexed the civilisation of man. It is like an intellectual savage who has learnt the language and studied the dress and deportment of polite society, but all the while nurtures dark atavisms and murderous impulses in the centres of his brain. The subtle danger of the presence of such a nation in the European comity is that it uses the language of that international society, and yet all the while means something different, and that with every appearance of solemn subscription to its forms and treaties it is making mental reservations and “economies” which strike at the very root of them. The Casuistry of the Intellectual Savage. In the hands of such a nation an international convention is not merely idle and impotent; the convention itself becomes positively dangerous, simply because it can be perverted. It can be used to invest the most barbarous acts with a specious plausibility, and can be turned against the very people whom it was designed to protect. Any one who takes the trouble to study the official proclamations of the German military authorities, or the introductory memorandum to the German White Book, cannot fail to be struck by this. A civilian who fires on the enemy forfeits under international law the privileges of a non-combatant. The rule means as much as it says, and no more; it does not impose on a civil community the obligation to prove that it is a non-combatant. But in nine out of ten German proclamations the rule is invoked as an excuse for involving a whole community in responsibility with their lives for the acts or omissions, real or alleged, of single individuals--“the innocent will suffer with the guilty”[68]--and the “law of nations” is invoked to put a whole population “outside the pale” of it.[69] At one stroke we are carried back to the days of the blood-feud and of vicarious punishment, and the law of nations is perverted from an instrument of progress to an organon of bloody sophistries. So, too, the Hague Convention which requires that requisitions of supplies should not be made without giving receipts is observed in the letter and violated in the spirit; receipts are given, but they are forged. The obligation of a treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium is admitted, but a false charge and a falsified document is advanced to justify its breach. A brigade order to kill