Every one was in a condition of panic, and two Frenchmen, fathers of families, were seeing red at the story of all these barbarities. But they had to decide--and the thing was discussed at a little family conference--where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naïvely and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in Brussels, and so far as we know, not a child or a woman has been injured. Indeed, in normal times our security against foreigners is not based upon physical force at all. I suppose during the last century some hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists have traveled through the historic cities of Germany, their children have gone to the German educational institutions, their invalids have been attended by German doctors and cut up by German surgeons in German sanatoria and health resorts, and I am quite sure that it never occurred to any one of these hundreds of thousands that their little children when in the educational institutions of these "Huns" were in any way in danger. It was not the guns of the American Navy or the British Navy that were protecting them; the physical force of America or of Great Britain could not certainly be the factor operative in, say, Switzerland or Austria, yet every Summer tens of thousands of them trust their lives and those of their women and children in the remote mountains of Switzerland on no better security than the expectation that a foreign community over whom we have no possibility of exercising force will observe a convention which has no sanction other than the recognition that it is to their advantage to observe it. And we thus have the spectacle of millions of Anglo-Saxons absolutely convinced that the sanctity of their homes and the safety of their property are secure from the ravages of the foreigner only because they possess a naval and military force that overawes him, yet serenely leaving the protection of that military force, and placing life and property alike within the absolute power of that very foreigner against whose predatory tendencies we spend millions in protecting ourselves.