There will be sentimentalists among the Allies who will speak of forgiveness and softer judgments. Their motives will be mixed and many: some will be camouflaged pacifists; some will be influenced by personal advantages, such as relations, business affiliations and financial investments in Germany; some will be war-weary mothers and wives who will pounce on the first opportunity of regaining their remaining men. None of them will be the men who have done the fighting. Germany has turned to the American President as the intercessor for Peace; the men at the Front look to America to back them up in exacting the final penalty—they look to America above all the other Allies for firmness for the reason that she is not war-weary, and because millions of her men who are in khaki have yet to prove their manhood to themselves. America beyond all Germany’s adversaries came into the war on indisputably righteous grounds: we look to her to insist on a meticulously righteous settlement. In the face of the enormities which have been perpetrated by the Hun armies from the first violation of Belgium’s neutrality up to now, no vengeance could be made adequate. The entire history of Germany’s method of making war is one of an increasing ingenuity in devising new methods of making nations suffer while withholding the release of death. The ravishing of women, the shooting of old men, the sending of the girlhood of occupied territories into the shame of unwilling prostitution, the wholesale destruction of all virtues that make life decent and desirable cannot be exacted as part of our penalty; but the extermination of the arch-culprits who have educated their human instruments out of manhood into bestiality can. If the Kaiser and the herd of human minotaurs who surround him escape the gallows, justice becomes a travesty and there is no murderer, however diabolical his atrocities, who deserves to be electrocuted.