Our cartoonist, it will be noticed, has placed sledge hammers in the hands of both John and Michael, rather primitive weapons, but most admirably adapted for "crushing." And nothing short of crushing will satisfy the Allies, despite the futile wiles and whines of Messrs. Trevelyan, Ponsonby, Morel, and Macdonald. Crushed they will and must be to fine powder. The hammer strokes are falling now with a persistence and force which, at long last, reverberates in the cafes and beer gardens of Munich and Berlin. The Teuton tongue--a hideous concatenation of noise at its best--must be almost inarticulate to-day in its guttural chokings and splutterings. "Frightfulness" is coming home to roost. With all our hearts we hold out the glad hand to Michael. Come in, and stay in--bless you! HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL. [Illustration: "COME IN, MICHAEL, I THINK I'M AWAKE NOW."] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- FIVE ON A BENCH All visions and poems of justice have been full of the refrain of _deposuit potentes de sede_; but the bracing reality of such a revolution is lost by certain effects of antiquity, by the mists which make the past somewhat monochrome, and by the exalted equality of death. To say that Belisarius became a beggar means little to us when it seems only the difference between a rich and a tattered toga. We do not picture Belisarius in a patched pair of trousers: but then we have no reason to be angry with Belisarius. But whenever real tyranny and honest wrath are reborn among men, there will always be an instant necessity to represent the great reversal in the graphic colours of contemporary fact. Raemaekers' cartoon, representing the tyrants of Europe reduced to that very hopeless modern beggary to which they have driven many thousands of very much better men, is perhaps of all his pictures the most grim, or what would be called vindictive. I think that such revenge is in truth merely realization. The victims of the war have to sit on such real benches in such real rags. And being one of the fiercest, it is also one of the most delicate of the Dutch artist's studies. Nothing could be truer than the insolent and swollen decay of the Jew Ferdinant; or the more effeminate collapse of the Kaiser, the very spike on whose helmet droops with sentiment. G. K. CHESTERTON. [Illustration: FIVE ON A BENCH In a year and a half.] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT ABOUT PEACE, LADS?