all prisoners is first denied, and then when denial becomes futile, a fictitious order of a prior date is alleged against us in order to dignify the real order with the sanction of “reprisals.” Defenceless merchantmen are attacked and sunk at first sight, and then when they carry guns for their protection their precautions for defence are used as a retrospective pretext for attack. The same curious casuistry is invoked to excuse the attacks on Scarborough and London, and the Hague Convention is interpreted, in defiance of its authors, to support the plea that whatever barbarity is not expressly prohibited is thereby condoned. Germany as a Moral Pervert. It is this terrible perversion, this prostitution of words until, to quote a classical expression of Thucydides, they have lost their meaning in relation to things, that seems to me the most intractable problem that we have to face. To my mind it is this pathological aspect of the German temperament which presents a far more serious obstacle to a restoration of the European comity based on the readmission of Germany to membership than the German dogma of war. You may, perhaps, extirpate a dogma but you cannot alter a temperament. To regard Germany as the misguided pupil of a military caste which alone stands in the way of her reformation seems to me to ignore the volume of evidence as to the complicity of officers and men in those orgies of outrage. I cannot avoid the conclusion that the whole people is infected with a kind of moral distemper. “Look, Madame,” said a German soldier to a French woman who witnessed the execution of three poor travellers who with their hands tied behind their backs with napkins were led into a field close to her house and shot by six soldiers under the command of a German officer, “Look! isn’t it fine! See them shoot some French civilians. A fine feat that! All the others ought to be killed in the same way.”[70]