Thus the fat missionary in spectacles volubly attempts to seduce the grave and rather sardonic Dutch peasant, whose face is a triumph of non-committal. He holds him long in conversation, while from behind steal up the German soldiers and sailors waiting for the attention of the peasant to be wholly absorbed in the propaganda, suddenly to capture and to bind him, beyond all power of self-release. Here the satire of Raemaekers is directed against the intrigues of German diplomacy at The Hague, and the rumors which have of late been rife concerning a party of politicians in the Dutch State who have been persuaded into recommending a studied neutrality now, indeed, but a secret agreement with Germany that shall not come into force until after the declaration of peace. The draftsman warns his countrymen that they are not, in their simplicity, capable of holding their own against a combination of Teutonic violence and Teutonic guile. It may be that these Dutch disciples of Wilhelmstrasse have not the naïveté which Raemaekers sees proper to attribute to them. Their attitude has something more ignoble than simple, and they remind us not a little of the particularists of the seventeenth century, whose selfish and senseless anti-Orange policy left the Dutch without a friend in Europe. But we can confidently believe that general public opinion in Holland to-day will be too wholesome and too intelligent to pursue the suicidal path which the “Toekomst” and its German inspirers indicate. EDMUND GOSSE. [Illustration] _Tetanus_ Here Raemaekers draws aside from his fierce mood of indictment of the aggressor and, touched with a neutral’s pity, tries to express something of the agony that comes impartially to those who fight for and those who fight against the right. The candid critic must confess that this mood has not the interest of his satire and invective. But it is natural for the imaginative artist to be deeply moved by these, as it were, impartial horrors and good for us stay-at-homes to be helped to realize them. In the early days of the war, waged as it was over the most intensively cultivated soil in Europe, the mortality from this dread horror, Tetanus, was very great. The skill of the bacteriologist and the surgeon has indefinitely reduced the mortality. And perhaps those of us who are bowed down by the thought of all the needless pain and incalculable waste may take a crumb of comfort from the thought that out of all the suffering and death grow knowledge and skill that will relieve suffering and prevent death in the future. So the eternal courage and resourcefulness of man always recapture the citadel he seems to have lost in the first onset. JOSEPH THORP. [Illustration] _Shakspere’s Tercentenary_