During the grim and ghastly struggle at Verdun we are told the Kaiser, standing “at safe distance,” watched through his field-glasses the fiery mowing down of his countrymen to the number of forty-five thousand! Does any one, reading this, take the trouble to pause and consider what it means? Forty-five thousand strong, brave men in the flower of manhood (for let us hope we are none of us so unjust as to deny our enemies their strength or their courage); forty-five thousand capable human beings fit for every sort of industrial labour--the blood and bone of future generations--slaughtered like vermin; and their Emperor, their sworn Defender and Protector, within sight-range, looking on! What a “Harvest Home”! Are we able to conceive the nature and temperament of a monarch who _could_ so look on at this massacre of his subjects and not rush among them to stop the advance of their serried ranks and “massed formations,” resulting in such a wanton and wicked waste of life? The crazy antics of Nero were mere child’s play compared with this callous attitude of William of Hohenzollern; an attitude which even his French foes cannot maintain. For, fired with vengeance for old wrongs as they are, and bent on victorious justice, they have declared themselves “sick with slaughter.” “Such hecatombs,” writes Colonel Rousset, “cannot last. Our adversary, while carrying his disregard of human life to the point of madness, cannot go on throwing his soldiers into the charnel-house without thinking of to-morrow.” The losses of the Germans at Verdun have been estimated at 10,000 per day! “I dream at night,” writes one French artillery officer, “of those ghastly crumpled heaps of shattered gray-green bodies! Germany’s wives and mothers must curse the Kaiser in their prayers!” THE CRIME OF STUPIDITY Voltaire is accredited with the saying that “the only crime is stupidity.” According to this dictum one must come to consider the “All-Highest War Lord” the greatest criminal of an epoch, his stupidity being almost without parallel in history. What man, not entirely mad, seeing a world of prosperity within reach of his hand would clench his fist and knock the whole splendid sphere away from him at one blow! The proposition seems absurd and untenable, yet it has been and continues to be the Kaiser’s policy, or the policy of his ministers and advisers; clear to all save those who remain perversely and wilfully blind.